Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  Opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, as it is called, argue that it would pose unacceptable environmental risks, even leaving aside the issue of how dirty oil sands oil is. The pipeline, three feet in diameter and buried underground, would transport diluted bitumen through such ecologically invaluable regions as the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides nearly a third of all groundwater used for irrigation in the United States, and is also a major drinking water supply. The threat to the Ogallala, the argument goes, is too great a risk to take. And then there’s the question of whether the project would even be economically viable.

  Pipeline supporters, on the other hand, claim that Keystone XL would be reliable and safe, and they contend that it would double the amount of oil sands oil that can be imported to the United States.

  What Keystone XL definitely has going for it, though, is irresistible symbolic value. Judged by this admittedly dubious metric, a pipeline connecting northern Alberta and Port Arthur, Texas, is almost too good to pass up. Because if the oil sands represent the future of the oil industry, then Port Arthur represents its past, even its birth. And Keystone XL, should it be built, would physically link the two, feeding the future to the past, and tying the history of petroleum up in a tidy bow.

  They called it folly. To most people, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that there was oil waiting underneath the low hill known as Spindletop, near Beaumont, in Southeast Texas. But Patillo Higgins had been obsessed with it for nearly a decade. A local businessman and self-taught geologist, he had led multiple failed attempts to find oil under the hill, and still he persisted. The quintessential example of an entrepreneur driven beyond sound judgment, Higgins spent year after year chasing oil with nothing to show for it. He pursued his goal with a faith matched only by his own religious dogmatism, and even ceded ownership of his own company to attract new investors—all in an age when oil was used only for lamp fuel and lubricants. As a business plan, it was idiotic.

  On the morning of January 10, 1901, Higgins wasn’t even on Spindletop. Neither was his drilling contractor, a similarly obsessed, Croatian-born engineer called Anthony Lucas. They had no idea what was about to happen. Not even the drilling crew, as they ground the well deeper, past 1,100 feet, knew what they were about to unleash on Texas and the world. No idea that by lunchtime their well would be producing more oil than every other oil well in the country—combined.

  It was the first gusher: the violent fountain of oil that in the old days would explode out of the ground when a new well broke through to a rich deposit. (Go see There Will Be Blood if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Nowadays, drillers understand how to control such things, but the gusher remains an archetypal American moment, as central to our folklore of wealth as gold rushes and tech IPOs.

  Beginning on that January morning, the well called Lucas No. 1, or the Lucas Gusher, ran for nine days, spewing millions of gallons of oil onto the ground before it was brought under control. PURE OIL SPOUTING HIGH IN THE AIR—MUCH EXCITEMENT IN THE CITY ran the headline in Beaumont’s Daily Enterprise on that first day. Just how much excitement can be traced in the work of the Enterprise headline writers over the following week:

  January 12: MANY OIL PROSPECTORS ARRIVED TODAY.

  January 14: FEVERISH AND EXCITED…BIG THINGS PLANNED WHICH WILL BE CARRIED OUT.

  January 15: EXCITEMENT STILL HIGH. EVERYBODY GRABBING FOR LAND—PRICES SKY HIGH.

  Their best effort, at once breathless and circumspect, ran on January 16: CROWDS STILL COME!…VARIOUS RUMORS OF IMMENSE TRANSACTIONS BUT VERIFICATION WAS NOT OBTAINABLE.

  Within months, the population of Beaumont had quintupled; the sleepy town of Port Arthur, twenty miles down the road, was on its way to becoming a petrochemical mecca—and the Texas oil boom was on.

  An oil industry already existed in the United States at the time. It had been built by John D. Rockefeller and his contemporaries, following discoveries made in Pennsylvania starting in the late 1850s. But oil had nothing like the dominance it has today. The internal combustion engine barely existed, plastic was decades away, and gasoline was considered an uninteresting refinery byproduct. Kerosene, the world’s first bright, clean-burning lamp fuel, was the real game.

  The Lucas Gusher produced more oil than anybody knew what to do with. Well after well was sunk into Spindletop in an orgy of drilling and speculation, and hundreds of new oil companies sprang up; you may recognize names like Texaco, Humble (now ExxonMobil), and Gulf (now Chevron). In Beaumont, the price of a barrel of oil dropped to below that of a barrel of water, so severe was the oversupply. Complicating this dilemma was the fact that this new Texas crude was ill-suited for making kerosene. Even if it had made for good kerosene, the writing was on the wall: kerosene lanterns were being replaced by electric lightbulbs.

  The oil industry needed new markets. But what they eventually found—and founded—was a civilization. The dominoes began to fall almost immediately. First were the railroads: in 1901, the Santa Fe Railroad had a single oil-powered locomotive; four years after the Lucas Gusher, it was running 227 of them. Steamships in the Gulf of Mexico weren’t far behind, changing over to fuel oil and lining up to take advantage of the glut. Mechanized agriculture and manufacturing took off in Texas, now suddenly the proving ground for the oil-based economy. Before long, the pattern was being repeated around the globe. Navies of the world switched to oil as well, signaling the abrupt geopolitical centrality of petroleum to the unfolding twentieth century.

  And then there was the automobile, coming of age with eerie synchrony to the oil industry’s burgeoning second wave. Several energy sources had been proposed for cars, among them electricity, but oil’s new availability sealed the deal for the internal combustion engine. And the Texas crude refined nicely into gasoline. Before, gasoline had been considered a near-waste product; now it took its place next to fuel oil as the power source of the new age. It was time to pave America, and the rest of the world.

  Over the following century, finding new markets for petroleum—new uses, new products, new classes of products—would prove to be one of the things that oil companies do best. And there is a direct line from the glut of oil on Spindletop to the omnipresence of petroleum today. As any oilman or environmentalist will tell you, oil seeps into every corner of our lives—our households, our economy, our politics. It fuels or abets almost everything we do, from tourism to warfare. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. We live on oil, and by it, and its use is responsible for more than a third of global emissions of carbon dioxide, which, in an era of man-made climate change, is perhaps the most fundamental pollutant of all.

  On Spindletop, though, on that January morning in 1901, all that was yet to come. Nobody knew that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be made of petroleum. And there had never been a gusher before. Nobody knew that a well could, without warning, explode into a glistening, green-black geyser. Nobody had ever danced in oil raining from the sky. When Lucas finally saw the roaring fountain that would immortalize his name, he just shouted, “What is it?”

  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 count
ry’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.

  In Kelley’s pickup truck, we rode slowly through West Port Arthur, taking what he called his “toxic tour” of the city. Until 1965 or so, he said, segregation meant that African Americans weren’t allowed to live anywhere but the West Side. It was no coincidence that this was the part of town closest to the refineries, hemmed in by Valero and Motiva.

  As we drove, Kelley told me his life story with the fluency of someone used to talking to journalists. He grew up in Port Arthur in the 1960s and ’70s, then joined the Navy and ended up in California, where he became an actor and stuntman. In 2000, he came back to Port Arthur for Mardi Gras and was shocked by the poverty and hopelessness he found.

  “I would take these little walks,” he said. “And I started wondering, what the hell happened?”

  He decided to move back, hoping to find some way to help, and soon found himself focused on the local environment: lobbying for better monitoring and enforcement, and standing by the refinery gates with signs demanding change.

  “I thought I’d be here two or three years when I came back,” he told me. “Now it’s been ten years, and I don’t see no end to this environmental fight.”

  We drove on, heading along West Seventh Street, the artery running from downtown, through the poor neighborhoods, toward the bridge that crosses the ship channel. “People are just appalled to even drive through here,” Kelley said. “They talk about building another bridge, just so people don’t have to drive down Seventh Street, so they don’t have to go through the West Side.”

  He told me it was part of a larger pattern—a conspiracy, even—that threate
ned to starve West Port Arthur out of existence. “I think a plan was developed,” he said. “A sinister plan. I don’t have any proof, but I’d stand up and say that in front of anybody. You have a community with a thirty-billion-a-year company on one side and a forty-billion-a-year company on the other side, and yet it’s one of the most dilapidated communities in Texas. It don’t add up.”

  Driving past the football field of the deserted former high school, Kelly pulled the truck over. He was looking in the rearview mirror. He had done this more than once during the tour, letting people pass us as we crept around the neighborhood.

  “Come on, drive around me!” he said. Finally the car passed us. He watched it go.

  “I’m real leery about people following me,” he said. “I wouldn’t say paranoid. I’m cautious. And of course, I’ve always got my little friend.”

  He pointed at a small soft case resting between us on the floor of the cab.

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean—”

  “That’s right,” and then he was holding it up, a heavy piece of metal that looked very much like a handgun.

  The afternoon had taken a turn. “I keep it loaded,” he said. “And one in the chamber.” He said he carried the gun partly because of the crime rate in Port Arthur—but only partly.

  “There are some people here who hate my guts,” he said. “They think I’m a troublemaker. That I’m going to make them lose their jobs. But I am not trying to shut the refineries down. I just think they need to abide by the regulations we already have. By the Clean Air Act. And they’re not.”

  A phrase like “abide by the Clean Air Act,” I noticed, took on a nice urgency when you waved a loaded .40 caliber around while saying it.

  We passed by a storage yard full of components for the Motiva expansion. Kelley was talking about the products that came from the refineries. He knew they were important. He knew we all used them. He was, after all, driving a truck that probably got about fifteen miles to the gallon.