stuarthsmithllc

[stuarthsmithllc]

Stuart H Smith, LLC

Like many other small towns along the western Gulf Coast in Texas and my native Louisiana that are dominated by the petrochemical industry, folks in Port Neches, Texas, used to breathe in the occasional noxious odors from its biggest employer — a giant, aging facility belonging to the TPC Group — and considered it the smell of money.

At first, residents’ faith in the petrochemical plant wasn’t even rattled by the pre-Thanksgiving explosion at the plant last November that not only produced dramatic video footage of part of the facility getting blown skyward but shook nearby homes — damaging many of them — and forced residents to evacuate town ahead of the holiday.

But now, just four months later — according to a recent lengthy report in a local paper, the Beaumont Enterprise — some community members are fed up and angry. Some are becoming unlikely activists, pleading their case for much stricter pollution controls on the TPC facility and for more stringent reporting rules, while criticizing the offers the company has made to repair homes that were damaged in the Nov. 27 blast.

“I think people feel they’ve been forgotten. I think they feel they’ve been betrayed…,” Suzanne Williamson, who lives just over two miles from the plant, told the newspaper. “Our system is designed to elect people who will speak up for you. I know a lot of people have told me they feel that’s not happening and it’s frustrating to them.” 

Williamson admits she knew nothing about the environmental regulations covering the oil and gas industry before that fateful morning, when she heard a strange sound at 1 a.m. and then felt a force that “seemed like a car hit my house going 100 miles an hour.” In the weeks following the blast, Williamson travelled to the state capitol in Austin for a public hearing on TPC’s earlier pollution violations and showed commissioners there a homemade poster of the explosion’s closeness to the local football field.

“I feel that I have to do everything I can, talk to every lawmaker, talk to every TCEQ person, the Texas attorney general — whoever will listen, because I owe it to my son to look him in the eye and tell him I did everything I possibly could to fight for (his) health while (he sits) in school, which is state mandated,” she said. “What else am I going to do?” She wants both better monitoring of the plant and tougher fines for violations.

As I wrote in a post earlier this year, TPC had promised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that it would aggressively monitor the air surrounding the facility for 1,3 butadiene — a highly flammable, carcinogenic chemical that had been repeatedly leaking from the site – and respond quickly to any problems.

But no such thing happened. Records obtained last year by the Texas Tribune show that toxic air pollution emissions at the Port Neches plant skyrocketed when they were supposed to be falling. On at least three days in the summer and fall of 2019, levels of butadiene at the plant’s fence line spiked to as much as 29 times the level that scientists believe is safe for short-term human exposure.

Such revelations have surely played a role in changing local attitudes about the TPC plant, as has growing disenchantment with the extent of offers the company has made to pay for damages to their homes — many of which saw cracks, damaged roofs or more serious structural damage from the force of the November blast.

Marcia Sharp, the principal of a local elementary school, was out of town when the explosion occurred less than a mile from her home but told the newspaper that her 88-year-old mother, who was there, was both traumatized by blast that blew their door off its hinges, and possibly sickened by the butadiene fumes that dizzied her for days.

“Medically, my mom hasn’t been the same since,” Sharp said. “She used to stay by herself and cook for herself before. Now, she has severe anxiety.” She said the explosion and her dealings with the company in the aftermath have changed how she views the company and her reaction to the periodic pollution incidents there.

“I hope our lives come back to normal at some point, but my life has been severely disrupted,” she said. “I can’t really imagine that happening anytime soon.”

Sharp’s neighbor in Port Neches, Daniel Reynolds, also says that he’s campaigning for tougher pollution laws, with requirements that community members be notified of a leak, and for stricter enforcement by state environmental authorities.

“There are guidelines,” he said. “How come all these other plants haven’t blown up? They’ve done what they’re supposed to. Continually violating the Clean Air Act, that’s a big deal. That, to me, if you look at that and then look at the rest of this process, it’s all so in line. Why do we expect anything different?”

The post Four months after Port Neches blast, residents are frustrated and angry appeared first on Stuart H. Smith.

[stuarthsmithllc]

HOW LAX REGS, LOW TAXES POWER LOUISIANA’S ‘CANCER ALLEY

As an environmental lawyer with close ties to Louisiana’s ever-growing community of local activists fighting on the same issues, I’ve been sounding the alarm about the state’s so-called Cancer Alley — the web of massive petrochemical plants lining the lower Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to below New Orleans — for years.

The small river towns between those two cities — mostly black and mostly poor — breathe some of the most polluted air in the United States, as confirmed by federal and state testing, and there’s increasingly powerful evidence that these environmental factors are part of what makes Louisiana’s cancer rates among the nation’s highest.

It’s been gratifying over the last few years to see existing groups like the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, high-profile advocates like Gen. Russel Honore, and a network of smaller ad hoc local groups band together to fight large outside companies from China and elsewhere and their plans to build massive new plastics plants in the heart of Cancer Alley.

These groups are starting to win some battles – but they can’t do it alone. The fight against unchecked pollution in Cancer Alley won’t begin to turn the corner until the state of Louisiana ends its traditions of promising Big Oil and Gas a climate of low taxes and little to no environmental regulations with the aim of luring new jobs. With a Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, about to launch his second term, there is much work to do.

In Washington, a good-government group called the Environmental Integrity Project decided to look at what’s happened with environmental enforcement on the level of the 50 states since 2008, or covering roughly a decade. The study was motivated by recent federal policies from the Trump administration that have sharply cut money for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and related groups. The philosophy is that environmental regulation is better left to the states — but are the states really up to the job?

The environmental group found that for Louisiana, the answer has been a resounding No.” Over that decade, the report found, the state’s main regulatory agency — the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ — has slashed its budget by 35 percent while reducing its staff by 30 percent. That was among the worst in the nation, even as Louisiana was constantly in the news for its pollution problems.

It’s not as if the DEQ and its investigators had nothing to do during that time. To the contrary, during those 10 years Louisiana still managed to sign off on 42 major new petrochemical plants or natural gas exporting facilities, and there are 11 more significant new projects that are in the works. State lawmakers and governors from both parties have ensured those plants will open with the absolute minimum amount of oversight.

Even The Advocate, which is now the principal daily newspaper for both New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and which takes the fairly conservative position that Louisiana should continue to attract new petrochemical plants for the jobs that they create, recently editorialized that the state’s outgunned regulatory framework is not rational.

“It defies common sense to have DEQ stretched thinner at a time when the state’s leadership is avidly seeking to expand petrochemical manufacturing,” the newspaper wrote in a recent editorial. “If we want the jobs and payrolls of the plants, we must ensure that clean air and water are protected.”

Of course, the lax climate does make sense when one considers that Louisiana and its government have been in the back pocket of Big Oil and Gas since the early days of the industry a century ago, with corruption and a cozy relationship thriving through governments as diverse as the bayou populist Huey Long to small-government conservatives like Bobby Jindal. Even today, the state’s tax structure is geared to aid big polluters.

Read More : HOW LAX REGS, LOW TAXES POWER LOUISIANA’S ‘CANCER ALLEY