Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

The late afternoon is a good time to drive to Port Arthur from Houston. You’ll arrive at sundown, under a lavender sky deepening into purple, and see the distant lights and towers of a city, a wavering Manhattan spread out along the water, just where Texas decides it would rather be Louisiana.

What you see is not a city. Draw closer, and what you thought were buildings resolve into the spires and turrets of industry. They are refineries. Soon you’re surrounded. In one direction, there is water—in every other, the humming, roaring machinery of petrochemical digestion, a rusty Oz that churns through a million gallons of oil every forty minutes. It is from places like this that we receive our gasoline and jet fuel and plastic and everything else that we can’t do without. Port Arthur is a refinery town, with oil in its veins, toluene in the breeze. It is the pungent center jewel in America’s petrochemical tiara, also known as the Gulf Coast, a region that accounts for nearly half of the country’s refining capacity. The US Department of Energy notes that the region has “the highest concentration of sophisticated [refining] facilities in the world.”

Port Arthur, much like Fort McMurray, has a reputation as a shithole. But while the Albertans have managed to keep the oil sands mines at a discrete remove, Port Arthur is utterly dominated by its refineries, in ways that are impossible for even a casual observer to ignore. The downtown is literally encircled by steel forests billowing sulfurous air day and night. It smells like rotten eggs. Then there are the occasional upsets —accidents or malfunctions that sometimes result in the emergency release of fuel and other refinery goods into the atmosphere. The gases are burned off as they’re released from tubes high above the plant, and people invariably describe refinery flares as awesome events, artificial auroras that paint the sky a glowing orange.

Most important, there are the habitual emissions of volatile organic compounds, things like toluene, benzene, and other contaminants that—it has been plausibly argued—result in elevated rates of respiratory disease, birth defects, and cancer for the communities that live with them. And once in a blue moon—seriously, only very occasionally—the plants self-annihilate. They explode. In Texas City, ninety miles to the west, a 2005 refinery explosion killed 15 people and injured more than 170.

The industry here is the direct legacy of the boom sparked by the Lucas Gusher, and the plants that overshadow downtown Port Arthur are the same plants that were built to receive Spindletop’s oil, although a century’s growth has transformed them. Valero (whose refinery first opened in 1901) and Motiva (1903) now cover almost as much land as downtown Port Arthur itself, and Motiva—in the middle of an expansion when I visited—is on its way to becoming the largest refinery on the continent.

Nevertheless, you can drive down Port Arthur’s main street and fail to see another human being. With its rows of brick storefronts spread along a breezy coastal ship channel, downtown Port Arthur has the bones of a charming small city. But they are just that: the bones.

There are no grocery stores, no hardware stores—in fact I saw no surviving stores of any genre in downtown Port Arthur. There are no operating banks. Building after building sits vacant. Most are boarded up, burned out, or otherwise deserted. The industry that inhabits this city manages somehow not to sustain it.

As was traditional across America, the middle and upper classes of Port Arthur fled their city’s downtown in the 1970s and ’80s. Unlike in many other cities, though, the presence of the refineries has kept anyone with money from moving back. The result is a community that’s among the poorest and most polluted in the nation—yet surrounded by multibillion-dollar companies. It’s the perfect place to refine oil, incinerate toxic waste, and expand a petrochemical plant: a place where they’re used to it. A place already so dominated by industry that nobody who matters will care.

The neighborhood to the north and west of downtown is poor and black. There are roofs still dressed with blue FEMA-issued tarps to cover damage from hurricanes of years past. I saw one FEMA tarp that had itself been repaired with another FEMA tarp. Beyond them towered the metal thickets of the refineries.

The best place to sit down for lunch in central Port Arthur—possibly the only place—is a soul food restaurant called Kelley’s Kitchen. With its orange awning and hand-painted purple sign, it stands like an oasis among the vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. Inside, there is a single room with a painted concrete floor, a half-dozen tables, and a counter and stools in back. A young woman named Daisha served me shrimp, okra, and sausage over a pile of rice, with a pair of turkey wings and corn bread on the side.

Kelley’s Kitchen was no mere restaurant. It was the latest venture from Hilton Kelley, Port Arthur’s leading environmental activist and all-around force of nature. Soul food is not typically a part of the environmental agenda, but Kelley took a holistic approach. “I’m about creating job opportunities,” he said, as I buried my face in okra. “I’m about serving the community. I’m about encouraging young people to get business licenses, to do things that will help them get off the streets. ’Cause these streets will kill you faster than the pollution.”

A tall, ample man in his early fifties, Kelley had an energy that was both generous and pugnacious. Above all, he was a man with hustle. When I first found him, he was sitting at a table working on his laptop while eating lunch; moments later he was outside with a crew of helpers, hauling a pair of heavy wooden stalls to a spot in front of his restaurant. In preparation for the upcoming Mardi Gras parades—the only time of year when central Port Arthur sees some life—Kelley was planning to sell “food and hats and whatnot” to passersby. Moments after that, we were back inside the restaurant and Kelley was pointing out the new dance floor, off to one side. “I love dancing. That’s why I built me a dance floor.” He was an experienced carpenter, and power tools littered the cab of his pickup truck.

But above all, he had devoted himself to picking environmental fights in Port Arthur. His organization, the Community In-power and Development Association, had recently blocked the importation of PCBs from Mexico to a nearby incinerator. It had also fought the Motiva refinery expansion, holding it up and forcing concessions from the company on monitoring and community investment.

Kelley was also working with a group called the Southeast Texas Bucket Brigade, doing grassroots air-quality measurement, in hope of filling the massive gaps in monitoring left by industry and government. The figures available for refinery emissions, one environmental lawyer told me, are based not so much on actual monitoring as on calculations made by the EPA—calculations that can be decades old. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly what’s drifting out of a refinery in any given week.

“Toxic exposure!” Kelley said. “You’ve got hydrogen sulfide. Benzene, a known carcinogen. Thirteen butadiene. Occasionally, you’ve got explosions that will rattle your windows. Some people are living with storage tanks sixty feet from their backyards. If one of those things went up, it would incinerate everything within a quarter block.” He had strong words for the state regulators—“They have to actually do their jobs!”—as well as for the Environmental Protection Agency, and before I knew it, he had become a one-man poetry slam, performing a piece called “My Toxic Reality,” written after he’d spent a sleepless night listening to his house being rattled by a nearby refinery flare.