Chronic Exposure

In the offices of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the grassroots nonprofit group in Mid-City New Orleans, a large map of the state and the Gulf of Mexico hangs on the wall. The map is covered with thousands of red dots—some on land, some on the water, and most clustered where the Louisiana coast meets Gulf waters.

Each dot represents an oil spill that happened in 2009, the year before the BP disaster. There are 3,600 in all.

The map, created in partnership with students at the University of New Orleans, was one of the first attempts to analyze spills reported to the National Response Center, the federal agency in charge of collecting such data.

The results were striking: While the 2010 BP disaster was bigger than anything the Gulf had experienced, toxic oil spills have been a routine byproduct of the region’s energy economy.

“There’s a history of chronic chemical exposures in this state,” Mariko Toyoji, a research analyst who helped compile the report, told Southern Exposure.

More than 300 of the spills occurred within a mile of a public school. Many have involved pipelines along sensitive coastal wetlands. Remarkably, some of the spills have been going on continuously since Hurricane Katrina struck more than five years ago.

The Brigade, which started out taking bucket samples of air to test for toxic contamination, found that spills aren’t the only way Louisiana’s oil has been finding its way into communities and ecosystems. The group also found that between 2005 and 2010, there were 2,849 accidents at the state’s 17 refineries—an average of about two a week. And those are just the ones that the companies reported.

The result of these refinery mishaps: 22 million pounds of pollution were released into the environment, according to a Bucket Brigade analysis of data reported by the refineries to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. Those releases included toxic and cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and volatile organic compounds.

“The BP oil spill is a great illustration of the dynamics happening every day in this state,” says Anne Rolfes, the Bucket Brigade’s executive director. “These accidents are happening all the time, and there’s no enforcement.”

 

“What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You”

Today, Louisiana is the fourth-biggest oil-producing state in the U.S. after Alaska, Texas and California. The birth of the industry in Louisiana can be traced back to 1901, when the Heywood well in Jefferson Davis Parish in southwestern Louisiana first began producing oil in commercial quantities. Eight years later a refinery opened in Baton Rouge; today, ExxonMobil’s Baton Rouge refinery is one of the largest in North America.

The oil drilling, refining and related petrochemical industries bring undoubted benefits: One industry-commissioned study estimated the total direct and indirect economic impact for Louisiana at $65 billion a year. But the benefits are not distributed equitably—and neither are the drawbacks.

The dynamics are rooted deep in Southern history. As scholar Barbara L. Allen details in her book Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes, after the Civil War the federal government distributed farmland to the newly freed slaves, often on or near the plantations where they had previously worked, and typically deeded the land to extended family groups. When the oil refineries came later, they bought the larger plantations from wealthy whites, thus avoiding the need to negotiate with multiple owners whose title to the land wasn’t always clear.

“The oil industry replaced the plantation economy after Reconstruction,” observes Monique Harden, an attorney with Advocates for Environmental Human Rights in New Orleans.

African-American communities have borne the brunt of the pollution from the nearby refineries and petrochemical facilities. So has the Mississippi River, which in addition to supplying a key shipping lane has served as a convenient disposal site for the industry’s toxic wastes. The 85-mile stretch of river from Baton Rouge to New Orleans eventually came to be known as “Cancer Alley” by local leaders and environmental health advocates who say there is an unusual concentration of illnesses suffered near the polluting industries.

One of these towns is Norco, located in St. Charles Parish about 25 miles west of New Orleans. Today Norco is home to 3,500 people and six major oil refineries and petrochemical plants. In 2009, these facilities reported releasing more than 1.1 million pounds of toxic pollution into the air, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, which compiles pollution data self-reported by industry.

Iris Carter, who was born in segregated Norco’s African-American neighborhood of Diamond in the early 1950s, remembers when the Shell Chemical plant expanded to the edge of her community. She grew up smelling terrible odors, and watching the plant’s good jobs going to whites that lived farther away.

A turning point came in 1973, when the mere spark from a resident starting a lawnmower above one of the plant’s leaking underground pipelines was enough to trigger a blast that killed two people. Diamond’s residents decided they’d had enough, and began picketing the facility and demanding that Shell relocate them.

“When Miss Helen and that boy blew up [from the explosion], that was the deciding thing,” Carter said in an interview with Southern Exposure.

After pressure from Carter and the Concerned Citizens of Norco, Shell finally agreed to buy out Diamond residents, who had grown so rattled by the plant’s frequent accidents that they took to sleeping fully clothed in case they had to flee in the night. Of about 200 families that once called the community home, only about 20 remain today, their houses scattered among open fields.

Families like the Carters have also suffered a public health nightmare they believe can be directly linked to years of toxic exposures. Carter has been diagnosed with environmentally related asthma, and her daughter is also asthmatic. Carter’s mother died of cancer, and one of her sisters died of the autoimmune disease scleroderma—two illnesses Carter says are common in Diamond. Another sister is currently being treated for a rare blood cancer.

“We didn’t know it was dangerous,” Carter says. “Sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you.”

 

A “Come-to-Jesus” Moment?

Norco’s experience is far from exceptional: The energy companies lining the Mississippi River routinely unleash enormous amounts of pollution, much of which eventually empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

Southern Exposure analyzed data from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, looking at the 18 petroleum industry facilities in EPA’s database that are located in the Louisiana parishes along the Mississippi River for the five-year period from 2005 through 2009.

During that time, those 18 facilities dumped a total of more than 24 million pounds of toxic chemicals directly into the river or nearby waterways that drain into the Mississippi.

On top of that, they emitted another 237 million pounds of toxic chemicals to the air, some of which eventually end up in the river following rains that wash them from the air and land.

Much of this pollution ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, which in addition to oil spills and refinery effluents faces another environmental threat: the Gulf Dead Zone.

Scientists believe the Gulf Dead Zone is caused by a mix of high-nitrogen fertilizer from Midwestern farmland and sewage run-off, which has caused an explosion of algae that robs ocean waters of oxygen, making it unable to support other aquatic life. Last year’s Gulf Dead Zone was one of the largest ever measured at over 7,700 square miles—almost the same size as New Jersey.

The BP disaster seems to have exacerbated these ongoing threats to the health of the Gulf.

Since the spill, fishermen have been reporting unusual problems with their catches: lesions on shrimp, crabs with holes in their shells, red snapper with rotting fins. Meanwhile, dead dolphins have been washing up on Gulf beaches in unprecedented numbers, leading the federal government to declare an “unusual mortality event.” Scientists have also found more oxygen-depleted areas near the spilled oil, raising concerns that the BP disaster may have made the dead zone worse.

BP announced in August 2010 that it would fund a three-year state study of the oil spill’s impact on Gulf fisheries. However, the company has not agreed to fund a longer-term and more comprehensive fisheries study that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal requested.

Efforts to document the impact of oil pollution on the Gulf’s people and communities routinely run into roadblocks.

While the National Institutes of Health announced in September 2010 that it was launching a multi-year study to look at the disaster’s health impact on 55,000 cleanup workers, many of whom are now reporting illnesses they believe are related to the spill, there is no comparable effort to study the health of Gulf residents who weren’t part of the cleanup, or the cumulative impact of pollution from the BP spill when combined with years of other toxic exposures.

More than a year after the BP calamity, spills and pollution from the Gulf’s oil companies continue. In March 2011, another oil spill of mysterious origin that was eventually blamed on an Anglo-Suisse Offshore Partners well damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, dumped another estimated 640,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf.

“A reckoning with the oil industry needs to happen,” says Anne Rolfes of the Bucket Brigade. “We need a come-to-Jesus moment.”