The closed entrance to the former Encycle plant in Corpus Christi, Texas
What would it be like to grow up down the street — literally a block away — from a plant that treats hazardous waste? For the residents of the Dona Park neighborhood in Corpus Christi, this isn’t a hypothetical question. For fourteen years, the Encycle plant treated hazardous waste just 950 feet away from the neighborhood, which is also surrounded by six major refineries.
As you can see from the map below, the Encycle plant sits right at the edge of four long residential blocks, consisting of nearly three hundred homes. The plant is now being demolished, but families in Dona Park worry that as it’s being torn down, it could pollute the neighborhood again. Continue Reading →
Workers sift through debris at the BP facility in Texas City 55 kilometers (35 miles) south of Houston, 24 March 2005, after an explosion that killed 15.
Earlier this week there were reports of a leak at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, just outside of Galveston. Sulfur dioxide (a pollutant regulated by the EPAÂ and linked to respiratory issues) reportedly escaped the plant.
A caller reported the sulfur dioxide leak Monday to the National Response Center, the federal division for reporting oil and chemical spills. “Caller is concerned about the health of the residents located near the refinery,” the incident report logging the call says. (You can read the report below.) Under a category for “Environmental Impact,” the report says “UNKNOWN.” The field for “Community Impact due to Material” is simply left blank, and under the category of “Media Interest” it states: “NONE.”
It could be that the report was submitted by someone working at the refinery itself, as it says that the caller encouraged “agencies to call him to direct them where exactly the leak is at the refinery.” [UPDATE: BP says the report was not made by anyone at the company and that no sulfur dioxide leaked from the plant. Read the full response from BP.] Continue Reading →
A statue stands in front of the remnants of a burned down home outside Bastrop, Texas.
They are numbers familiar to us by now: billions in losses, millions of acres burned, record high temperatures, and record low rainfall during our current drought.
Some towns in Texas are now asking the big question: How long do we have until we run out of water?
“We haven’t had that situation yet,” says Andrea Morrow, a spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). “There hasn’t been a scenario yet where someone’s completely run out.”
Map of the Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline/Stephanie d’Otreppe, NPR
The State Department made it official today — the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought oil from Canada through the U.S. to refineries on the Gulf Coast, will not be happening anytime soon. Continue Reading →
Billy Placker’s Front Yard in Refinery Row/Photo by Teresa Vieira for KUT News
What do you see when you look out your window at night? If you live in Billy Placker’s neighborhood, it could very well be a giant ball of fire.
“This is what we deal with here a while back,” the former refinery worker says. “My grandson run in the house, he said, Grandpa! Grandpa! The refinery’s fixing to blow up. We run outside, and the refinery back around the corner from us over here, both their flares were going insane.”
You might have seen a flare before, maybe while driving along the highway. It’s the fire on top of stacks at refineries. When things are going according to plan, the flame is small. But here on refinery row, a ten mile stretch of plants, refineries  and homes in Corpus Christi, things don’t always go according to plan. Continue Reading →
With the current drought now more or less at the one-year mark and breaking records along the way, many are wondering if it will ever end. Another question is, how unique is this drought to Texas and the surrounding region?
Toxic Air From an Oil Refinery Fire in Long Beach, California
Today NPR, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and StateImpact launch a special series examining how air pollution is affecting communities across the nation called Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities. It has been twenty-one years since Congress amended the Clean Air Act to deal with toxic air, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce regulations and protect the general public from toxic emissions. But as the investigative series discovered, companies are still producing toxic air, and regulators are having a difficult time stopping them. The team found:
State and federal regulators take months and sometimes years to enforce anti-pollution rules. About 400 facilities are on an internal EPA watch list that includes serious or chronic Clean Air Act violators that have not been subject to timely enforcement. The list was obtained by the Center and NPR and is being made public for the first time.
More than 1,600 facilities around the country are classified by the EPA as “high priority violators” of the Clear Air Act sites in need of urgent action by enforcers.
Regulators largely rely on an honor system easily manipulated by polluters, which report their own emissions. Even judging by the self-reported numbers, the scale of pollution is enormous: At least 600 million pounds of toxic chemicals – including arsenic, benzene, formaldehyde and lead – were released into the air in 2009, according to EPA data.
To begin exploring how air pollution may affect your community, use NPR's interactive map of more than 1,000 Texas facilities that have emitted hazardous chemicals into the air. Continue reading →
The Obama administration announced last week that 445 square miles of the West — more than 285,000 acres — will be zoned for solar energy development. Across parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, the government is essentially fast-tracking large tracts of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for solar energy development. The BLM has done the research and surveys, now companies can start applying for permits to build solar energy farms. It can shave one to two years off the approval process. The areas are called Solar Energy Zones (SEZs), and they represent an important step forward in the development of solar energy.
But Texas wasn’t on the list. Why? I put the question to Megan Stouffer, the State Planning and Environmental Coordinator for BLM New Mexico, which manages agency projects in that state as well as Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
It was hammer time this week at a joint meeting of the Texas Senate Committee of Agricultural and Rural Affairs and the Committee on Natural Resources.
Lawmakers were there to hear about the impact of the ongoing drought on the state. It’s already the worst single-year drought in Texas history, and could become a new drought of record if the dry weather continues.That prompted state Senator Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay), who chairs the panel, to wonder how the state can enforce water conservation if it needs to. Continue Reading →
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