Living and breathing on the front line of a toxic chemical zone

Juan López had just returned home from his job supervising the cleaning of giant tanks that hold toxic chemicals produced along the Houston Ship Channel, one of the largest petrochemical complexes in the world.He was ready to sit down to dinner with his wife, Pamela López, and their four school-age children at their small house across the highway from the plants.But as the family gathered, the facilities were still burning off chemical emissions, sending clouds of leftover toxics toward their two-bedroom home, hitting them on some days with distinct and worrisome smells — and leaving Mr. López concerned about the health of their children.“I make good money where I’m at,” he said. “But I always felt like it was only me that was getting exposed, because I am working in the tanks with the chemicals. When the smell comes, all we can really do is try to keep everyone inside. Is that enough? I just don’t know.”He has reason to worry. Two recent assessments, by the Environmental Protection Agency and city officials in Houston, found that residents were at higher risk of developing leukemia and other cancers than people who lived farther from the chemical plants.These same worries afflict households in Illinois, Louisiana, West Virginia and other spots around the United States where families live near manufacturing facilities that make or use these cancer-causing chemicals.“Sacrifice zones — that’s what we call them,” said Ana Parras, a founder of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, which sued the E.P.A. starting in 2020 to push for tighter rules on toxics. “These areas here are paying the price for the rest of the nation, really.”The chemical plants were still burning off emissions as the López family ate dinner.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesPamela López, 32, comforting her 9-year-old daughter, Mahliyah Angelie, who had a headache.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesWaves of toxic chemicals drift toward the López family home at unpredictable moments, day and night.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesAfter years of only intermittent action by the federal government and opposition from the industry, the Biden administration is racing to impose restrictions on certain toxic air releases of the sort that plague Deer Park, while also moving to ban or restrict some of the most hazardous chemicals entirely.The proposed measures would significantly cut releases of a number of cancer-causing chemicals from plants in Texas, including four of those across the highway from the López family.Companies from a variety of industries, including those that produce the substances and those that use them, are pressuring the administration to water down some of the rules, saying the repercussions of a ban or new restrictions could be economically crippling.Few communities are at greater risk than Deer Park, and few people experience the trade-offs between economic considerations and health more than Mr. López, for whom the petrochemical industry is both the source of his family income and a threat to their health.Mr. López, 33, did not graduate from high school and is proud of how much he is paid to supervise the cleaning of the chemical tanks, which his crew climbs into and scrubs from the inside, an extremely dangerous job.But he suggested that the job did not blind him to the risks the plants pose to his family, saying that “just because you help me make a paycheck does not mean you are doing everything right.”Waves of toxic chemicals drift toward the family home at unpredictable moments, day and night. Mr. López wears protective gear at work. But there are no such measures at the house, where the children ride bikes in the driveway and play with a puppy named Dharma. From the swing set in their backyard, they can see the flares from the nearby plants.

Design advice for a less toxic life

Advice on healthy candles, purging kitchen plastic and the art of dyeing fabric naturally.This article is part of our Design special section about making the environment a creative partner in the design of beautiful homes.I’ve heard some candles can create indoor air pollution and even be harmful. Are there safer alternatives?Paraffin, the wax from which many candles are made, is derived from petroleum. When it burns, it emits toxic fumes. These irritate some people’s eyes and can also exacerbate asthma and other respiratory conditions. Synthetic fragrances and colors can also produce irritating fumes. On top of that, some wicks contain lead (to make them firmer), which is released into the air.Alternatives include beeswax as well as waxes made from soy, coconut, rapeseed and other oils. Some vegans do not support the use of beeswax because it is an animal product, and some feel the beekeeping industry is not cruelty free. Soy wax is certainly more sustainable than petroleum, but its possible negatives include the use of pesticides. (Look for organic soy wax.) The other vegetable waxes mentioned are relatively clean.Be sure to read the fine print. I was recently lured in by a candle from a well-known brand that was “formulated with vegan-friendly ingredients” only to find it also contained paraffin. So make sure you’re getting 100 percent of whatever alternative wax you seek. Also, check to see if artificial scents or other chemicals have been added. (Choose candles scented with nothing but essential oils.) Look for wicks that are made from cotton, wood or hemp — and glass containers that can be recycled or reused.Organic Savanna candles, poured in Kenya, are handmade from organic soy wax and locally sourced ingredients. One hundred percent of profits from the sale of the candles helps create jobs for Kenyan women and fund children’s education. Les Crème candles have pure organic coconut wax and cotton wicks. Hive to Home candles incorporate locally sourced beeswax, organic coconut oil, cotton wicks and sustainable packaging. Rapeseed wax candles are harder to find, especially in the United States. But plenty of places sell the wax itself if you’re a candle maker.Klas FahlenMy kitchen feels like a toxic waste dump filled with plastic bags and storage containers, plastic wrap and more. Are there better choices?Indeed there are. Plastic containers have gotten a lot of negative press, especially those that contain Bisphenol A, or BPA, which has been discovered to be an endocrine disrupter linked to all kinds of potential health issues and is banned in many states. Now we are swimming in BPA-free plastics. Unfortunately, these can contain Bisphenol S (BPS), which is chemically similar.An alternative is glass or metal storage containers with silicone lids. (Silicone isn’t perfect because many communities don’t recycle it, but it is primarily made from a naturally derived material, silica, and lasts much longer than plastic.) Brands include Ikea, Pyrex, and Public Goods.You can also reuse screw-top glass jars. (If the original housed something aromatic like garlicky dill pickles, you’ll want to run the lid through the dishwasher first.)Plastic wrap and even some wax paper also contain materials derived from petroleum. Also, they are (generally) one-time-use products, so they keep your bowl of guacamole fresh for a day before off to the landfill they go.But there are plastic-free wraps, typically cotton fabric coated with some sort of wax, that can be used repeatedly to cover a jar or bowl, or wrap a piece of cut fruit or a wedge of cheese. They don’t last forever but they are typically compostable (or can be used as fire starters). I find they sometimes pick up odors, but a thorough wash in cool water and mild soap, followed by a thorough air dry freshens them. Bee’s Wrap has two versions — one coated in beeswax, the other in a vegan-friendly soy-coconut wax blend.Another clever product is Food Huggers, which are a set of five sizes of colorful, stretchy discs made from food-grade silicone. They are dishwasher, freezer, and microwave safe. You can use them as jar lids or slide them over the cut end of a lemon, onion, apple or other produce. The company also makes silicone “Hugger Bags” that take the place of plastic food storage bags.Klas FahlenI’m interested in trying natural fabric dyeing but am afraid it’s really complicated. Where can I find out more?Making dye from plants and animals goes back to ancient times and has been done by nearly all cultures. Today there is a community of dyers you can tap into for information, ideas and supplies.I’ve long been a fan of indigo, a plant in the bean family whose leaves — when soaked and fermented — produce a beautiful deep-blue dye. Other colors can be produced using flowers, roots, berries, fruit and vegetable peels, wood, and even insects.The Bible mentions a particular blue dye color, called tekhelet, whose exact formulation has been lost but is thought to have come from a secretion of sea snails.But you’re right. It’s often more complicated than simply boiling some flower petals and dunking in a piece of fabric — especially if you want the dye to be durable and stay uniform over time.Botanical Colors, based in Seattle, offers education and natural dyeing materials. They support farmers and organic and regenerative farming, organizing workshops locally and sometimes in other parts of the country, on topics including dyeing with mud, indigo, persimmon tannins and more. They also have a biweekly online show called Feedback Friday, which began during the pandemic. The group’s president, Kathy Hattori, and sustainability and communications director, Amy DuFault, speak with artists, writers and scholars about natural dyeing and color.Maiwa, based in Vancouver, sells a large range of materials for the natural dyer as well as downloadable instructions (“How to Dye With Indigo,” for instance), books, and fabrics. They promote “Slow Clothes,” or the contributions of hand spinners, hand weavers and natural dyers as an antidote to mass production. They also offer classes, many of them free, through their School of Textiles.Readers are invited to send questions to designadvice@nytimes.com.

LISTEN: The man who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is still trying to stop ocean pollution

Growing up in Long Beach California, Captain Charles Moore quickly developed a love for the ocean.Moore’s father was a chemist and sailor who frequently took him and his siblings out on the Pacific. Moore fondly recalls their long conversations about science while they stared out into the water.“When you get out there and jump in and just see that deep blue going on forever,” he says. “The biggest kind of surprise that you can get as a human being, in terms of knowing the planet that you occupy.”
So it was fate as much as luck that, decades later, it was Moore who discovered the largest-ever accumulation of plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean — what’s commonly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”In 1997, Moore was on a sailing trip from Honolulu to Santa Barbara when hurricane winds blew him way off course. He started noticing objects bobbing in the water, like coming across a plastic soup.Moore started to play a game: Every 10 minutes, he’d come up to the deck to see if he could get a clear view of the ocean without any trash. Unfortunately, he never won.“So I said, you know what, this has got to be more than just Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of crumbs just for me to follow home. This is not what it is,” Moore recalls. “This is gotta be a bigger phenomenon.”

Eric Risberg

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Associated PressBags filled with plastics and debris from the North Pacific Gyre are unloaded from the Ocean Voyages Institute sailing cargo ship Kwai in Sausalito, Calif., Wednesday, July 27, 2022. The ship returned with plastics from the ocean after 45 days in the area more commonly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The plastics are to be recycled, upcycled and repurposed.

What Moore discovered was the first of five large floating plastic debris zones in our oceans. The largest one is estimated to be a 620,000 square mile circle of trash, and all of the zones are increasing in magnitude every day.Moore went on to found the Algalita Marine Research and Education organization in 1999, and he’s stayed at the forefront of what he calls the “Great Plastics Awakening,” to make people aware of this growing problem.According to marine biologist and ocean activist Danni Washington (who calls Captain Moore the O.G. of ocean advocacy), an estimated 4-12 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean every year. That’s enough plastic to cover every foot of coastline on the planet.Despite that, Washington says, “it’s not about doom and gloom.”“It’s not just about projecting this idea that we’re screwed. We have to design the future that we hope for, where we see equitable and regenerative solutions being brought to the forefront.”On the KCUR Studios podcast Seeking A Scientist, host Dr. Kate Biberdorf (aka Kate The Chemist) spoke to Moore about his research and what it means for marine life. And Washington shared the latest innovations and efforts to fix the damage that humans are causing to our oceans.So how do garbage patches form in the ocean?The average American generates almost five pounds of trash every day. That’s 292 million tons of trash per year.And in the United States, we only recycle about 35% of that trash. The EPA estimates that we could be recycling up to 75%, but a lot of this waste still ends up in trash bins. And a lot of that waste is plastic.It takes a long time for plastics to biodegrade — anywhere from 20 years to 500, depending on the type of plastic and how much sunlight it gets.

Algalita Marine Research and Education A plastic bag floating in the ocean with fish swimming by.

Because the ocean is downstream from everything, a lot of the plastic waste that we throw out ends up there. Common plastics found in the ocean include polypropylene (from bottle caps and plastic straws), polyethylene (used to make our take-away containers and shampoo bottles), and nylon (often found in plastic toothbrushes and fishing nets).But it’s not just large plastic objects that we need to worry about. Over time, UV rays from the sun can weaken plastic, causing “photodegradation” to occur. When this happens, the plastic breaks into smaller chunks, sort of like what happens when you drop a champagne flute: the larger glass breaks down into smaller pieces.Now imagine picking up each of those tiny pieces, and shattering them again. This process repeats on end, until we end up with micro-plastics and nano-plastics in the ocean. And it’s still uncertain if these smaller pieces of plastic ever fully break down. This process is problematic for tiny marine life that can mistake the plastic for food.It’s proven especially destructive to plankton — a crucial source of food for larger marine life, as well as the source for nearly half the planet’s oxygen.All these big and small chunks of plastic come together in places called gyres, which are vortexes in the ocean caused by currents.

Algalita Marine Research and Education There are 5 major gyres in the ocean. These rotating currents are formed by a combination of global wind patterns and forces created from the Earth’s rotation.

“These circulating bodies of water act as accumulators for things that are floating on the surface,” Moore explains. “So those circulating bodies of water happen to comprise 40% of the world ocean.”Moore has a particular fondness for the North Pacific Gyre, the one responsible for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.He’s returned to the patch several times over the last two decades, often taking crews of researchers with him, and has been shocked by the rapid increase in plastic he’s seen.It’s so bad, Moore says, that in 2021, the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch outweighed the plankton there by a factor of six to one. Every year, it is estimated that 100,000 mammals and 1 million seabirds are killed by plastic in our oceans. Dolphins get tangled in nets and can’t come up to the surface to breathe. Albatross eat plastic bottle caps, while whales and sea turtles consume disposable packaging and plastic bags.To truly understand the severity of the situation, Moore wants people to experience these garbage patches firsthand.“It can be so calm out there that you can just take a piece of plywood and four inner tubes and pitch a tent on it and just hang out there,” Moore says. “I think adventure tourism has a place out in the garbage patch to really see how this thing is. But part of that is the trip to get there and learning how big the ocean is and how we’ve been able to pollute something that big.” How is pollution changing marine life?Twenty years after Moore’s initial discovery of the garbage patch, he stumbled upon something much worse: a trash island.In the documentary “Sailing the Ocean of Trash with Captain Moore,” there’s footage of Moore walking on Hi-Zex Island, a floating trash mound within the North Pacific Gyre made of bound-up rope, buoys, and an accumulation of garbage.

Algalita Marine Research and Education A collection of sea debris found on an expedition in the western pacific in 2012.

“I felt like Captain Cook mapping a new island, you know, out in the middle of the ocean,” Moore says.One of the odd things that scientists have found is that, while the garbage has proved destructive to ocean environments, some species have found ways to thrive within this plastic world.Below the surface, Moore’s crews observed a tremendous amount of fish — pelagics like mahi mahi, dolphins and rudderfish, all feeding on other species that had gathered.Just recently, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center documented 484 different species hanging out on the marine debris, the majority of which are usually found on the coast.“It’s not entirely clear 100%, but I will tell you that a big player in the potential success of a species to adapt to environmental changes is how diverse is their genome in their population,” says Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, executive director for the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. (Disclosure: the Stowers Institute financially supports KCUR’s podcast Seeking A Scientist.)Sánchez Alvarado says that genome diversity is a lot like the makeup of your hand in a game of cards. If you have all aces, and you’re playing a game where aces can’t be played, then you’re out of luck (i.e. the species becomes extinct). But if you have a range of cards, your chances of being able to make a move are way better – these species survive.Sánchez Alvarado says this genetic diversity helps species adapt more willingly to new situations. The ones who don’t, likely die off and disappear forever.One example of a species that seems well suited for environments polluted by humans are killifish — which are sort of like the celebrity fish of toxic waters.

Algalita Marine Research and EducationMoore says surface filter feeders like barnacles, muscles and oysters tend to thrive on garbage, while creatures like salps and larvaceans struggle.

There are over 1,200 different types of killifish, and different variations have found novel ways to adapt to their specific environments. The Atlantic killifish on the eastern coast of the United States has been exposed to bad industrial pollution, but seem to be thriving nonetheless.Meanwhile, killifish have been found living in a sulfur-rich spring in Mexico, despite extremely low concentrations of oxygen. Another killifish group was sent to space and learned how to swim under weightless conditions. And when their sibling eggs hatched, they too could swim without gravity.For comparison, when goldfish were sent to space, they started to swim in a looping pattern and appeared to be miserable.“That’s what genetic diversity is all about,” says Sánchez Alvarado. “It’s exciting to see, you know, how species are adapting… But at the same time, I know that comes at a cost and that there are gonna be some things that we don’t understand might disappear before we understand them. And therefore, there may be a sense of loss, at the end of the day.”So what can be done?What’s clear is that the worsening pollution in the ocean will end up with winners and losers — which will have lasting consequences far beyond the water. Danni Washington says that to tackle this growing problem, plastic consumers, producers, and scientists all need to step up.“It’s just a matter of collective vision. It’s about innovation, it’s about creativity,” Washington says. “Bringing all these different ideas and minds and backgrounds and experiences to the table so that we can come up with the best solution possible.”“We have a lot of work to get there,” she adds.

Algalita Marine Research and Education Moore has been collecting samples from the Garbage Patch, studying the micro and nano-plastics in the water.

At this point, a complete ocean clean-up of all the micro-plastics and nano-plastics would be nearly impossible.“If you tried to clean up less than 1% of the North Pacific Ocean, it would take 67 ships one year to clean up that portion,” says Diana Parker, who works on the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Debris Program.“And the bottom line is that until we prevent debris from entering the ocean at the source, it’s just going to keep congregating in these areas. We could go out and clean it all up and then still have the same problem on our hands as long as there’s debris entering the ocean,” she says.But Washington says there are still a lot of things we can do to mitigate the situation.“When it comes to plastic pollution entering the ocean, 80% of it is coming from land-based sources,” says Washington. “So that means that we have an opportunity to intercept those pieces of plastic before they enter the water.”On top of local and individual efforts, a few non-profit organizations are stepping onto the scene. The Ocean Cleanup has gained some notoriety on social media by building high tech “interceptors,” which are positioned at the mouths of polluted rivers and harbors and funnel floating trash onto a conveyor belt.The Ocean Cleanup reports that 80% of the plastic that enters the ocean comes from 1% of the rivers on Earth. As of today, their interceptors have removed about 5 million pounds of trash from waterways.Another, more adorable solution is Mr. Trash Wheel, which is especially effective after big storms. With 5-foot googly eyes and powered by hydro- and solar energy, the semi-autonomous interceptor hangs out in harbors and collects trash — it can gobble up to 38,000 pounds in a day.

Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore

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Associated Press Mr. Trash Wheel®, created by Clearwater Mills, has become famous in recent years for all but eliminating floating debris in the Baltimore Harbor.

Washington’s favorite is The Great Bubble Barrier, which was designed by a Dutch startup company. It uses air to create a bubble curtain that prevents plastic from moving beyond a point, pushing trash (but not marine life) into a catchment system.Outside of the ocean, there are exciting innovations coming from scientists who are working to make plastics that are more biodegradable.Like research out of the University of Sydney, which recently discovered two fungi that can break down a type of plastic in about four and a half months. There’s also been some success with a corn-bioplastic that can break down in two-three months.Another promising result involves using an invasive brown seaweed to create a biodegradable replacement for plastic wrap.But Washington also knows that to protect the ocean, humans need to keep plastic out of the water in the first place.To that end, Washington is working towards a “Universal Declaration of Ocean Rights” that is being presented to the United Nations General Assembly in September.“I think it’s so important that no matter what walk of life you’re on, no matter what you do, you can get involved,” she says. “The ocean is our life source and it requires everyone to contribute.”Where can I hear even more about this topic?Listen and subscribe to Seeking A Scientist with Kate The Chemist, from KCUR Studios, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Seeking A Scientist is a production of KCUR Studios, made possible with support from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and design help from PRX.This episode was produced by Dr. Kate Biberdorf, Suzanne Hogan and Byron Love, edited by Mackenzie Martin and Gabe Rosenberg, with help from Genevieve Des Marteau.Our original theme music is by The Coma Calling. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Why is chemical recycling controversial?

Gas giant ExxonMobil has launched a large-scale chemical recycling plant in Texas with the goal of recycling over 80 million pounds of plastic waste per year. However, chemical recycling has long been controversial — oil companies may be avid proponents, but environmental groups accuse them of “trying to put a pretty bow” on plastic pollution, The Guardian writes.How does chemical recycling work?Plastic waste is a steadily growing problem and a major contributor to a number of ecological problems. Currently, only approximately ten percent of plastics are recycled in the U.S. This is largely because most plastics are unable to be recycled through traditional mechanical recycling. “No flexible plastic packaging can be recycled with mechanical recycling,” explained George Huber, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin to Environmental Health News.In turn, some companies are trying to recycle plastic on a large scale in hopes of reducing the amount of pollution. This is known as chemical recycling which is when “plastic is heated to temperatures between 800 and 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit to break it down” and then transported to a facility to make it plastic again, writes Politico. “An advantage of advanced recycling is that it can take more of the 90 percent of plastics that aren’t recycled today … and remake them into virgin-quality new plastics approved for medical and food contact applications,” vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council (ACC) Joshua Baca told EHN.Not everybody is a fan, however, because during the process of breaking down the plastics, called pyrolysis, a number of toxic chemicals are released including benzene, mercury, and arsenic, Politico continues. Additionally, pyrolysis consumes large amounts of energy and water, leading some critics to call the process “so inefficient … it should not be called recycling at all,” per The Guardian. What do supporters say?Exxon’s recycling plant is one of the largest in the country, and the company plans on opening plants all over the world. Its goal is to have a global recycling capacity of 1 billion pounds of plastic each year by 2026. “There is substantial demand for recycled plastics,” argued President of Exxon’s Product Solutions Company Karen McKee, “and advanced recycling can play an important role by breaking down plastics that could not be recycled in traditional, mechanical methods.”Those in the industry are inclined to agree. Baca of the ACC, which is an industry group including Exxon, acknowledged “the problem of plastic in the environment,” and deemed chemical recycling as “a critical part of the solution,” to Politico. The goal is to close the loop in plastic production so new plastic no longer needs to be manufactured. Most plastic today either ends up in landfills or is incinerated, according to Chemical and Engineering News.”The beautiful thing about feedstock recycling is that you take waste plastic, you make a pyrolysis oil, and at the end of the day you make a virgin plastic,” said Carsten Larsen of oil company Dow’s plastics business. “You have a 100 percent normal grade of food-approved plastic, except instead of coming from fossil fuels, it comes from waste plastic.”What do critics say?Despite being a seemingly promising solution to plastic pollution, there are a number of downsides to this style of recycling. First, the broken-down plastic actually becomes synthetic crude oil before being turned back into plastic. Some of this oil is used for energy, thereby perpetuating fossil fuel usage, writes Politico. Also, the location of such recycling plants has brought up environmental justice concerns as they are usually built in low-income and minority communities.”They’re going to be managing toxic chemicals … and they’re going to be putting our communities at risk for either air pollution or something worse,” remarked the manager of the Center for International Environmental Law’s plastics and petrochemicals campaign Jane Patton to EHN. Plastics contain harmful chemicals like phthalates, which are known to be carcinogenic and when plastic is pyrolyzed, it produces dioxins which “can cause cancer, reproductive issues, immune system damage, and other health issues,” EHN continues.Some say Exxon’s attempt to recycle is hypocritical as the company produced six million tons of new single-use plastic in 2021, more than any other oil and gas company, according to the Plastic Waste Makers Index 2023. Phaedra Pezzullo, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, commented to The Guardian that chemical recycling is “deflecting attention away from what we need, which is reducing single-use plastics and a global treaty on plastic waste.” Veena Singla of the Natural Resources Defense Council added that it is “a way for the industry to continue to expand its plastic production and assuage people’s concerns about plastic waste.”Overall, there is still no great solution to the problem of plastic pollution other than to greatly reduce its production. “We recognize the challenge with plastics is huge. So we know we need lots of different solutions here,” explained Nena Shaw, of the EPA’s resource conservation and sustainability division. “Everybody is in limbo right now, and you have all these damn industries coming in and taking advantage.”

Adrienne Matei: Plastic is already in blood, breast milk, and placentas. Now it may be in our brains

Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered particles of plastic in mice’s brains just two hours after the mice ingested drinking water containing plastic.Once in the brain, “Plastic particles could increase the risk of inflammation, neurological disorders or even neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,” Lukas Kenner, one of the researchers, said in a statement, although more research is needed to determine the relationship between plastics and these brain disorders. In addition to potentially severe degenerative consequences, the researchers also believe that microplastic contamination in our brains can cause short-term health effects such as cognitive impairment, neurotoxicity and altered neurotransmitter levels, which can contribute to behavioral changes.In the course of their research, the team gave mice water laced with particles of polystyrene – a type of plastic that’s common in food packaging such as yoghurt cups and Styrofoam takeout containers.Using computer models to track the dispersion of the plastics, researchers found that nanoplastic particles – which are under 0.001 millimeters and invisible to the naked eye – were able to travel into the mice’s brains via a previously unknown biological “transport mechanism”. Essentially, these tiny plastics are absorbed into cholesterol molecules on the brain membrane surface. Thus stowed away in their little lipid packages, they cross the blood-brain barrier – a wall of blood vessels and tissue that functions to protect the brain from toxins and other harmful substances.While the Vienna study focused on the effects of plastics consumed in drinking water, that’s not the only way humans ingest plastic. A 2022 Chinese study concentrated on how nasally inhaled plastics affect the brain, with researchers reporting “an obvious neurotoxicity of the nanoplastics could be observed”. In basic terms, the inhaled plastics lead to reduced functioning of certain brain enzymes that also malfunction in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.Of course, we eat plastic, too, and new research on plastics and brain health is emerging alongside breaking studies on how the contaminants affect our gastrointestinal health. Much like the blood-brain barrier, the gastrointestinal barrier is also vulnerable to interference by nanoplastics – which can cause inflammatory and immune reactions in the gut, as well as cell death.At this point, it’s clear that plastics have infiltrated most parts of the human body, including our blood, organs, placentas, breast milk and gastrointestinal systems. While we don’t yet fully understand how plastics affect different parts of our bodies, many chemicals found in various types of plastic are known carcinogens and hormone-disruptors, linked to negative health outcomes including obesity, diabetes, reproductive disorders and neurological impairments in foetuses and children.This spring, the Boston College Global Observatory on Planetary Health led the first-ever analysis of the health hazards of plastics across their life cycle and found that “Current patterns of plastic production, use, and disposal are not sustainable and are responsible for significant harms to human health … as well as for deep societal injustices.”None of this is encouraging news – especially in light of the fact that plastic production is still accelerating. Yet, improving our understanding of plastic’s implications for human health is a crucial step towards banning plastic – a move 75% of people globally support. Encouragingly, more than 100 countries have a full or partial ban on single-use plastic bags, and policymakers in some countries are thinking about plastics more in terms of their costly externalities, including pollution and effects on health. Yet global plastics regulation is still vastly out of step with both scientific and public opinion.In 2021, the Canadian government formally classified plastics as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The move means that the government has more control over the manufacture and use of plastics, limiting the kinds of exposure that threaten health. In response, plastic producers including Imperial Oil, Dow Chemical and Nova Chemicals formed a coalition to try to crush these regulations.More countries must designate plastics as toxic and increase its regulation, doubling down on the message that when plastic affects our health – even going so far as to alter our brain function – it infringes on our human rights.
Adrienne Matei is a freelance journalist

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Environmentalists want the FTC Green Guides to slam the door on the ‘chemical’ recycling of plastic waste

The newest flashpoint in a political battle between environmental groups and the plastics industry over “chemical” or “advanced” recycling has to do with the kinds of claims that can be made and still be truthful with American consumers.

The Federal Trade Commission is weighing its first changes in 10 years to its Green Guides, which establish guidelines for companies’ environmental advertising and labeling claims. The FTC’s review goes far beyond plastic recycling and includes concepts such as “net zero” related to greenhouse gas emissions, biodegradability, sustainability and organic products.

But recycling is front and center in the FTC review, which comes amid a global recognition of a plastic crisis, United Nations negotiations toward a treaty to curb plastic waste and the awareness of the widespread failure of plastic recycling. Tens of millions of Americans still dutifully sort their household plastic to be recycled, even though most of it ends up in landfills or is sent to incinerators. 

Plastic manufacturers are also pushing hard now with media, advertising and lobbying campaigns to gain public acceptance of advanced or chemical recycling, which requires new, largely unproven kinds of chemical plants that seek to break down plastic waste with chemicals, high-heat processes, or both, and then turn the waste into feedstocks that can be mixed with fossil fuels or incorporated into new plastic products.

The industry says that through advanced recycling a “circular” plastics economy can be created that reduces the need to tap virgin fossil fuels to make its products. Environmentalists say advanced recycling is in many cases tantamount to “greenwashing”—an energy-intensive process with a high carbon footprint that essentially incinerates much of the waste and turns a small percentage into feedstocks for new plastics, or more fossil fuels.  

Whichever way the FTC comes down on the question could go a long way toward reinforcing recycling policies across the country for the next decade or longer. So could the potential for new scrutiny of certain kinds of chemical recycling by the Environmental Protection Agency, announced in a draft plastic waste strategy issued late last month. 

To date, the EPA has tended to view these “advanced” processes as incineration, not recycling, though the agency in its 2021 National Recycling Strategy said it would “welcome” further discussion of chemical recycling—a position it is now partially walking back.

Taken together, the FTC and EPA actions stand to affect the growth potential of the nascent advanced recycling industry across the United States. That includes one of the largest proposals—Houston-based Encina’s plan to erect a $1.1 billion chemical plant on 100 acres next to the Susquehanna River in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, which has run into local opposition. 

The plant is being designed to convert end-of-life plastics into benzene, toluene and xylene to be used to manufacture new plastic products, according to the company.

The United States has about 4.3 percent of the world’s population but generates nearly 11 percent of global plastic waste and has the biggest plastic-waste footprint of any country, generating approximately 486 pounds per person annually, according to the EPA.

A study last year by the environmental groups Beyond Plastics and The Last Beach Cleanup, found plastics recycling in the United States had fallen to below 6 percent.

Businesses cannot be trusted, said Jan Dell, founder of The Last Beach Cleanup, based in Southern California. Dell has recently put digital trackers in plastic bags or containers labeled as recyclable, dropped them off at recycling stations, then traced them to local landfills.

“There are thousands of products labeled with false recyclable labels,” she said.

A Call for Clearer Guidance or Mandates

The FTC first issued its Green Guides in 1992 and they were revised in 1996, 1998 and 2012. They provide guidance on environmental marketing claims, including how consumers are likely to interpret them and how marketers can substantiate them to avoid deceiving consumers, according to the agency.

FTC Chair Lina M. Khan

“People decide what to buy, or not to buy, for all kinds of reasons,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a Dec. 14 statement when the agency opened a comment period for the Green Guides update. “Walk down the aisle at any major store (and) you’re likely to see packages trumpeting their low carbon footprint, their energy efficiency, or their sustainability. For the average consumer, it’s impossible to verify these claims.”

More than 7,000 people, businesses and organizations submitted written comments by the FTC’s April 24 deadline, which marks the beginning of a drawn-out process that will include the agency reviewing the comments, holding workshops, drafting revisions to the Green Guides and then seeking more public comment, an agency spokesman said. The agency has posted nearly 1,000 of the comments.

Environmental, business and industry groups are all calling for clearer guidance on claims that consumers rely upon to choose what products to buy. Environmentalists want new mandates.

The Consumer Brands Association, whose members include beverage,  food and drug companies and retailers including Amazon, for example, told the FTC that a comprehensive update of the guides is needed for clarity. 

“The distinction between environmental benefit claims as opposed to instructions which direct consumers how to recycle products have amplified confusion in the marketplace, and consequently the potential for consumer deception,” the association wrote. “At the same time, there is a lack of clarity for (the) consumer and regulatory certainty for industry that has been exacerbated by lack of uniform federal standards, a patchwork of state approaches to environmental claims and recycling systems, as well as litigation.”

Strong reforms are necessary around recycling claims, said John Hocevar, oceans campaign director with the environmental group, Greenpeace USA.

“The FTC has an opportunity to stop the widespread greenwashing about the recyclability of plastic packaging,” he said. “It is clear that the current approach has not been successful, so it is time to codify and start enforcing the Green Guides. Once corporations stop misleading their customers that all this throwaway plastic packaging is recyclable, it will be much easier to have honest conversations about real solutions.”

Greenpeace USA joined other environmental groups including Beyond Plastics, the Center for Biological Diversity and The Last Beach Cleanup in written comments calling for FTC to give the Green Guides, which critics describe as largely voluntary, the full force of federal law while encouraging the agency to adopt California’s 2021 Senate Bill 343. The bill requires products to meet benchmarks in order to be advertised or labeled as recyclable, and is designed to help consumers to clearly identify which products are recyclable in California.

Across the country, seven categories of plastics currently include the so-called “chasing-arrows” symbol— numbered 1-7—as a sign that the material is recyclable, even though often it is not.

Of those seven, plastic bottles and jugs numbered 1 and 2  made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET)  and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) are the most commonly recycled, according to a 2022 Greenpeace report that included Dell’s research. Numbers 3-7  (polyvinyl chloride, or PVC; low-density polyethylene, or LDPE; polypropylene, or PP; polystyrene, or PS; and mixtures of various plastics), are rarely, if ever, recycled, Dell said.

The environmental group Californians Against Waste described SB 343 as prohibiting “the use of the chasing-arrows symbol or any other suggestion that a material is recyclable, unless the material is actually recyclable” in most communities “and is routinely sold to manufacturers to make new products.”

The environmental groups told the FTC that it is not enough to say a plastic product is potentially recyclable. In the current plastic waste stream, only certain types of plastic bottles are actually recycled and reused again as plastic bottles. Most plastic waste, even when it contains the chasing-arrows symbol, ends up in either a landfill or an incinerator. 

Environmental groups are also pressing the FTC to crack down on misleading claims of “circularity,” a new industry buzzword with no widely accepted definition that is used to suggest products are repeatedly made from waste without tapping new natural resources.

“The Guides should require that any ‘circular economy’ claim necessitates showing a decline or, at a minimum, a cap on virgin resource extraction, production, and product manufacturing and an overall reduction in emissions and toxic pollution throughout the lifecycle of the material,” according to written comments from the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit that works with local communities to hold oil companies accountable for climate impacts.

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EPA, Texas ignored warning signs at chemical storage site before it burned

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This story is the first of a two-part series by The Texas Tribune and Public Health Watch. Part two will publish on Thursday.

DEER PARK — Danny Hardy was sitting in the third-row pew at Deer Park First Baptist Church when the cellphones began buzzing in unison. Several men quickly shifted in their seats — all of them first responders or employees at one of the dozens of nearby refineries and chemical plants.

Hardy, a retired police officer and head of the church security team, wasn’t alarmed. After living in the Houston suburb of Deer Park for nearly 40 years, he was accustomed to the sight of refinery flares burning in the night, the occasional stench of chemicals and the sound of sirens wailing in the distance. Deer Park was nestled in the heart of North America’s petrochemical industry. These things were to be expected.

But as ripples of conversation spread through the congregation, it became clear that this emergency alert — on Sunday, March 17, 2019 — was different. After a few tense moments Wayne Riddle, a former mayor, stepped onstage and addressed the crowded worship center.

There had been an accident. A facility housing millions of barrels of volatile chemicals was burning a little more than 2 miles away. City officials had issued a shelter-in-place advisory.

Hardy looked out a window and saw a towering plume of ink-black smoke blanketing the sky. He instructed a team of 30 deacons and volunteers to shut off the air-conditioning system and guard the exits. Everyone needed to stay inside, safe from whatever fumes might be lurking outside.

The choir sang a worship song to calm the parishioners: “Lift your voice / It’s the year of jubilee / And out of Zion’s hill / Salvation comes.”

Danny Hardy inside the worship center at First Baptist Church in Deer Park on Feb. 6, 2023. As the church’s head of security, Hardy was tasked with protecting his congregation in the fire’s earliest hours. “All of a sudden, alarms on our phones started going off,” he said. “We knew it was a fire and it was pretty major.”

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

* * *

Four hours later and 1,000 miles away in Boulder, Colorado, Ken Garing got an email about the mushrooming chemical fire in Southeast Texas.

For 30 years, Garing had worked as a chemical engineer for a branch of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that investigates high-stakes cases of industrial pollution. His back stiffened when he saw that the blaze was at Intercontinental Terminals Company, or ITC, in Deer Park.

Garing had visited the 265-acre chemical storage facility twice, in 2013 and 2016. Both times, he left shaken by what he’d seen. Worrisome amounts of chemicals were leaking into the air from dozens of ITC’s massive tanks, including an outpouring of benzene, a carcinogen that can cause leukemia.

“I remember thinking, ‘Holy cow.’ They had by far the highest benzene numbers we’d ever seen inside a facility,” he said. “Something bad was going to happen at ITC. It was just a matter of time.”

A 10-month investigation by Public Health Watch found that Garing was one of many state and federal scientists who documented problems at ITC long before catastrophe struck. The fire didn’t just punctuate years of government negligence — it revealed regulatory failures familiar to communities that experience chemical disasters, including the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The pattern is a common one: State and federal officials know for years of a looming danger but repeatedly fail to correct it. And then, after an accident occurs, they fail to adequately protect those who are harmed.

The story of how this pattern unfolded in Deer Park, a tight-knit city of 30,000 and the self-proclaimed “Birthplace of Texas,” is based on thousands of pages of state and federal documents, on investigative reports and pollution data from the EPA and on eyewitness accounts from residents. It also draws on extensive interviews with a handful of retired government regulators who tried to sound the alarm about ITC years ago and are speaking out now in the hope of preventing future disasters.

* * *

ITC’s 227 chemical storage tanks sit on the northern outskirts of Deer Park like giant, white monuments to Texas’ powerful petrochemical industry. The facility is owned by Japan-based Mitsui Group, one of the world’s largest corporations. It stores and distributes toxic chemicals, noxious gases and petroleum products essential to the region’s thousands of chemical plants and refineries, moving the products from freighters to railways, barges to pipelines, tankers to refineries. It has more than 20,000 feet of rail lines, plus five shipping docks and 10 barge docks that back up to the Houston Ship Channel. Downtown Houston is just 17 miles away.

The petrochemical industry has been intertwined with Deer Park for nearly 100 years. It is the city’s largest employer and a major philanthropic source for civic activities. It has especially close ties with Deer Park’s schools, which, along with well-paying industry jobs, are key draws for families. When the town’s school district was created in 1930, its board met at the local Shell refinery.

Barges float through the Houston Ship Channel’s murky waters next to the ITC facility in February in Deer Park.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

Deer Park has plenty of reasons to be loyal to industry. But in July 2004, Tim Doty and 14 other scientists from the state’s environmental regulatory agency — the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ — were focused on risks the industry might pose to the town.

The TCEQ was barely a decade old at the time, but it was already under heavy fire from environmental leaders — especially Houston Mayor Bill White, a Democrat whose city was fighting a losing battle against air pollution. The American Lung Association named Houston the nation’s fifth smoggiest city that year, and emissions from Deer Park and neighboring towns contributed to the problem. White wanted the TCEQ to toughen regulations and increase fines for repeat offenders of the federal Clean Air Act.

Doty had been tracking industrial emissions since 1990, when he went to work for the Texas Air Control Board, an agency that preceded the TCEQ. His ability to interpret complex chemical readings had made him one of its sharpest investigators. His dogged commitment made him one of its toughest.

Doty’s mobile monitoring team had taken chemical readings around ITC before.

In 2002, his scientists found startling levels of benzene and other dangerous chemicals outside the facility, including toluene, which is found in nail polish and explosives, and 1,3-butadiene, a carcinogen used in plastic and rubber products. The emissions were so strong that three of Doty’s scientists experienced burning throats, burning noses and watering eyes.

But the incident didn’t lead to any fines. The TCEQ, the state’s primary enforcer of the federal Clean Air Act, penalized ITC only once between 2002 and 2004 — for equipment problems, not chemical leaks. Most of the meager fines the company faced in that period came from the Federal Railroad Administration and the EPA.

Just six months before Doty’s team arrived in Deer Park in July 2004, ITC had illegally released 101 pounds of 1,3-butadiene into the air. But no fines were issued and 16 days later, the TCEQ gave ITC permission to install an additional tank of 1,3-butadiene. It also renewed the facility’s 10-year chemical permit — one of two key permits required of any company that emits pollution as part of its routine operation.

The TCEQ scientists spent almost a week that July combing Deer Park and surrounding communities for illegal emissions. For 13 to 14 hours each day, they triangulated emission sources along the peripheries of various facilities.

The corner of Tidal Road and Independence Parkway quickly became their top priority.

Two hazardous waste facilities and a chemical plant that produced chlorine and caustic soda, which is used in soaps and to cure foods, sat nearby. But ITC’s storage compound dominated the intersection. It was filled with tanks housing volatile fuels, including gooey leftovers from the refining process. Each tank had a number that allowed ITC — and regulators — to keep track of its emissions and compliance record over the years. The tanks in this corner, known as the “2nd 80’s” because each could hold up to 80,000 barrels of product, were 80-1 through 80-15. All of them were built in the 1970s.

That intersection “was literally ground zero for benzene,” Doty said. “There were many chemical sources around there, but ITC was right in the middle of it all. It was one of our main focuses.”

The scientists used handheld vapor analyzers to take rough measurements of chemicals in the air. They used small, metal canisters to trap air samples that would later be tested at the TCEQ laboratory. But their biggest weapons were their 16-foot box vans. The vans were outfitted with 30-foot weather masts that allowed them to track wind direction and small ovens that rapidly analyzed air samples by burning off chemicals one by one.

The scientists’ findings led to a follow-up inspection by the TCEQ. They were also summarized in an internal memo to seven agency officials, including the directors of the offices of compliance and enforcement and air permitting.

“Elevated levels of benzene and 1,3-butadiene” had been detected near the intersection of Tidal Road and Independence Parkway, the memo said. ITC, the suspected culprit, had been issued a notice of violation, a document that lists problems a company is required to address. According to the memo, ITC had released a sustained concentration of 720 parts per billion of benzene over the course of an hour, a “violation of their permit.”

But again the TCEQ let ITC off the hook.

The company said it had fixed the faulty tanks and no further action was taken. A year later, the TCEQ gave ITC permission to install 48 additional tanks.

To Doty, these decisions were just more examples of the TCEQ bending to industry rather than protecting the public.

“It was frustrating. My team was always trying to do the right thing,” he said. “Whether TCEQ actually followed up with any meaningful action, well, that’s a different issue.”

* * *

In December 2006, another problem cropped up in ITC’s “2nd 80’s.”

Emergency responders rushed to Tidal Road after a pressurized valve malfunctioned, spewing 2,076 pounds of pyrolysis gasoline, or pygas, into the air, onto the ground and into a water-filled roadside ditch.

Pygas is rich in benzene and toluene. Exposure to these chemicals can cause symptoms ranging from dizziness and irregular heartbeats to kidney damage. In extremely high concentrations they can lead to death.

Tim Doty, a former mobile air monitoring expert for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, at his home in Driftwood, near Austin. Doty documented excessive benzene emissions near ITC’s “2nd 80’s” section for nearly a decade but watched in frustration as the chemical storage facility repeatedly escaped enforcement.

Credit:
Liz Moskowitz for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

Harris County investigators closed Tidal Road for 13 hours as they managed the contaminated area and gathered air and water samples. Harris County includes Houston, Deer Park and other industrialized towns.

County officials pounced on the accident. They’d grown frustrated by the TCEQ’s leniency and were beefing up their own air monitoring and investigative efforts.

Harris County sued ITC over the pygas leak, alleging that the facility had committed six separate violations of the Texas Clean Air Act and the Texas Water Code. In their petition, the prosecutors said they were confident the case would warrant a penalty as high as $150,000 “because of the compliance history of ITC.”

Harris County updated its petition less than six months later after another ITC incident. In a span of just four minutes, nearly 1,800 pounds of 1,3-butadiene escaped from tank 50-2, the tank’s fourth emissions violation in as many years. It was located in a section of the facility adjacent to the “2nd 80’s” near Tidal Road, where Tim Doty and his team of TCEQ scientists had recorded high levels of benzene three years earlier.

Since then, Doty’s team had made four more weeklong investigative trips to Deer Park. Each time it left with new data about ITC’s troubling benzene emissions. Doty described the problems in his post-trip reports.

“I created detailed narratives and stories that anybody curious about what was happening at ITC — say, a journalist — could follow up on,” he said. “We were determined to show that ITC’s problems were consistent. They weren’t one-time events.”

Again, the TCEQ didn’t issue any penalties.

In 2008, ITC settled the lawsuit with Harris County for $95,250 for five chemical leaks caused by operator error. The company agreed to abide by environmental laws and implement better management practices — a promise it failed to keep. After another chemical accident caused by operator error the following year, Harris County sued again. This time ITC settled for $90,000.

* * *

While ITC was fending off regulators, Elvia Guevara was settling into her new home 4 miles away from its chemical tanks.

The comfortably middle-class community of Deer Park was everything she and her husband, Lalo, had hoped it would be when they moved there in 2008. The Houston suburb was small, intimate and safe. Its planned neighborhoods were lined with clean streets, large yards and spacious two-story homes. And its proximity to petrochemical facilities meant shorter commutes to work.

Elvia Guevara (left) washes dishes before her grandson’s Spiderman-themed birthday party on Feb. 11, 2023, in Pasadena, Texas. Her family moved to Deer Park in 2008. “We always wanted to live here,” she said, “because the school districts are good and it’s safe and clean.”

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

Guevara managed around-the-clock logistics for a nearby chemical company. Her husband was a railroad tech manager who repaired rail lines near ITC. The industry had been good to them. It helped them move from Pasadena, a less-affluent neighboring city, and put food on the table for their three sons, Eddie, Anthony and Adrian.

“We didn’t focus on the possibility of chemical leaks and things like that,” Guevara said. “For us, it was normal to live in a community surrounded by chemical companies.”

Unbeknownst to Guevara, the EPA — the agency tasked with making sure Texas properly regulated those companies — was entering a period of turmoil. A determined regulator, Debbie Ford, had a front-row seat.

Ford arrived in Dallas in August 2008 as an air enforcement inspector for EPA Region 6, which oversees federal environmental regulations in Texas, Louisiana and three other states. She’d spent most of her life in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where her father was the medical director at a refinery. After earning a master’s degree in environmental science, she went to work for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ.

Ford’s ability to interpret complicated chemical permits and memorize labyrinthine air pollution regulations shot her up the agency’s ranks. Within six years, she was the senior air technical inspector of her regional office and one of the DEQ’s most respected technical experts, especially when it came to chemical tanks.

But Ford’s rigorous approach earned her a reputation as a “pot-stirrer” in a state that, like Texas, is known for its lenient approach to enforcement. Rather than yielding to the political pressure and regulatory tiptoeing that often steered the agency, Ford pressed on — often to her bosses’ chagrin.

“To me, it was simple: The regulations are in place and everybody’s supposed to follow them,” Ford said. “But some companies were able to skirt the rules and receive lax permits thanks to their influence in the state.”

Ford thought that joining the EPA would give her a better chance to make an impact. But she soon learned that the agency’s powers under the Clean Air Act are limited. The act makes the EPA responsible for overseeing the implementation of federal regulations, but it gives states most of the responsibility for enforcing them. Like parents trying to corral their sometimes-rambunctious children, the EPA’s 10 regions are often forced to cajole and compromise with their state partners.

Several current and former EPA officials told Public Health Watch that Region 6 took a “go-along-to-get-along” approach when dealing with industry-friendly states like Texas and Louisiana. They said its reputation for going light on violators of the Clean Air Act was well-known at the other EPA regions — and even at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Ford was unprepared for Region 6’s lax attitude. When she arrived at its office in downtown Dallas the first time, she said no assignments had been prepared for her and she was given only minimal information about the ever-evolving federal air pollution regulations she was expected to enforce. She said a co-worker regularly slept at a desk nearby and that she once overheard a higher-up whisper to another boss, “Don’t let her find out too soon how little we do here.”

When Public Health Watch asked Region 6 about this exchange, the agency said it “cannot verify an overheard statement.”

Ford was shocked by what she saw.

“I just kept thinking, ‘What the hell have I gotten myself into?’”

* * *

Ford felt a bit hopeful in 2009, when President Barack Obama chose Alfredo “Al” Armendariz, an engineering professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, to lead Region 6.

Environmentalists rejoiced because Armendariz was known for criticizing state regulators about their weak approach to enforcement. But officials and industry groups in Texas strongly opposed his appointment. They were especially angered by a paper he had written before he took the job. It showed that natural-gas drilling in the Dallas-Fort Worth area created nearly as much smog and greenhouse gases as the cities’ gridlocked traffic.

Debbie Ford at her home in Richardson. Despite serving as EPA Region 6’s tank expert for more than a decade, Ford was given little input on the region’s multiple inspections at ITC. Now retired, she still wonders if the fire could have been prevented by stronger enforcement and oversight from the EPA.

Credit:
Emil T. Lippe for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

Eight months after his appointment, Armendariz sent his bosses in Washington a 44-slide PowerPoint presentation asking for more resources for the Dallas office. His argument was clear: Region 6 had by far the most petrochemical facilities in the country. But it had the sixth-smallest staff among the 10 regions and was unequipped to properly enforce the Clean Air Act.

In the spring of 2011, more than 25 Texas officials, including then-Gov. Rick Perry, created a task force to combat what they saw as increasingly intrusive EPA policies. In 2012, a video emerged that cost Armendariz his job. In it, he compared his enforcement philosophy to Roman crucifixions. By making an example of bad actors, he said, the EPA would drive the rest of the industry to police itself.

Armendariz apologized for his word choice, but the damage had been done. The TCEQ described his comments as “outlandish” and “unacceptable and embarrassing.” Perry tweeted that Armendariz’s statements were “another reason to all-but-eliminate EPA.”

Armendariz stepped down four days later.

* * *

Despite the turmoil at the top of Region 6, the staff in the air enforcement division pushed on.

On the morning of Oct. 10, 2012, a pair of EPA investigators showed up in Deer Park for an unannounced inspection at ITC. Like Doty’s TCEQ team eight years earlier, they were on the hunt for benzene. This time, they went inside the facility to get a closer look at its tanks.

The lead investigator was Dan Hoyt, an environmental engineer from Region 6 who had good reason to be worried about ITC. Data from some stationary air monitors in the area suggested there were dangerously high levels of benzene emissions in or near the facility.

Tracking emissions in large tank farms requires patience, precision, sophisticated tools and intensive training. Airborne leaks can’t be observed with the naked eye, so the investigators used heat-tracking infrared cameras to identify them. Black-and-white videos showed clouds of vapors surging through the vents that lined the tops of each tank.

Hoyt was equipped with a photoionization detector that took instant readings, but the sheer number of tanks, and the fact that they were so close together, made it difficult to pinpoint the leaks’ sources. Some of the tanks stood 40 feet tall and 120 feet in diameter, so mapping the flow of air through the complex — a critical aspect of monitoring — was challenging.

By the end of their three-day inspection, the investigators had surveyed 98 of the facility’s then-231 tanks.

Four months later — not long after ITC had applied to renew its TCEQ chemical permit for another 10 years — Hoyt sent a draft of his report to Ford, who had become Region 6’s tank expert.

Plenty of inspection reports had crossed Ford’s desk. But Hoyt’s draft stuck out. The results were “jarring,” she said, especially in the final section, labeled “Areas of Concern.”

Public Health Watch acquired a copy of the final report through a Freedom of Information Act request. It identified 10 tanks that might be exceeding their permitted limits for volatile organic compounds emissions. Four of them — 80-2, 80-7, 80-9 and 80-12 — were near Tidal Road, in the same section Doty and the TCEQ team had worried about eight years earlier.

Region 6’s next step was to call in the EPA’s emissions “SWAT” team.

The National Enforcement Investigations Center, or NEIC, is a specialized branch of the EPA based in Denver. Each year, it takes on dozens of the nation’s most complicated cases of industrial pollution. When a regional office needs a heightened level of expertise or seasoned investigators, it turns to the NEIC.

Garing was a chemical engineer for the team. He knew the petrochemical industry inside and out. Before he joined the NEIC in 1987, he’d worked as a chemical engineer for Conoco. By the time Region 6 asked him to measure benzene emissions in eastern Harris County, he’d inspected nearly 100 plants and refineries.

In April 2013, Garing spent several days driving around the area in a custom-made van fitted with a brand-new tool: Geospatial Measurement of Air Pollution, or GMAP, technology. The $100,000 machine produced a 3D emissions map that showed real-time chemical spikes. One look made it clear to Garing that ITC had a benzene problem.

Region 6 added Garing’s findings to a draft of a formal document called a Clean Air Act Section 114 Information Collection Request. If the region wanted to move forward with enforcement, sending the 114 to ITC was a critical way to gather key details and documents.

The 13-page draft, which Public Health Watch obtained through a public-records request, laid out widespread maintenance problems and mechanical defects associated with five tanks, including tanks 80-2, 80-7 and 80-15. All of them were in ITC’s “2nd 80’s” that Doty had flagged in 2004 and Hoyt had flagged in 2012.

But Region 6’s effort to clamp down on ITC apparently stopped there.

There is no record of the 114 having been finalized or sent to ITC after the inspection, of any fines being levied or any corrective action taken.

When Public Health Watch asked why ITC wasn’t penalized after the inspection, officials at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said “subsequent compliance discussions with the company and review of the evidence led Region 6 to decide against formal enforcement against ITC.”

* * *

Garing and the EPA’s team of specialists made a second visit to ITC on Nov. 14, 2016. This time, Region 6 asked them to conduct a full-scale inspection inside the facility, close to the tanks.

The strong odor of chemicals hung heavy in the cool Texas air that morning as Garing entered the complex. Hulking cylindrical tanks lined either side of the road like guardsmen standing at attention. Trains loaded with petrochemicals rumbled nearby.

Garing’s white Chevrolet Express was equipped with an arsenal of advanced pollution-tracking technology. Two contraptions sat atop its roof: an air monitor to track wind patterns and a 4-foot metal mast connected to a fan that sucked in atmospheric samples. It took seven car batteries just to power the potent vacuum.

After entering the mast, the air samples traveled through a Slinky-like plastic tube and into the GMAP machine, where they passed through an ultraviolet light that bounced repeatedly between two mirrors. Because specific compounds absorb light at specific wavelengths, the GMAP could identify in real time whether certain chemicals were passing through and at what concentrations. The readings went to a laptop in the front seat, giving Garing instant information about whatever he was driving through.

If emissions were low, the GMAP’s bar graph-like depictions were short and green. If emissions were high, they were bright red and stacked up like tall fences.

Garing had been using the GMAP for more than three years. But he said he’d never seen benzene levels as high as those it recorded inside ITC that day. In one part of the facility, the readings exceeded 1,000 parts per billion — more than 10 times higher than what the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health advises for workers.

“As we looked at our maps, there was all this red everywhere,” Garing said. “You usually see high emissions around one or two tanks — not around a series of tanks like we saw.

“Something wasn’t right,” he added. “It just looked very incriminating.”

Public Health Watch acquired a copy of the NEIC’s post-trip inspection report, dated April 2017, through a Freedom of Information Act request.

A large table summarizing Garing’s GMAP data showed more than 40 high benzene readings and their potential sources. Some of the emissions appeared to come from a neighboring facility. But at least half came from ITC. Five of the tanks that were flagged — 80-2, 80-6, 80-7, 80-10 and 80-14 — were in the troubled “2nd 80’s” section near Tidal Road. The highest benzene readings were found near tank 50-2 — the same tank whose 1,3-butadiene leak played a prominent role in Harris County’s first lawsuit against ITC.

The report said “it would be prudent to closely examine all available data … to decide whether further investigation would be warranted.”

NEIC delivered its findings to Region 6, which was responsible for investigating whether any of the high benzene readings exceeded ITC’s permit.

Then, just as in 2012, the effort to clamp down on ITC apparently stopped.

There is no record of Region 6 having drafted a 114 letter — a critical precursor to enforcement — or of any fines being levied or any corrective actions taken after the inspection.

Public Health Watch asked ITC if it received a 114 letter after the NEIC’s inspection. The company did not answer directly. “We responded fully to all of staff’s issues at the time,” a spokesperson said, “and ITC is not aware of any further action taken or needed.”

Public Health Watch asked to interview Region 6 leaders about why they decided not to penalize ITC after the region’s 2012 inspection, the NEIC’s 2013 benzene screening and the NEIC’s 2016 inspection. Region 6 spokesperson Joe Robledo emailed the following response:

“While these inspections identified areas of concern and specifically visible hydrocarbon emission from the top of some tanks at the facility, EPA’s enforcement review of the inspection results did not identify specific noncompliance. Regarding tanks, EPA does not expect tanks equipped with fixed roofs, internal floating roofs, or external floating roofs to achieve 100% emission control, so observing emissions from tanks is not necessarily a violation of a permit or federal standard.”

* * *

By August 2018, Elvia and Lalo Guevara’s oldest son had joined his parents in the petrochemical industry.

Eddie started as a contractor when he was just 18 and taking night classes at San Jacinto College. Three months later, he got a full-time job at a chemical company and dropped out of school. His starting salary was $70,000.

Eddie Guevara (second from left) and his family in the backyard of their home in Pasadena. The petrochemical industry has been good to Eddie, but he has always been aware of its dangers. “I always took being clean seriously,” he said, “especially working at a chemical plant where you could potentially carry these hazardous substances with you.”

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

Like many residents of Deer Park, Eddie didn’t pay much attention to how the TCEQ did — or didn’t — regulate the facilities that helped his community thrive. ITC’s persistent maintenance problems and environmental issues rarely made news. Since 2002, it had been penalized only $270,728 by the TCEQ, EPA and Harris County combined. That was barely a blip on the balance sheet for ITC’s owner, the Mitsui Group, which recorded $7.2 billion in profits in 2018 alone.

* * *

On the evening of Saturday, March 16, 2019, a chain of events began in ITC’s “2nd 80’s” that would draw national attention to the facility’s emissions problems. Reports from the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office and the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board laid out what happened.

About 7:30 p.m., operators began unloading two truckloads of butane into tank 80-8, according to the safety board’s preliminary report. The highly flammable liquid was being added to naphtha, an ingredient used in gasoline, to increase the fuel’s octane level. After the trucks were emptied, an external pump was left running to continue mixing the product.

The next morning, the pressure inside tank 80-8 suddenly dropped, a sign of a possible leak. About 9:30 a.m., more than 9,000 gallons of the naphtha-butane mixture began spilling onto the ground. The safety board report said the tank farm didn’t have a fixed gas detection system, which would have set off alarms to warn employees of the emergency.

The fire marshal’s office described what happened about a half-hour later, when an ITC supervisor was testing a tank. He heard the groans of metal grinding in the distance, but assumed it was two rail cars coupling together.

Moments later, he saw flames shooting up a tank about two football fields away. He wasn’t sure which tank it was, but he saw that it was at the heart of the “2nd 80’s” — the section whose high emissions had worried TCEQ and EPA inspectors for at least 15 years.

The fire marshal’s report said the tank farm didn’t have an automatic fire alarm system, so the supervisor grabbed his handheld radio and alerted the facility’s emergency response team. Then he ran to the nearby security office and activated the fire alarm.

According to the safety board, tank 80-8’s valves couldn’t be closed remotely. To turn them off, someone would have had to charge directly into the fire.

The tank farm also didn’t have an automatic sprinkler system, the fire marshal’s report said. The facility’s on-call fire team was still minutes away, so the ITC supervisor sprinted toward the nearest firefighting station. As he got closer, he saw that tank 80-8 was at the center of the inferno.

Firefighters struggle to extinguish the towering flames pouring out of ITC’s tank 80-8 on the afternoon of March 17, 2019. The fire would blow through the entire “2nd 80’s” section of the facility.

Credit:
Courtesy of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

By the time he reached a company firefighting station, the flames had crawled from the 40-foot tank’s base to its roof.

The operator who was responsible for the “2nd 80’s” that day was already there in full protective firefighting gear. He and the supervisor didn’t have a direct shot at the fire, so they tried to bounce water off another tank and onto 80-8.

But the water pressure was too weak to reach the flames.

As the operator screamed into his radio for more water pressure, he saw a second tank — 80-11 — catch fire.

A gas-fueled fireball rose more than 150 feet into the air. Ash rained down on emergency responders as they fought to slow its spread. Billows of thick, black smoke formed an enormous plume that could be seen for miles.

Eddie Guevara, who was working a few miles from ITC that Sunday, watched it drift toward his family’s home. He called his father and brother to warn them, but he kept on working. He had learned to live with the hazards of his job.

Ford, the Region 6 tank specialist, was inspecting tanks in Louisiana that day. When she got back to the office, she said the region’s leaders were huddled in closed-door meetings. She wasn’t included — so she began researching the fire on her own.

“It’s always a shock when there is an explosion or fire at a facility you have inspected or have knowledge of,” she said. “The question is whether management tried to deflect any responsibility for not following up” on its past inspections.

“Only those folks who were in the room would know,” she said.

Coming tomorrow: An invisible plume of benzene settles over Deer Park and nearby towns — threatening residents’ health and sending officials scrambling.

Texas Tribune reporters Alejandra Martinez and Erin Douglas contributed to this story.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop provided editing and graphics support. This project is co-published with Grist.

Disclosure: San Jacinto College and Southern Methodist University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

We can’t wait to welcome you Sept. 21-23 to the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, our multiday celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the day’s news — all taking place just steps away from the Texas Capitol. When tickets go on sale in May, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

Correction, April 26, 2023 at 10:35 a.m.:

An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the dimensions of some tanks in ITC’s “2nd 80’s.” The tanks were 40 feet tall and 120 feet in diameter.

Public wasn’t warned about lingering chemicals after ITC fire near Houston

This story is the second of a two-part series by The Texas Tribune and Public Health Watch. Read part 1 here.

DEER PARK — A week after the massive chemical fire that spewed toxic smoke over this Houston suburb had been extinguished in March 2019, Mario Ochoa cradled his 4-year-old son and prayed the child’s cough would ease so they could both sleep. Castiel kept waking Ochoa up with “horrible and terrifying” snoring.

“It was like watching your son drown right in front of you,” Ochoa said. “[He was] gasping for air in his sleep.”

A group of massive tanks, some containing millions of gallons of highly flammable chemicals used to make plastic and gasoline, had caught fire at a chemical storage facility owned by Intercontinental Terminals Company, a Texas-based company owned by Japanese conglomerate Mitsui Group. The fire began after a tank’s pump failed and began to leak naphtha, a highly flammable liquid.

As the fire at ITC spread from tank to tank, an ominous black plume of smoke spiraled over the Houston skyline. Ten of the tanks — each big enough to hold more than 3 million gallons of chemicals — collapsed, sending chemicals gushing into the nearby ship channel and killing birds and fish. Ash rained down on nearby neighborhoods.

Twice, city officials advised residents of Deer Park, the city closest to the fire, to shelter indoors. The first lasted 18 hours immediately after the fire broke out, and the second came three days later when air monitoring detected extremely high levels of benzene — an invisible, sweet-smelling hydrocarbon often found in crude oil and cigarettes. It’s known to cause cancer after repeated exposure and can irritate the throat and eyes. When inhaled in large quantities over a short period, benzene can affect the central nervous system and cause symptoms including dizziness, a rapid heart rate and headaches.

But what Ochoa and other residents weren’t told by federal, state and local officials at the time was that long after the fire was extinguished and life seemed to go back to normal, an invisible danger remained.

Benzene emissions spiked to abnormally high and potentially dangerous levels for more than two weeks after nearby residents were told it was safe to return to school and work, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air-monitoring data. The data was collected by a mobile laboratory that roamed the area for two months after the fire erupted — one of many air quality devices deployed to monitor pollution at the time.

Almost 1,000 people swarmed to temporary mobile health clinics in Deer Park that operated for three days after the fire started, and Texas Poison Center Network records show its hotline received almost 200 calls reporting chemical exposure from the ITC fire over a more than two-week period. The most frequent symptoms were headache, throat irritation, nausea, coughing, dizziness and vomiting.

The fire had been out for days when Ochoa, a 39-year-old pipe fitter at an industrial construction company, sat awake late into the night worrying about his son, who complained that his head hurt. Ochoa grabbed a few pillows and tucked himself in a corner, hugging his son tight. He felt helpless. “I was watching him and knowing, he doesn’t even realize he’s suffocating,” he said.

He took his son to the hospital the next morning.

VIDEO: On March 17, 2019, a group of massive chemical tanks caught fire at Intercontinental Terminals Company in Harris County, releasing large amounts of benzene, a known human carcinogen, into the air. The Texas Tribune’s investigation shows that benzene levels rose to potentially dangerous levels for weeks after the fire was extinguished

Credit:
Credit: Anita Shiva and Todd Wiseman / The Texas Tribune

A few days into the crisis, officials from the EPA, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Deer Park had to make a crucial decision: How much benzene in the air is too much for people to breathe? They decided they would issue public warnings only when benzene levels reached 1,000 parts per billion in the air over one minute — a level that scientists who study benzene now say was too high.

The federal, state and local officials who formed a “Unified Command” near the ITC facility after the fire erupted had to choose a threshold on the spot because there’s no accepted national standard for how much benzene in the air should be considered dangerous. They adapted it from the federal workplace standard, which allows worker exposure up to 1,000 parts per billion over an 8-hour work day.

Anita Desikan, one of the authors of a December 2022 study of the ITC fire and a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the action level used during the ITC incident was “out of line with basically every other measure I’ve seen [for] benzene.”

“It’s concerning that would be the case for an emergency situation,” she said, adding that “you will see people hurt and harmed if it’s your only number for taking action.”

At a March 26 press conference — nine days after the fire started — an EPA official said the agency would “get it out to the community to take action” if it detected benzene levels above that level. “So you can trust that if it’s 1,000 parts per billion … we will let you know.”

But those warnings didn’t always come. Or, they came too late for residents to take action.

The EPA data that the Tribune used for its analysis, which was originally obtained by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, shows that benzene spiked above 1,000 parts per billion on at least seven different days after the second and last shelter-in-place advisory expired — although it’s unclear from the data whether those spikes lasted for an average of 1 minute.

On six of those days, the spikes occurred in industrial areas near the ITC facility, but on March 31 — a full two weeks after the fire began — benzene spikes above 1,000 parts per billion were recorded in a residential area of Deer Park. Data from TCEQ’s stationary and handheld monitors also indicated elevated benzene concentrations near the same times and locations as the EPA’s mobile lab.

The benzene drifting through Deer Park “was a health threat to the community that went basically unshared,” said Elena Craft, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“I don’t think anyone really understood the magnitude,” Craft said. “Or, they still don’t.”

When a reporter asked Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton about the strong smells that continued to waft through the city almost a week after the fire was extinguished, the mayor said those smells were “normal.”

“There are random times when we have smells,” said Mouton, who declined repeated requests for an interview. “We are monitoring the air continuously, and there’s nothing that’s even come close to registering any kind of action item.”

ITC said in a statement to the Tribune that there were “no longer-term public health impacts to the community” from the incident, pointing to an analysis by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The report found that health effects from benzene “were not expected to have occurred” due to the “short” amount of time high levels were detected.

Mario Ochoa and his son Castiel Winchester sit on a rock in Houston’s Hermann Park on Feb. 25. Ochoa said he took his son to a park near his southeast Houston home days after the ITC fire in 2019. “At the time, I didn’t even think about what the contamination would be if he was rolling around playing in the grass,” Ochoa said.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

The analysis did not take into account the fact that hundreds of people actually sought medical care during the incident.

Jennah Durant, a spokesperson for the EPA, said both the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry — a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — reviewed the action level “and had no objections.”

The city of Deer Park and ITC contracted with a company called CTEH to conduct hand-held air monitoring. In a written statement, Pablo Sanchez-Soria, a senior toxicologist at CTEH, said that using short time frames to measure benzene levels — in this case one minute in the community — help officials “take early action” to reduce human exposure.

“Based on our experience, the [1,000 parts per billion] action level for 1 minute for benzene across community areas was highly conservative,” Sanchez-Soria said. “Sufficiently protective values must be balanced against the inherent risk associated with actions such as evacuation.”

But Seth Shonkoff, an associate researcher of environmental health sciences at the University of California-Berkeley, said it’s “inappropriate to use occupational standards in a community setting” because they are designed for workers who are typically healthy adults trained to prevent chemical exposure with equipment such as respirators. Those workplace standards, he added, were a compromise between now-outdated benzene science and the economic impact on businesses.

Texas has guidelines that define what level of exposure to various chemicals could affect people’s health; for benzene, it’s 180 parts per billion in an hour. The state health agency used that number when it analyzed the potential for health problems from the ITC fire, but TCEQ spokesperson Victoria Cann said the number “does not constitute a bright line” for health impacts and is “precautionary in nature.” Emissions above that level don’t trigger any regulatory action by the agency.

A group of mostly Houston-area scientists using the most recent science on benzene exposure said that officials should have used a much more conservative threshold — 27 parts per billion in two consecutive hourly readings — and issued seven more shelter-in-place orders and 17 air quality alerts after the fire broke out. Their study, commissioned by the Houston Health Department, is awaiting peer review.

Adrian Garcia, a Harris County commissioner who represents Deer Park, said the county was “scrambling” to get current air quality data from the company or from federal and state agencies to inform their decisions.

“One of the things that I think the government tries hard to do is to be fair to everyone without being too quick to overly react,” Garcia said. “We were really trying to get to a place where we were being fair to the industry, but also transparent to the public about … whether there was still harm.”

“I’m not sure whether we really got there,” he said.

Four years later, Deer Park residents who fell ill — some of them children, elderly or otherwise at higher risk — said they sensed at the time that they were more exposed to chemicals than they were told. Many, like Ochoa, say they are still scarred by the experience.

“That kind of turmoil is haunting,” said Ochoa, who is now 43. “My soul remembers.”

Fire rages as residents fall ill — March 17-19, 2019

Deer Park resident Eddie Guevara, 19, was working a Sunday shift at a chemical plant in La Porte, a town just east of Deer Park, the day the ITC fire broke out. He was checking the windsocks mounted around the plant and jotting down the direction of the wind to help the plant workers plan the best evacuation route — just in case.

That’s when he first saw the smoke coming from the ITC tank farm.

“Anytime you see any kind of black smoke out there, it’s not good,” he said.

Eddie Guevara said his eyes burned and he experienced a rapid heartbeat and chest pains after returning from work the evening after the ITC fire broke out in 2019.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

He glanced again at the fluttering orange windsocks. The wind was blowing the smoke toward his own home.

Guevara, who has worked in industrial plants since he was a teenager, called his dad and his brother, Anthony, to warn his family of the smoke approaching their orange brick, two-story house located just four miles from ITC.

Soon, the smoke blanketed their home. Then, their city.

Deer Park is one of a string of suburbs hugging the Houston Ship Channel, which is lined by chemical plants, refineries, smokestacks and flare towers that burn like enormous candles over a massive industrial skyline. Shell Oil Company built the first refinery in the area in 1928, and since then, generations of Deer Park residents have crossed state Highway 225 to work in the petrochemical industry.

Locals say they love their community — where block after block of single-family homes are surrounded by lush yards — because it’s quiet, safe and has great schools. And the refineries and chemical plants are a boon to their economy: The city of more than 34,000 people has a median household income of about $81,500 — higher than nearby Houston, where the median household earns $55,500.

But the risk of explosions and chemical fires always hangs over them. A 1997 explosion at Shell Oil Co. injured several workers and sent residents scurrying to shelter in their homes. A massive 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, about 35 miles to the south next to Galveston Bay, killed 15 workers and injured nearly 200 others.

In Deer Park, the sirens that warn the public of industrial accidents are tested every week, and schoolchildren are drilled on how to shelter in place twice a year, with the assistance of “Wally Wise Guy,” a cartoon turtle who “knows it’s wise to go inside his shell” when there’s danger.

Fewer than 10 miles from where Guevara stood, firefighters rushed to the ITC facility and put their lives on the line in a war against the fire — fueled by 12.3 million gallons of highly flammable chemicals — that would burn for 64 hours straight. According to a preliminary report from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the fire began in tank 80-8 and then spread to other nearby tanks. Since at least 2002, EPA and TCEQ inspectors had reported high emissions of benzene and other chemicals from that same area.

Bob Royall, then-assistant chief for the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office, said it was one of the longest fires that he had battled in his almost five-decade career.

“It was a very challenging, very dangerous situation,” Royall, who is now retired, recalled. “With possible catastrophic consequences if we failed.”

Firefighters and other first responders were ordered to wear respirators if the benzene level hit 500 parts per billion over 5 minutes, according to records obtained by the Tribune.

The fire prompted Deer Park officials to advise residents to shelter in place that Sunday. But Deer Park City Manager James Stokes said air monitoring readings looked “favorable” as the fire burned off the dangerous chemicals. Meanwhile, residents, news reports and meteorologists anxiously tracked the black smoke plume that snaked over the Houston area.

Throughout the response, a plane brought in by the EPA flew above the fire and the plume, monitoring the air and providing eyes from above, while TCEQ and Harris County employees on the ground recorded benzene levels on hand-held air monitors, in addition to CTEH’s monitoring efforts for the city and company.

One Harris County official estimated that all together, more than 400 personnel took air samples throughout the response.

Despite the large monitoring effort primarily led by the feds and the state, the results were “limited,” often delayed, and not always immediately provided to local officials, according to a Harris County report. Some devices, including the EPA’s air monitoring bus, were not deployed until days after the fire broke out.

Garcia, the Harris County commissioner, said it felt like “pulling teeth” to get information about air quality. He said county officials didn’t feel they were being told everything they needed to know.

Meanwhile, an untold number of people were breathing benzene fumes without protection. In Deer Park, Guevara said his eyes burned and his heart fluttered that first evening after he went home — he said he wasn’t aware of the shelter-in-place advisory. When he stepped out to the backyard, a sanctuary where his family usually grills and gathers around a table to gossip, he said he experienced chest pains.

Elvia Guevara holds her grandson Xavier during his Spider-Man-themed first birthday party on Feb. 11 in Pasadena. Guevara said the 2019 ITC disaster “was not just a little fire. You heard of people having symptoms. … What do we do as parents to make sure that our children are OK?”

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

First: Eddie Guevara laughs with friends during his son Xavier’s birthday party on Feb. 11 in Pasadena. Days after the ITC fire began, Guevara and his brother Anthony sat in the backyard singing and playing huapangos, an upbeat Mexican style of music. Guevara remembers playing his accordion as a black cloud from the chemical fire could be seen from their home. Second: Eddie Guevara holds Xavier during his birthday party. The Guevara family has lived in Deer Park for 15 years.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

“I’d be out here looking at the fire and start to feel my heart going crazy,” he said.

By the next morning, the fire had spread to five additional tanks at the ITC facility, according to TCEQ and city of Deer Park records. Seven were now burning; the tanks contained naphtha, xylene, gas blendstock and pygas, a blend of chemicals that’s rich in benzene.

Deer Park city officials lifted the shelter-in-place advisory at 5:30 a.m., stating no air quality readings had exceeded “action levels.” They reopened state Highway 225, which borders the cluster of petrochemical plants and is residents’ main route to drive into Houston for work.

Despite the all-clear from city officials, Deer Park School District remained closed that Monday.

“There have been multiple reports of community members experiencing a range of symptoms from discomfort to difficulty breathing,” an email message from the school district to parents said that morning.

Ochoa, the single father, left home at the usual time Monday morning and worked a 12-hour shift outdoors in the Houston Ship Channel installing pipes. He smelled smoke and began to experience pounding headaches.

That day, his managers called him and his work team of about 10 people into the lunch room. They said the fire was nothing to worry about because the wind was blowing the danger away, but employees could go home if they were personally concerned.

Ochoa said he and his fellow workers were indeed concerned. They could smell the chemicals in the air.

But they kept working. He said they needed the money.

“I’m a single father, I had to work,” Ochoa said. “Even if I didn’t want to, I had to.”

As he installed pipes, he said his lungs ached when he took deep breaths. After two days of vomiting and “a piercing headache, behind your eyes,” he said, he drove himself to a nearby hospital Tuesday morning.

The staff checked him out and took his temperature, then told him to take ibuprofen or Tylenol for the headaches and over-the-counter nausea medication. Ochoa said he asked whether his symptoms were related to the chemical fire. The doctors said they didn’t know.

He went back to work.

With fire out, officials declare victory — March 20, 2019 

By Wednesday afternoon, four days after the ITC plant ignited, federal, state and local officials hosted a press conference to announce the fire was finally out.

Mouton thanked first responders for their service.

“I’m very proud to stand here as mayor and recognize all of the officials and volunteers who waited in line to take their turn to fight for our community,” Mouton said. “Today, we are Deer Park strong.”

In a press release that day, the city assured the public that the air quality in Deer Park was not a concern. The TCEQ, meanwhile, advised “sensitive populations” — including elderly residents, pregnant people and children — to limit outdoor physical activity and told everyone to avoid any black smoke still drifting through the area.

As officials declared victory, Mario Ochoa’s mother could hardly breathe.

Mary Ann Conteras, a 58-year-old assistant director at Rosewood Funeral Home, noticed the black dust accumulating on her van’s windshield as she drove flowers to a Pasadena cemetery seven miles from the ITC facility. She then watched as the smoke plume settled above the mourning family during the funeral service. She could taste the smoke; she had the distinct sense that the smell would stick to her all-black attire and linger in her firmly pressed curly hair.

Leaving the cemetery, Contreras said she began to get headaches and feel nauseous as she drove to visit a friend in the Heights, a quiet Houston neighborhood known for its Victorian-style homes.

“I thought to myself, ‘This is not a migraine — this is totally different,’ ” she said. “I was gasping for air.”

She stopped along a highway median, opened her car door and threw up. Cars zoomed past her. She drove herself to an emergency room, not knowing yet that her son had gone to the hospital a day earlier for the same symptoms.

Contreras, now 62, said the doctor who saw her said her symptoms were caused by “high exposure to chemicals.” He advised her to drink lots of water and stay indoors.

First: The Houston Ship Channel winds past the ITC facility in Harris County. Second: Mary Ann Contreras, an assistant funeral director at Rosewood Funeral Home, at a Pasadena cemetery on Feb. 9. Contreras became so ill after attending an outdoor funeral service the week of the ITC fire that she sought care at an emergency room. “I am traumatized now every time I see smoke,” she said.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

An analysis of air quality data from a TCEQ’s stationary Deer Park monitor southwest of City Hall shows that benzene emissions had risen early that morning to 61 parts per billion in an hour. That was below the 1,000 parts per billion threshold set by Unified Command, but it was 12 times above the highest concentration of benzene typically found in the area. In Deer Park, benzene concentrations usually top out around 5 parts per billion in March, according to an analysis of TCEQ data by Ebrahim Eslami, an air quality research scientist at Houston Advanced Research Center.

ITC said in a statement that morning that air monitoring readings were “well below hazardous levels.” Deer Park said in a statement later that day that the city was obtaining “normal levels” of air pollutants. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo assured the public during a press conference that afternoon that the county was using “very conservative estimates to determine the threshold of dangerous levels of air quality.”

Yet throughout the area that day, residents from Deer Park and surrounding cities swarmed the pop-up county health clinics complaining of eye, ear, nose and throat irritation, severe headaches and trouble breathing. County health providers screened more than 900 people and referred the worst cases to local hospitals.

“We didn’t realize the amount of people that were going to actually show up,” said Michael McClendon, the director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at Harris County Public Health.

At one area hospital, a pair of medics who were helping respond to the fire were evaluated for benzene exposure that day, records show.

A second shelter-in-place when benzene “rears its ugly head” — March 21-22, 2019

At the ITC tank farm, the fire was out, but a new danger emerged. The remaining chemicals in the collapsing tanks were venting into the open air.

First responders transitioned from firefighting to frantically spraying the ruptured tanks with enormous amounts of industrial firefighting foam, hoping to create a blanket to tamp down emissions. But the foam ripped apart with each big gust of wind and quickly dissolved on the hot chemicals like whipped cream melting on hot coffee.

And benzene escaped.

“After the fire fight was over, that’s when the benzene issues began to rear their ugly head,” said Royall, the former assistant chief of Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office.

Rodney Reed, an assistant chief at the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office who worked in the county’s emergency operations center at the time, said when officials spotted spikes in benzene emissions, they called Unified Command, “and they’d [say] they had a break of the foam blanket.”

When more foam was applied, he added, the benzene levels would drop. The operation turned to tamping down benzene emissions and emptying the chemicals from the ruptured tanks.

By 4 a.m. Thursday, TCEQ inspectors found benzene emissions exceeding 1,200 parts per billion had wafted across Highway 225 and into Deer Park.

In a statement to the Tribune, the EPA said that when benzene readings topped the 1,000 parts per billion threshold in neighborhoods for at least a minute, Unified Command directed air quality inspectors to the area to take more measurements and confirm whether the concentrations were expected to linger in the area. Then, Unified Command notified local authorities.

The emissions prompted the city of Deer Park to issue a second shelter-in-place advisory. Schools canceled classes again, this time for one day.

The EPA warned in a press release that exposure could cause headaches and nausea, and then Harris County Public Health Executive Director Dr. Umair Shah encouraged residents to call the “Ask a Nurse” hotline if they experienced symptoms.

ITC spokesperson Alice Richardson choked up during a press conference after the second shelter-in-place advisory, outlining how the company and first responders were attempting to reduce the emissions.

“ITC cares,” she said, as her eyes filled with tears. “We care a lot. This is personal.”

Before noon Thursday — after a little under eight hours — the city of Deer Park lifted the shelter-in-place advisory. Robert Hemminger, Deer Park’s emergency services director at the time, told the public that benzene emissions had “significantly reduced” since that morning.

TCEQ’s stationary air monitor indicates that benzene concentrations in Deer Park had reduced to more typical levels by the late afternoon.

A Deer Park neighborhood next to Highway 225, which borders the refineries, petrochemical plants and industrial storage tanks that line the Houston Ship Channel. In 2019, air quality inspectors found that high levels of benzene emissions had wafted across the highway and into residential areas of Deer Park in the weeks after the ITC chemical fire was extinguished.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

That day — four days after the ITC fire began — the EPA finally deployed its air monitoring bus, the rolling lab that could sample the air while it drove. The bus recorded several spikes of benzene above 1,000 parts per billion on Friday afternoon outside of the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site, a popular tourist destination just down the road from ITC (it was closed to the public during the fire).

While benzene levels continued to spike near the ITC facility, neighboring chemical plants were warned to shelter in place Friday afternoon — the nearby community was not.

Durant, the EPA spokesperson, characterized such spikes as “instantaneous” measurements in industrial areas that would not have prompted notification to local officials.

Meanwhile, a portion of a dike wall surrounding the tank farm collapsed, sending petrochemicals, firefighting foam and contaminated water gushing into Tucker Bayou. Fire flared up again briefly in one of the tanks, which were melting from the heat. Then another tank collapsed.

“That almost killed some firefighters,” Royall said. “It just imploded on itself and went down in a matter of seconds.”

Benzene pollution lingers as life returns to normal — March 25-29, 2019

As fire crews fought the last remnants of the fire, life in Deer Park returned to normal. By Monday — eight days after the disaster began — students returned to school, to gym class and sports activities. Kids played kickball outside on the high school football field.

“I can stand here today and tell you with assurance, that safety to the public is priority No. 1,” Mayor Mouton said that day at another press conference. “We feel safe at this time.”

In the same press conference, Adam Adams, the federal on-scene commander for the EPA, said that air monitoring results, “have been consistent — no detections [of benzene].”

In a statement, EPA spokesperson Joe Robledo clarified that benzene readings below the 1,000 parts per billion action level did not prompt notifications to the public.

But the EPA’s air monitoring bus continued detecting elevated levels of benzene as it drove through the industrial areas lining the Houston Ship Channel early that week, the Tribune’s analysis shows. That Monday afternoon, the same day as the press conference, the bus recorded three benzene spikes well above 1,000 parts per billion across the street from the ITC facility between 4 and 4:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, EPA and TCEQ officials held another press conference and said that they had “no notifications of air monitoring results” above 1,000 parts per billion. If any readings crossed that threshold, Adams said the agencies would notify local officials and the public.

Hemminger, the former Deer Park official, said in an interview that the city only warned residents if emissions exceeded the “action level” within the city’s boundaries and were expected to linger, based on weather forecasts and subsequent readings. The high readings along the highway likely wouldn’t have prompted a response, he said, because the benzene levels quickly dropped again.

“We didn’t want to alarm the public needlessly,” Hemminger said. He added that the city verified high benzene readings with multiple sources before deciding whether to tell residents to go inside.

In the Wynfield Estates neighborhood, where many of the homes are two-story red brick and shaded by big oak trees, Anthony Guevara, Eddie’s 14-year-old brother, didn’t go to school that Monday because his eyes were burning and his throat stung.

“You don’t know what you are inhaling or putting in your body,” Anthony Guevara said. “It was scary.”

The benzene continued wafting from the broken tanks: On Friday, March 29, the EPA’s air monitoring bus again recorded benzene spikes above 1,000 parts per billion, this time across the ship channel in an industrial area near Channelview — about three miles northwest of the ITC facility. No shelter-in-place advisory was issued for Channelview residents.

Luoping Zhang, a researcher and adjunct professor of toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley, said after reviewing some of the EPA’s data that she was shocked the samples were collected outdoors in the middle of the day because benzene typically breaks down quickly in the sunlight and open air. The EPA bus typically only took measurements from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“Oh my god,” Zhang said after seeing the benzene readings the EPA gathered near Channelview on March 29. “That spike, to me, is really pretty high.”

Benzene drifts into Deer Park, but residents aren’t warned — March 31, 2019 

On March 31, two weeks after the ITC fire erupted into flames, the EPA mobile lab was still driving around Deer Park, testing the air. Motoring down East 13th Street, the van passed brick houses, a United Methodist Church and an elementary school with a playground nestled in the shade of tall, skinny pine trees.

That Sunday morning, it drove through an invisible cloud of benzene — logging a reading above 1,000 parts per billion near San Jacinto Elementary School.

It wasn’t the first sign of trouble: Around 11:30 p.m. the night before, a neighboring industrial facility near ITC reported “high benzene detections” and said one of its workers was vomiting and being sent to a hospital, Unified Command records show. A few hours later, around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, two people working on cleanup operations at the ITC plant became ill and went home.

Climbing benzene concentrations near the facility led the EPA and TCEQ to send inspectors into Deer Park, where they found benzene was drifting through neighborhoods near where Eddie Guevara and his family of five live. TCEQ inspectors recorded three benzene spikes on handheld air monitoring devices above 1,000 parts per billion on East Boulevard the morning of March 31. One of the readings occurred two blocks south of the elementary school, in a neighborhood near the intersection of East San Augustine Street and East Boulevard.

Later that morning, EPA inspectors with handheld devices also recorded elevated benzene concentrations in the same area — including one reading above 1,000 parts per billion.

Benzene drifted for miles through the community. One of TCEQ’s stationary air monitors near Spencerview Athletic Complex, about four miles south of San Jacinto Elementary School, was recording an average hourly concentration of about 40 parts per billion at 9 a.m. — about eight times higher than the highest concentrations usually recorded at that location.

The public was not warned the entire day.

Shonkoff, the environmental health sciences researcher at UC Berkeley, called the levels of benzene recorded by the EPA’s air monitoring that day “crazy” and “very high.”

“They are striking concentrations of benzene,” Shonkoff said. “Absolutely striking.”

The Tribune’s analysis shows that benzene levels continued to spike close to, but not surpassing, 1,000 parts per billion for the rest of that Sunday morning in residential areas of Deer Park.

The air monitoring “seems like a waste” if the public wasn’t immediately told about the danger, said Craft, one of the authors of the study that concluded that more shelter-in-place advisories and air quality warnings should have been issued during the ITC disaster.

“It seemed like [the EPA] was going out and doing this monitoring between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and it wasn’t clear what their intention or purpose was,” Craft said. “It was a missed opportunity because [the data from the EPA’s mobile lab] could’ve been used to inform some of the public health decisions, but it doesn’t seem like it was.”

A playground at San Jacinto Elementary School, located in Deer Park a few miles from the highly industrialized Houston Ship Channel. On March 31, 2019, air quality inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency recorded extremely high levels of benzene in the air as they drove past the elementary school. Residents were not warned about the pollution present in the community that day.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

Several school administrators who worked for the district in 2019 did not recall being informed about high levels of benzene near the elementary school on March 31, Matt Lucas, director of communications for Deer Park ISD, said in an email.

More than 800 students returned for classes at the elementary school the next morning.

Residents didn’t learn of the high benzene levels until a 10 a.m. press conference on Monday, when Adams, the federal on-scene coordinator for the EPA, said there was a benzene spike that weekend above the action level “in the community” — he didn’t say where — and added that the agency notified local officials.

But Adams said the EPA concluded that the high levels did not last long enough in the area to prompt action.

“If we get something sustained above [1,000 parts per billion], we notify the local governments to evacuate or shelter-in-place, whichever is more appropriate for the community,” Adams said.

Brent Weber, who was ITC’s “incident commander” during the fire and is now the company’s president and CEO, said during the same press conference that the company had encountered issues pumping the chemicals out of the damaged tanks over the weekend that caused an increase in benzene emissions.

Deer Park officials appeared to rely more on air monitoring readings from its hired contractor than the EPA’s. The city also released a statement that day to its residents: “We did not receive any readings above actionable levels over the weekend,” it said, citing data from CTEH, the company the city and ITC had contracted to conduct air monitoring.

CTEH is known as an industry-friendly environmental consulting firm and is frequently hired by companies during chemical emergencies.

An air quality report provided by CTEH shows that it did not not detect any concentrations of benzene above 1,000 parts per billion in Deer Park, Pasadena, Galena Park or Channelview on March 31, however, the report does not indicate at what time the readings were taken.

Stokes, the Deer Park city manager, declined to answer questions about the high levels of benzene recorded on March 31 by the EPA and TCEQ.

Eddie Guevara, who’s now 22, said officials should have been more honest with the public.

“You want to be able to trust officials and ITC representatives telling people you will be OK,” Guevara said. But, “of course they are going to downplay it.”

Uncertainty looms over benzene exposure

Guevara worries that his family won’t know the full impact of their benzene exposure for years.

“To me, it’s no joke,” he said, adding that he worries about whether the fumes he breathed could increase his risk of cancer.

While scientists have found that years of repeated exposure to benzene causes cancer, the long-term impact of being exposed to brief but high levels of benzene is less certain.

It’s notoriously challenging to determine whether cancer was caused by exposure to a specific chemical or pollutant. Some experts who study benzene said the spikes that wafted through Deer Park and the surrounding areas over that two and a half week period could increase residents’ risk of cancer, but others said it was unlikely.

“I would definitely say that [people nearby] have an increased risk,” said Zhang. But she added that it would be difficult to determine for sure.

Stephen Rappaport, a leading environmental health sciences researcher who studies chemical exposures and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, said there is “no safe level for a carcinogen,” but added, “the evidence shows it tends to be people who have a fairly high exposure for fairly long periods of time [who develop cancer].” Studies have typically focused on workers who are exposed to the chemical over years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed air monitoring data from the incident and found that the concentrations of benzene exceeded what the agency considers safe — but did not believe they were high enough to cause widespread cases of cancer.

“These concentrations are higher than we would normally consider protective,” Richard Nickle, an environmental health scientist at the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said in an April 2019 email to Harris County officials.

Xavier Guevara, 1, tries to walk from his mom Citlali Cabrera to his dad, Eddie Guevara, in his grandparents’ front yard on Feb. 21 in Deer Park. Eddie said protecting his son’s future is his priority. Before leaving work, he strips off his uniform and gear, wraps his shoes in a towel and takes a shower to avoid smelling like chemicals when he gets home. “The last thing I want to do is bring it to [Citlali] and my son,” he said.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

The CDC did not recommend further health monitoring in the community. Texas’ health agency similarly concluded that although benzene is a carcinogen, exposure during the incident “is not expected to increase people’s risk of cancer.”

“Benzene is associated with cancer usually after long durations (decades) of exposure,” DSHS spokesperson Lara Anton said in a statement. “The duration of exposure related [to the ITC fire] was much shorter. … Therefore, no evaluation of cancer risk posed by exposure to benzene from this event was carried out.”

Four years later

Four years after Ochoa, his 62-year-old mother, his son and countless others were sickened by the ITC fire, federal regulators are still investigating. A final report is expected this year.

Ochoa and Contreras are two of more than 300 Houston-area residents who are suing ITC, claiming they suffered severe health impacts, including headaches, coughing up blood, respiratory infections and emotional stress during the 2019 fire — which Ochoa is fighting to forget.

“I try not to think about it, because when I do think about it, my heart feels it,” Ochoa said. There are still moments — often late into the night, when he remembers that week of the fire — when those same feelings of panic come flooding back through his mind.

“I can still feel that sorrow,” he said.

The lawsuit also asks that the company pay for residents’ future doctor visits and tests for cancer.

Some local officials now say more should’ve been done to communicate with the public when air quality worsened — and they’re working on changing their protocols.

Loren Hopkins, Chief Environmental Science Officer of Houston’s health department, said she realized that when officials issue shelter-in-place advisories and nothing else, the message to the public is confusing: “It’s all fine, up until all of the sudden it’s terrible,” she said.

“People need to be able to make their own decisions,” Hopkins said. “The data needs to be available to the public with some kind of interpretation.”

Harris County Pollution Control Executive Director Latrice Babin said in an interview that telling citizens to shelter in place is “a really hard call to make,” noting that even when high levels of chemicals are recorded, interpreting air quality testing also depends on weather conditions and location. For example, sunshine can cause chemical reactions that transform the pollution into smog, strong winds can quickly dissipate the pollutants and samples taken near highways could also detect pollution from vehicles.

In 2020, the city created its own benzene guidelines that are far lower than what was used during the ITC incident: The guidelines say officials should consider a shelter-in-place advisory if benzene levels exceed 72 parts per billion over one hour and evacuations if the level hits 200 parts per billion for an hour.

Harris County produced an analysis of what went wrong during the response. For example, the report said Harris County Pollution Control, which has a special team to respond to fires involving hazardous materials and other chemical incidents, had meager staffing and “antiquated” or out-of-service equipment during the 2019 fire. Harris County commissioners invested more than $11 million to implement the report’s recommendations. The county has created a community air response monitoring program, expanded staffing and purchased more disaster response equipment, said Dimetra Hamilton, a Harris County Pollution Control spokesperson.

Harris County is also using a $1 million grant from the American Chemistry Council to create a new guide for emergency response to chemical disasters. But a draft shared with the Tribune shows that while it identifies 22 chemicals, including benzene, that could threaten residents’ health, it does not set a specific threshold for issuing a shelter-in-place advisory.

The city of Deer Park didn’t respond to questions about whether it has changed its policies for responding to community benzene exposure.

The disaster also exposed confusion over who should be responsible for telling residents to shelter in place during a chemical release.

Mario Ochoa and his son Castiel Winchester sit in the car after a day of walking through Hermann Park in Houston on Feb. 25. Four years after the 2019 chemical fire, Ochoa’s now 8-year-old son struggles with sinus infections and is more wary than he once was of playing outdoors.

Credit:
Mark Felix for The Texas Tribune/Public Health Watch

Rodney Reed, an assistant chief at Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office, said that each city, as well as multiple county agencies, have the authority to issue shelter-in-place advisories. But when an incident occurs at a facility like ITC that’s located in an unincorporated area of the county, deciding who has jurisdiction can be complicated. In the end, officials decided that Deer Park and ITC would lead response efforts.

The TCEQ, for its part, has beefed up its ability to test for airborne chemicals, adding new air monitors in the ship channel area since 2019 and purchasing three new air monitoring vehicles.

Still, the state renewed the chemical permit for ITC’s Deer Park facility less than a year after the fire. ITC’s operational permit is up for renewal this year and some residents have raised safety concerns about the facility ahead of the permit renewal; a public hearing will be held in May.

In 2021, TCEQ approved a rule that allows the agency to consider major explosions or fires when it decides whether to issue permits to a company — a change that agency staff pushed because of the ITC fire.

The TCEQ referred the ITC case to Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office typically handles major industrial accidents. Paxton’s office sued the company in 2019, but the case hasn’t moved forward since 2021, according to Travis County District Court records. The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for an interview.

ITC said in a written statement that it continues to implement “enhancements to safety, environmental integrity and emergency response capabilities” at its Deer Park location. The company said it has installed additional gas detectors and emergency shutdown valves in multiple areas of its facility.

Some residents still blame the incident for lingering health problems. Castiel, Ochoa’s now 8-year-old son, struggles with sinus infections. The chatty little boy — who told a doctor that his breathing problems felt like “bugs getting in my nose, like little tiny worms” clogging his nostrils and lungs — is now wary of playing outside at playgrounds, his father says. Instead, they spend more time indoors playing video games.

Ochoa quit his job as a pipe-fitter and found a job that doesn’t expose him to chemicals.

“People were telling me these horror stories from other refineries that were happening, people getting sick,” Ochoa said. “It’s horrifying, scary. And because I’m a single dad with a kid, I gotta find a different way.”

Now, Contreras is alert to strange odors in the air and watches for anything unusual at the nearby chemical plants — especially smoke. She has a grandson with respiratory issues and feels like it’s her duty.

“Do you have anything that you can cover up with?” she asks family and coworkers whenever she spots what might be dangerous.

“You know, to protect yourself?”

About the data

The Texas Tribune used air quality data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer (TAGA) Unit that sampled air quality in both industrial and community areas surrounding Intercontinental Terminals Company’s Deer Park facility between March 21 and May 20, 2019. The data was originally obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund through a public information request, and shared with the Tribune. The data provided by the agency included both “field” data and post-processed data, and included measurements of benzene, toluene, and xylenes — all volatile organic compounds that could be harmful to human health, according to the EPA. The Tribune used the post-processed data to analyze benzene measurements, and excluded days for which only field benzene data was available — that included March 24, April 9, April 16, May 3-6, May 11-12, and May 15, 2019. The Tribune compared the measurements from the TAGA unit with those in the EPA’s Final Analytical TAGA Report, obtained through a public information request. As a result, the Tribune also excluded March 21, 2019 because its location data did not match the EPA’s.

The Tribune also compared the TAGA data to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s hourly stationary air monitoring data to inform our analysis. An air quality expert at the Houston Advanced Research Center, who was contacted by the Tribune, used the TAGA data to calculate average hourly benzene measurements using a standard methodology. The Tribune compared these hourly average values to those measured by the nearest TCEQ stationary air monitor that measures benzene to see whether the TAGA data correlated with the TCEQ’s data. The Tribune and HARC used data from TCEQ’s Houston Deer Park #2 stationary monitor to calculate the average maximum level of benzene in the air in Deer Park in March between 2014 and 2018. The Tribune compared the average maximum level of benzene in March to the benzene levels recorded by the same TCEQ stationary monitor during and shortly after the fire.

Public Health Watch reporters Savanna Strott and David Leffler contributed reporting. Jade Khatib contributed data analysis.

Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund and Houston Advanced Research Center have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Glass or plastic: which is better for the environment?

For centuries we have used glass to store food, beverages, chemicals and cosmetics. But is it time to find a more sustainable alternative?Dating back to between 325 and 350 AD, the Speyer wine bottle is thought to be the world’s oldest bottle of wine. Now held in the Wine Museum in the German city of Speyer, where it was rediscovered in 1867, an analysis of its contents revealed that it holds an ethanol-based liquid. But the glass bottle remains unopened and the vintage unknown. Any prospective wine tasters should be wary – preserved historic beverages can be pungent, to say the least.
The widespread use of glass as a storage vessel throughout history highlights the material’s resilience and functionality. Glass is a useful material for everything from preserving food to carrying the signals that power the internet. So essential is glass to human development that the United Nations named 2022 the International Year of Glass to celebrate its contribution to cultural and scientific development.
Glass has sometimes been referred to as a material which can infinitely be recycled without it impacting its quality, purity or durability. Recycled glass can be crushed into glass cullets, which can be melted down and used to produce more glass. Glass used for packaging has a high recycling rate compared to other packaging materials. In Europe, the average glass recycling rate is 76%, compared to 41% for plastic packaging and 31% for wooden packaging.
When glass is left in the natural environment, it is less likely to cause pollution than plastic. Unlike plastics, which break down into microplastics that can leach into our soils and water, glass is non-toxic. “Glass is mainly made of silica, which is a natural substance,” says Franziska Trautmann, the co-founder of Glass Half Full, a New Orleans-based company that recycles glass into sand that can be used for coastal restoration and disaster relief. Silica, also known as silica dioxide, makes up 59% of the Earth’s crust. Since it is a natural compound, there is no concern about leaching or environmental degradation.Glass production requires huge amounts of sand – a rapidly shrinking natural resource (Credit: Edwin Remsburg / Getty Images)Because of this, glass is often touted as a more sustainable alternative to plastic.
However, glass bottles have a higher environmental footprint than plastic and other bottled container materials including drinks cartons and aluminum cans. The mining of silica sand can cause significant environmental damage, ranging from land deterioration to the loss of biodiversity. Violations of basic workers’ rights have also been found in Shankargarh, India, which is the biggest supplier of silica sand to the country’s glass industry. Some studies have also shown that extended exposure to silica dust can pose a public health risk, as it can lead to acute silicosis, an irreversible, long-term lung disease caused by the inhalation of silica dust over an extended period of time. Silicosis may first appear as a persistent cough or shortness of breath, and may result in respiratory failure.
Extracting sand for glass production may also have contributed to the current global sand shortage. Sand is the second most-used resource in the world after water – people use some 50 billion tonnes of “aggregate”, the industry term for sand and gravel, each year.
Its uses range from land regeneration to microchips. According to the UN, sand is now used faster than it can be replenished.
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Glass requires higher temperatures than plastic and aluminum to melt and form, says Alice Brock, a PhD researcher at University of Southampton in the UK. Raw materials for making virgin glass also release greenhouse gases during the melting process, adding to its environmental footprint. According to the International Energy Agency, the container and flat-glass industries emit over 60 megatonnes of CO2 per year. It may seem surprising, but Brock’s study found that plastic bottles are less environmentally damaging than glass bottles. Although plastic cannot be endlessly recycled, the manufacturing process is less energy-intensive, as there is a lower melting point for plastics compared with glass.
The raw materials for glass are melted together in a furnace at 1500C (2732F). The molten glass is then removed from the furnace, shaped and moulded. Glass production facilities often add a portion of recycled glass cullets into the raw material mix. Generally, a 10% increase in glass cullet into the container glass melting mixture can decrease energy consumption by 2-3%. This is because it requires a lower melting point to melt glass cullet compared to the virgin materials used to produce glass. In turn, this slightly reduces the CO2 emissions produced during manufacturing.
A key problem with glass recycling is that it does not eradicate the remelting process, which is the most energy intensive part of glass production. It accounts for 75% of the energy consumption during production. Even though glass containers can be reused an average of 12-20 times, glass is often treated as single-use. Single-use glass disposed of at landfills can take up to one million years to decompose. Glass recycling rates vary significantly across the globe. The EU and the UK have an average recycling rate of 74% and 76%, while the US figure was 31.3% in 2018. Glass can be recycled endlessly without loss in quality and durability (Credit: Remko de Waal / Getty Images)One reason for the US’ poorer figures is that recycled material is usually collected in a “single stream”, meaning all materials are mixed together. Single-stream recycling often complicates the sorting process, since glass must be separated from other recyclables and sorted by colour, before it can be remelted. Often, it is too time-consuming, and therefore expensive, to separate mixed coloured glass at a recycling facility. Instead of being converted to new bottles, the broken pieces of mixed glass are turned into glass fibre products that can be used for insulation. Glass cullet is the highest quality when it is separated from other recyclables from the beginning – this is known as multi-stream recycling.
The colour of glass affects how pure the stream needs to be. While green glass can use 95% of recycled glass; white or colourless glass, also known as “flint glass”, has higher quality specifications and only permits up to 60% recycled glass because any contamination affects the quality.
Recycled glass must be melted down twice, once into cullets and then again into a new product – which is why recycled glass might only be fractionally less energy-intensive than virgin glass.
There is no doubt that glass still plays an important role in many industries. Its durability and non-toxic properties make it ideal for foods and materials which require preserving. However, the assumption that glass is sustainable merely because it is infinitely recyclable is misconstrued. Considering its entire lifecycle, glass production may be equally as detrimental to the environment as plastic.
The next time you want to discard a glass bottle, perhaps consider reusing it first. Glass is a resilient, long-lasting material that is not made to be thrown away after only being used once.

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Microplastics in Lake Erie highlight growing concern over potential health effects

It’s been over a decade since researchers began looking into microplastics in the Great Lakes.Now, the issue is getting renewed attention amid broader concerns about the potential effects of microplastics on the human body and a possible future link to the hydro-fracking boom currently happening in the region.Microplastics form as plastic pieces in the environment erode into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually becoming so small that they can’t be seen with the naked eye, according to Sherri Mason, director of sustainability at Penn State University’s Barr Campus on Lake Erie, who’s spent years researching microplastics in waterways.Unlike other types of litter, the plastic bits will take far longer to disappear.Lake Erie is shown on a sunny day.ABC News”If you were to see a paper bag on the side of the road, it’s unsightly, but within weeks it has completely, what we call, mineralized. There are organisms in the soil that can use it as a food source,” Mason told ABC News’ Start Here podcast host Brad Mielke.Mason’s research has focused on Lake Erie, which has a concentration of microplastic that rivals the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating landfill that’s twice the size of Texas, according to multiple studies.But the majority of plastic in Lake Erie is less than 5 millimeters in diameter, much of it approaching microscopic size “about the width of a human hair,” Mason said. She describes it as a “smog” of particles drifting around, which also makes it impossible to meaningfully clean up.Mason and her students spent a year collecting samples of trash from Lake Erie and sorted them into different categories.”Thousands of bottles is the No. 1 thing. Bottles and cups, and then a lot of chip bags. It’s mostly a lot of food packaging,” Mason said.Before plastic gets pressed into a shape like a water bottle or bag, it starts off as plastic pellets that get fed into big machines.The pellets, about the size of a grain of rice, are transported by millions on freight trains before being siphoned out onto trucks that take them to factories. Not far from the banks of Lake Erie, small piles of pellets litter the tracks where they’ve spilled out during this process, Mason said. When it rains, the pellets start making their way into nearby Mill Creek and later into lakes and oceans.And it’s just one of the ways that plastic can end up in bodies of water, according to Mason.What’s more, one study suggests that the average person may be ingesting about 5 grams of plastic per week, or the equivalent to the mass of a credit card, according to a study commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund. Microplastics have even been found in the lungs of living people, according to recent research. Mason said that microplastics are getting so small that in some cases they are able to find their way beyond the digestive tract.Penn State University researcher Sherri Mason is shown holding up plastic pellets that fell onto the train tracks in Erie, Pa.ABC News”When you get a piece that’s smaller than a hundred microns or the width of a human hair, they can migrate across the gastrointestinal tract. They get carried in the blood. We have found them in the blood, and they can make their way into certain organs. They can make their way across the placental boundary,” Mason said.The World Health Organization says that although more research is needed, so far it has found no direct evidence that microplastics make people sick. The Plastic Industry Association, which represents plastic makers, said in a statement that claims about microplastics “lack sound data,” and that plastic is overwhelmingly safe. In fact, the association said, plastics are essential to hygiene, which is why it is in so many medical products.But Mason is concerned that the use of plastics shows no signs of slowing down.The Midwest is currently in the midst of a hydro-fracking boom, and half of the fracking wells in Pennsylvania produce ethane. Ethane can be turned into polyethylene, which is the most common type of plastic.”So now there is a connection between basically hydro-fracking and the plastics industry,” Mason said.Last year, a new plant opened just north of Pittsburgh that converts this material into plastic, and two more facilities are being proposed in Ohio.According to the Center for International Environmental Law, the health of the fossil fuel industry is deeply reliant on plastics, and these investments could cause plastic production to spike.Mason believes that the ultimate responsibility to curb plastic usage lies with the companies that make and use them.”You’ve given your money to that corporation. You end up with their container, which you don’t want, but then you also have to pay to get rid of it. You have to pay to clean it out of the water,” Mason said.