The forum was set to begin at 9 A.M., but Suzie was so excited she arrived at 8. Denied early entrance, she was shown to a café across the street where a coffee cost half her hourly wage. Once inside the White House, she was directed to a water fountain in another building when she asked for something to drink. For lunch, she was dispatched to a cafeteria, where she had to buy her own ham sandwich.
“There is no way they do that to all those movie stars and celebrities always visiting!” she mutters.
One hundred activists had gathered that day from across the nation. The sessions, however, featured only cabinet secretaries and other top Obama officials. The first batch devoted ninety minutes to reprimanding the Bush administration for failing to prioritize environmental justice. Not the Obama administration, they crowed: their Plan EJ 2014 would apply cutting-edge technology to study fence-line communities around the country.6 This revelation made Suzie squirm. “I kept thinking, that’s how they’re going to help us? Another study? They’re already studying us to death!”
At last, a question-and-answer session began. Many of the activists’ hands shot in the air, but only two were permitted to speak before coordinators announced the arrival of the attorney general. Suzie checked the agenda. Only five minutes of discussion had been allotted for dialogue. She looked around the room. The other activists were shaking their heads, clearly upset, but no one was speaking out. Rising to her feet, Suzie maneuvered to the front of the auditorium and stared into the crowd.
“Hi there. My name is Suzie Canales. I traveled here all the way from Corpus Christi, Texas, but I didn’t come to be talked to.”
The activists turned to her. The White House aides turned to her. The reporters turned to her. The cameras turned to her.
“I came here because I thought I was going to be able to voice concerns. Plans like EJ 2014 are just bureaucratic words on paper. They do nothing for our communities.”
The activists nodded in agreement while the aides scrambled about. Suzie concluded her remarks and sat down, trembling. A reporter darted over and crouched beside her. “Ma’am, can we interview you?” Suzie scribbled her phone number as an aide asked to escort her outside. “I hope you’re not kicking me out,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
People craned their neck as she was shown to the door. The first person she encountered outside was Attorney General Eric Holder. Extending his hand, he asked Suzie how she was doing. “Not very well, sir. I didn’t come here to be talked to.”
The aide hurried her along to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, where Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson awaited on a love seat. Patting the space beside her, she asked Suzie what the EPA could do to help. Suzie handed her CFEJ’s newest report: “Why EPA’S Attempts to Achieve Environmental Justice Have Failed and What They Can Do about It.”
“Instead of giving us more documents that have no value to us, you need to roll up your sleeves.”
She asked Jackson to prioritize the needs of communities who live in the shadow of industry, relocating them if necessary. And if the federal government was unwilling to shut down polluting factories, at the very least it should stop protecting them by conducting endless risk assessments and studies. When Jackson rose from the love seat, Suzie asked if she would hear from her again. Jackson promised so.7 An aide escorted Suzie back to the auditorium. For the rest of the day, conference attendees stopped to thank her, even in the bathroom. Soon after, Suzie generated yet another headline: ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ACTIVIST URGES EPA CHIEF “TO ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES” AT TENSE W. H. FORUM. Only it wasn’t the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. It was the New York Times.
“I know, I know,” Suzie says, laughing for the first time this morning. “I can’t believe me sometimes.”
BEFORE PARTING WITH SUZIE, I ask about visiting a fence-line community. Of the many to choose from—Hillcrest, Oak Park Triangle, Academy Heights—she suggests Dona Park. Sandwiched between a ship channel, a Valero refinery, and an interstate, its residents suffer a long list of indignities. Gas explosions shatter their windows. Oil slicks their children’s wading pools. Their yards (and their urine) have been tested repeatedly for arsenic, cadmium, and lead. They’ve been instructed by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services to abandon their tomato plants and to let their tangerines rot off their trees. But their biggest concern lately has been the demolition of a nearby ASARCO/Encycle plant, she says.
A multinational corporation with a 120-year history, ASARCO (American Smelting and Refining Company) started smelting zinc in Corpus in 1941. In its heyday, it employed nearly 800 workers who oversaw the production of some 100,000 tons of zinc a year. The national zinc market price plummeted in the seventies, though, around the time the company got sued for violating the Texas Clean Air Act. The plant shut twice in the eighties before getting bought by a subsidiary called Encycle, which turned it into an industrial waste recycling plant. Due in part to a disastrous whistleblower report, it finally shuttered in 2002.
Communities across the nation had similar experiences with ASARCO, which racked up billions of dollars in environmental damages. When the company finally filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2005, it was declared the largest environmental bankruptcy in U.S. history. Some ninety communities in twenty-one states won a $1.79 billion settlement to clean up their neighborhoods and compensate former workers. But while that sum might sound impressive, it represented less than 1 percent of what claimants requested. It has also grown exceedingly difficult for communities to request remediation because Mexican steel giant Grupo México bought ASARCO in 1999.
A U.S. bankruptcy court and the TCEQ ordered the Corpus plant razed in December 2010, and demolition crews rolled in the following spring. Yet, 600 feet from the facility sits Dona Park, which houses nearly 300 families. Dismantling a polluting plant might seem like a green victory, but according to Suzie, residents worry about the harm the demolition might bring. The EPA has documented asbestos throughout the site, and the whistleblower report that helped sink ASARCO/Encycle accuses it of a host of dirty deeds, including dumping unrecycled hazardous waste into tanks certified as recycled to customers and environmental agencies; keeping 3,000 or more hazardous storage units over the permitted number (500) and then hiding them during inspections (where they sometimes leaked); and accepting waste from the former army chemical warfare depot at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which is included on the government’s Superfund list of the most hazardous sites in the United States.
As a protection measure, demolition crews agreed to erect ten-foot tarps around the site and to cease working whenever northerly winds—that is, downwind from the plant to the neighborhood—exceed fifteen miles per hour. An engineer, meanwhile, got charged with overseeing an air monitoring system that screens for heavy metals. What Suzie and everyone at Dona Park want to know is, will these precautions be enough?
AS IT HAPPENS, one of my tíos used to work for ASARCO, for fourteen years in fact. Growing up, my cousins and I thought Tío Valentin was a dashing man, always clad in cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and a silver belt buckle shaped like an E for Elizondo. Though he has since shaved off his handlebar moustache and traded in his ropers for Hawaiian shirts, he still drives a mighty big truck. He picks me up one morning in the summer of 2011, and we drive out to his former workplace for a tour.
The last time I visited ASARCO/Encycle, it resembled a cross between Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and Chernobyl. It had pea-green cooling towers with enormous fans in their bellies, old casting buildings, rusty water towers, drum shredders, metal silos, orange-brick warehouses whose windows had been shot out, neutralizer tanks, decontamination feed tanks, and colossal caustic tanks that looked like geriatric Tin Men.
A few months into the demolition, many of those structures have now been obliterated to shards and scree. Steel rods protrude from the rubble as if waving in surrender. From Upriver Road, there are no tarps in sight, although we can see mist rising from the snowb
lowers used to stifle dust flow.
“You see that, mija?” Tío Valentin points out the trademark smokestack, 315 feet of brick and mortar striped red and white like a barber pole. Back in the seventies, he and a buddy used to scale its narrow stairwell to change the lightbulbs on the aircraft warning device. “We’d climb straight up, no safety equipment or nothing. I would be saying Hail Marys and Our Fathers the whole time.”
“Why did you do it?”
He blinks in surprise. “We got two and a half times our salary! We had families to feed.”
Dismantling the smokestack will be the demolition’s toughest operation. Crews plan to first remove its asbestos skin using a “wet-scraping” method. Then they will cut down the tower foot by foot with hydraulic shears, starting from the top so that pieces fall inward to the base of the stack. They plan to build an enclosed scaffold to ensure no asbestos flies away, but as Tío Valentin says, “Good luck with that. It was already falling apart back when I used to work there.”
One of his first jobs at ASARCO was feeding sheets of zinc into the furnace for smelting. “It reminded me of hell, all that molten zinc at the bottom of that chute. If the sheets grabbed hold of your shirt on the way down, you’d fall down that chute and die a horrible death. And the foreman down there would be honking his horn because we weren’t going fast enough. The zinc was really hot, so we’d use pieces of asbestos as potholders to pick up and stack the bars.”
They couldn’t use respirators because they kept getting clogged with all the smoke and debris billowing out of the chute. Instead, they tied rags around their faces and tried to duck. “We’d get red rags from the filling station … and [by the end of the day] they would be blue.”
Tío Valentin was also instructed to dump truckloads of waste into the fields outside the plant, near the ship channel. We drive around to the back of the plant so he can show me where. Overgrown with grass and weeds, the fields are level but raised like an artificial mesa, within a baseball whack of the channel.
“I saw what we were doing and thought, this is not a good idea. There was a slope going right down into the water. I asked the foreman, ‘What if it rains?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Yeah. I wouldn’t go fishing down there if I were you.’”
DAYS LATER, I return to Dona Park to meet with a lifelong resident named Billy Placker. A muscleman with a full black beard and a mound of curly hair, he works in construction. Though he is one of the most vocal critics of the demolition, he self-identifies not as an activist but as a “radically saved Christian.” His ball cap is emblazoned with GOD IS IN CONTROL across the front and I ♡ JESUS along the bill. When I recount my tío’s story about dumping waste by the ship channel, Billy says he not only used to fish out there when he was a boy but swam down there, too.
“We used to go to the end of the plant, where they had a reservoir pumped full of mud that looked like liquid peanut butter, and we would take that and chunk it at each other,” he says. “My daddy worked there twenty-three years, and he once took a bunch of pipes from the waste pile and made us a swing set with it. We would go by the grain elevator and shoot rats with BB guns. We could have blown the whole place up!”
He invites me inside his home to continue our conversation. A sign planted in his front yard reads “Save the Dona Park Children from Toxic Soil Contamination Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic, Zinc. Hair and Soil Samples Proved It.” As we walk through his front gate, a German shepherd hobbles over, lifting its haunches.
“What’s wrong with your dog?” I ask.
“We don’t know. It started about five months ago.”
As if on cue, the dog turns around, revealing a massive growth covering its entire backside, before limping toward a shade tree. Feeling queasy, I follow Billy inside. Modest on the outside, his house has high vaulted ceilings, black granite countertops, and a Jacuzzi inside plus a swimming pool out back. Billy remodeled it himself and beams when I compliment his handiwork.
I join him and his wife, Pat, in their living room and ask if they’ve noticed any unusual illnesses in their neighborhood. Billy’s son has William’s syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that includes mental disability, heart defects, and elfin facial features. Two of his grandchildren who live next door have asthma and attention deficit disorder; another has a foot deformity. Turning around on the couch, Pat points at nearby houses through the window. In that house, a lady has cancer. Next door, same thing. Across the street lives a little boy with no ears.
Like many of their neighbors, the Plackers are conflicted about what to do. They have built their dream house here for a fraction of what it would cost in the city. Billy’s parents, children, and grandchildren all live within a three-block radius, as do his childhood friends. There is almost no traffic here, so the kids can ride their bikes in the middle of the street. Dona Park is a community that hosts reunions every May, that throws block parties where the whole neighborhood is invited. Families have history here. Roots. How can they give that up to live in some anonymous apartment complex in Corpus?
Yet every time the Plackers step outside their door, they see dust clouds rising from the demolition. They hear bulldozers gnashing their teeth. The last time a northerly wind whirled through, Billy fell into a panic.
“I called the county commissioner, I called the news teams, and then I went over to the front gate where there was a security guard. I said, ‘I’m from the neighborhood and that wind is blowing at thirty miles per hour so you have to stop this.’ And he said, ‘Let me tell you, I don’t care what you or TCEQ says about this, this is now the property of federal bankruptcy court, and they say we can demolish it and we will.’”
Billy’s black eyes grow round and serious. “Well let me tell you, the Good Lord held me back from jumping that fence and killing him then and there. And the Good Lord didn’t allow me to remember what he looked like either, because if I had seen him at a 7-Eleven later that day, I might have killed him there, too.”
AT FORTY YEARS, the Gonzalez family has lived in Dona Park longer than almost anybody. Their house is one of the nicest in the neighborhood, with a pine tree in the front yard and an American flag swaying from a pole. The afternoon I visit, Chihuahuas prance about the hardwood floors while Consuelo and Hipolito rest in twin leather chairs. They are visibly fatigued. Two days prior, Hipolito went into cardiac arrest for the third time and has just returned home from the hospital.
They moved to Dona Park as newlyweds in 1970, a few months after Hurricane Celia blew the roof off their first apartment and soaked all their belongings. Hipolito, a Vietnam veteran, repeatedly applied for jobs at ASARCO but always got turned down. He found work at other refineries, though, including a job loading benzene on and off trailers. While grateful to their industrial neighbors for providing them a lifetime of financial security, they too wonder about the personal cost. Their children were plagued with allergies growing up and often had bloody noses. Consuelo has had cysts in her breast, a tumor in her pituitary gland, and liver problems; Hipolito has suffered from prostate cancer and congestive heart failure. They have tried to be as cooperative with the TCEQ as possible, submitting to numerous studies over the years. “We have given them blood. We have given them pee. We have given them soil. And then they come back and want to do it all over again,” says Consuelo.
They have already resolved to leave Dona Park. The question is how. Selling their home is no longer an option: its value has slipped from $89,000 to $55,000 in recent years, Consuelo says, showing me documents. Moreover, they don’t want to perpetuate the cycle. “You come here because this is what you can afford, and when you leave, your homes are sold to people who don’t know what is happening here. Now people are selling their property to illegal immigrants who don’t know what their children are facing.”
What the Gonzalezes want is a buyout. Such is not without precedence. In 2013, the former mining boomtown of Pincher, Oklahoma, dissolved its charter after nearly all of its residents accepted federal buyouts o
f their homes and evacuated. But the government usually funds buyouts only of homes built directly over hazardous waste sites, such as New York’s Love Canal near Niagara Falls. An industry buyout is much more likely. Closer to downtown, the bulk of the residential neighborhood Oak Park Triangle was bought out in the late nineties, due to its proximity to Citgo. There are rumors about Dona Park neighbors getting bought out over the years, too. One woman is said to have received $200,000 for packing her things and bolting in the middle of the night.
“She has cancer. She won’t talk about it, though, per the contract,” Consuelo says. “We haven’t got to that knowledge to where they would move us out yet.”
And so the Gonzalezes wait. As do the Plackers. As do the other holdouts of Dona Park. After bidding Consuelo and Hipolito well, I head back to my car, passing a long line of tiny signs. Warning: Naptha Pipeline. Warning: Hydrogen Pipeline. Warning: Gas-Oil Pipeline. Warning: Benzene Pipeline. Warning: Isobutane Pipeline. Warning: Nitrogen Gas Pipeline.
It is difficult to imagine Corpus Christi without heavy industries. They contribute thousands of badly needed, well-paying jobs to our economy. Four members of my family spent their entire careers at the refineries. So did many of my neighbors. They bought homes with this income. They took vacations with this income. They put children through college with this income. They retired in comfort with this income. It is merely coincidence that I do not rely on this income myself, though I of course depend on other services these refineries provide. They fuel our cars, cool our homes, cook our meals, and enable countless other tasks I’d rather not live without. But why must these privileges come at such a painful human cost? Refineries donate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to our local nonprofits. Why can’t they extend that compassion toward cleaning up their sites or conjuring greener alternatives to help out their neighbors? And why don’t more of our citizens demand so?
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