Since 1865 Black People Forced Onto Marshy Lands; Petrochemical Industry Hid Toxins as “Trade Secrets”; Now the Water’s Rising

HILTON KELLEY

Living in California, every now and then I would come back home. And I noticed the degrade in our downtown area. I noticed that the air quality was still the same, years after I had left with this fight, because what’s happening to our air quality is criminal.” our very livelihood, but it’s killing our planet as well. Around this world we have thousands and thousands of refineries, chemical plants, chemical incineration facilities, petroleum coke facilities, and all together they’re dumping all these toxins into our air quality. here. You smell that sulfur odor and that rotten egg smell. And then you would hear stories about the number of people that have died from cancer. And you see little babies with that chronic cough.

A lot of these industries were out of compliance with the Clean Air Act laws and regulations. And so I started calling the TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] and asking them: What do they plan to do about it? What kind of enforcement actions would they be putting out against these industries that were dumping tons and tons of SO2?

I finally got involved with taking air samples with this device, The Bucket. It’s a 5-gallon bucket with a bag in it. You get suction in that bucket, open the valve, and the ambient air automatically goes into that Tedlar bag. And then you take that bag and you send it to a lab. Now mind, I always used a third-party lab, because I did not trust a lot of laboratories here in the state of Texas.

There was a time to where we can go from Port Arthur through Sabine to McFaddin Beach. The surf set off a good 35, 40 yards off the road. Now that road is washed out. That is a prime example that sea level rise is real.

Extreme weather is real. We have an unprecedented number of hurricanes that come on shore every year, flooding our communities year after year after year. The hidden danger with that is also the stress that it put on each and every one of us.

Back in Oakland, California, I started jotting down ideas of what I saw and what I thought needed to be done for my hometown. I kept thinking, Who would I get the notes to? And so I had a dream. It was so surreal that I believe that the Almighty was showing me: No, I’m giving you these ideas for you to do. And I felt like nothing else in my life would have gone right, had not I at least came home and tried. I came back to Port Arthur in 2000.

Nobody had never really got behind the politics of industry. They never took a close look at the rules and regulations that govern those industries. Word got around, you know, this guy asking questions and about industry and whatnot. Reverend Roy Malveaux came to one of my meetings and he said, “We need more young people like yourself to get involved

We took one sample after another. And what we found was alarming. We found that there was a disproportionate amount of benzene being dumped into the air, 1,3-butadiene being dumped into the air, ethylene being dumped into the air—you name it. And TCEQ was not putting out any type of enforcement actions. And we had to protest to get the EPA to get up off its duff and started doing its job. We finally got some traction.

Now I totally get it that these industries helped to build this area. Spindletop was here right down the road—1901—oil was big. Everybody was getting into the oil business. But guess what? By the 1930s industries knew the dangers of many of those chemicals that they were dumping into the air, but yet they decided to keep that a secret and they called it a trade secret.

But if you’re dumping it in my air, I have a right to know what I’m breathing. I have a right to protect my kids and my family members. But yet you don’t want to tell me and now we have to find out by fighting you and dragging you into court?

These chemicals do not impact just our lives,

The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863. African Americans were free, but free to go where? We were forced to live from Mississippi all the way into Texas, we were forced to live in places like the Mississippi Delta, the marshes of Louisiana, and right on into Texas where I was born and raised on the West Side—that was one of the most marshiest areas in the world. But now we’ve grown to love our communities. We have a culture there. And for years we have always dealt with floods.

But now we’re dealing with unprecedented waters at certain heights that nobody has ever seen before. And now they tell us we should move—or we should pull ourselves up by our bootstraps—but we didn’t put ourselves to those areas, we were forced to live there. And it was maintained due to Jim Crow laws.

So I feel that many people who live in those areas today should be given an opportunity to get the funding they need to move out of those areas, because we were forced to live there and Jim Crow laws help to maintain that.

U.S. Navy and TV/film veteran Hilton Kelley founded Community In-Power and Development Association Incorporated to challenge local environmental violators and educate Port Arthurites about the toxic burden on them—earning the “Green Nobel,” the Goldman Environmental Prize.

I first want to volunteer my services as far as

Jonathan Brazzell here. I work with Chanelle at the National Weather Service and I’m the service hydrologist. I was in the newspaper in Lake Charles saying after I think four or five floods that, starting in 2016, I said, “I’m tired of this.” The headline was: “Everyone lives in the flood zone.” I don’t care where you live. It just takes that one event that’s gonna get you.

The old FEMA flood maps are junk. I don’t even look at them anymore. And that is what communities use to do enforcement of regulations in the floodway, in the flood zone. With the new InFRM maps that they developed, anybody can go look at them (QR codes to InFRM and their risk maps below). They have high-resolution maps based off the rainfall that we just updated after Hurricane Harvey that engineers use to make projects.

Ellen hit really, really hard with me: people building in areas where they shouldn’t. I heard a county official say, “Well, we can’t do anything about that.” Uh no, you can. You have enforcement authority when you are in the FEMA flood insurance program. And Bevil Oaks: I remember there was a flood event there. The county actually came in and said, “Well, we’re waiving the 50% thing,” where they don’t have to build up high or anything like that. And so that’s just frustrating: we’re killing ourselves.

How can we get our community leaders on board with our ideas? Because it took me where I live in Sulphur, Louisiana, a year and a half, because I’m on the zoning board and I said, “I am done with this.” And it took me a year and a half to for us to stop giving variances to these developers that come into our communities, make a development, then they’re gone. Then it’s on us.

I’m Liv Haselbach. I lead the Flood Coordination Study for Southeast Texas and I have been leading it for the last three years. We have monthly meetings with presentations and whoever wants to listen to them may. It is Drainage District 6 and Orange Drainage District and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Texas Water Development Board.

This is years and years of neglect on behalf of industry, and man and our politicians. This is why scientists are quickly trying to usher in clean energy technologies, such as solar panels, electric vehicles, even though at the end of an electrical vehicle’s life there is still some debris and trash and some type of material leftover that could leave a carbon footprint. But yet we have to continue to search for new ways of doing business. We cannot do the same business as usual, so it’s going to be a while before we turn this boat around. But we can start to work together to find solutions and I think we all can play a role, and number one, that’s reduce our plastic use.

We have a project going on at this present time in the Montrose District in Port Arthur, where we are building permeable pavement. We’re looking at waste. And the Army Corps of Engineers are playing a key role in helping us to discover water flows and whatnot and we got our city and the Army Corps of Engineers now talking. This is what it’s going to take: people working together and those agencies with boots on the ground getting out of their silos.

The majority of the people that’s making law and making policy do not live where we live. But if we are adamant, and as visible and audible as we possibly can be, and if you as the elected and/or appointed don’t go along with that, there is the come-back-and-sit-withme process or wait till the next election come about and then we’ll vote you out. Me personally, I like the “come back and sit down with me.”

On the Neches River Flood Planning Group: you can comment; you can be a part of that. We meet usually once a month. You need to look at the plan, because it’s going to affect you and your cities and counties are going to get money from that plan.

Lumberton is just, you know, booming and flooding. Booming and flooding. A new 2500-house subdivision is going in. What’s it gonna do? It’s gonna flood the people down below. I talked to the judge, I said, “Judge, on the west side of that is 10,000 acres for sale. The county needs to spend some of their grant money that they have and buy that 10,000 acres to keep a developer from buying it and putting in another 25-house subdivision.” There’s money for buyouts and acquisitions. It can be green space again.