hope and change Local environmental activist Hilton Kelley, far left, watches from the dining room of his shuttered restaurant as President Obama delivers his June 25 speech addressing climate change and the future of the Keystone XL pipeline. At a Port Arthur City Council meeting, 80-year-old Erma Lee Smith (above, in pink) awaits a vote on whether the plan to relocate her and her fellow Carver Terrace residents can proceed as scheduled.
Kelley was raised in and around Carver Terrace. He managed to escape its gravity for nearly two decades, after joining the Navy and later moving to Oakland, California, where he started and ran a home maintenance and repair business. But when he returned to Port Arthur in 2000 for a Mardi Gras celebration, he was shocked by the deteriorated state of his hometown. Within a year he had moved back and founded an organization he named the Community In-Power & Development Association (CIDA). He resolved to take the fight directly to the powers that be, training citizens to measure levels of toxicity in the air, filing lawsuits against illegal polluters, and crashing shareholder meetings to protest corporate indifference. Kelley has scored some major victories. In 2003 he succeeded in getting the Texas Commission on Environmental Equality to block a permit for a project at Premcor (the predecessor to Valero), which would have added 525 tons of emissions into the air. He drew national attention to a massive unpermitted release—more than 125 tons of toxic chemicals—from the Motiva plant in that same year, forcing the commission to take action. And in 2008 he persuaded the EPA not to grant the hazardous-waste-management company Veolia a special permit to incinerate 20,000 tons of liquid PCBs imported from its sister company in Monterey, Mexico. In honor of his efforts, Kelley was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2011 and even met with President Obama at the White House. But Kelley has also encountered fierce opposition. At one 2003 meeting between CIDA and Premcor executives in the Beaumont offices of U.S. Representative Nick Lampson, a Democrat, the congressman floated the idea of organizing a town hall gathering so corporate leaders might better hear the concerns of the people living in and around Carver Terrace. According to Kelley, the Premcor plant manager in attendance agreed—but not before saying that he didn’t want “to go into a situation where people are going to be acting like a bunch of monkeys.” In 2007 Kelley led a citizens’ lawsuit claiming that the Veolia plant, which
had incinerated nearly two million gallons of VX hydrolysate (a toxic by-product created when weapons-grade nerve gas is neutralized), had no measures in place to determine if the agent had been emitted into the air. Port Arthur’s then-mayor, Oscar Ortiz, told one local newspaper that Kelley was “full of crap” and told another that Kelley was “a clown and a loser just trying to get attention for himself.” The biggest knock on Kelley may be that bad things have kept happening in Port Arthur, whether he was talking about them or not. In 2007, four years after the major toxic-chemicals release at the Motiva plant, Carver Terrace was overwhelmed by an emissions event at the Valero facility that sent dozens of people to the hospital. Three years later, the Exxon-chartered oil tanker Eagle Otome collided with a barge, spilling 462,000 gallons of crude oil into the nearby Sabine-Neches Canal and forcing the evacuation of 136 Port Arthur residents. But it’s not the highly publicized releases that are the greatest problem; it’s the steady, routine release of toxic chemicals that never makes the papers. An investigation conducted last year by the Environmental Integrity Project found that levels of benzene and other volatile organic compounds released from Port Arthur’s refinery stacks were actually 10 times higher than were being reported. Nonetheless, for thousands of people who grew up in the housing complexes of West Port Arthur, the place still exerts the powerful pull of home. “I can see my greatgrandmother, with her flowered dress on and her parasol, walking down this middle aisle right here,” Kelley said to me as he gestured toward the long sidewalk that runs through Carver Terrace. “In a way, I’m going to really hate to see it go, because a lot of my history is here. But it should have been gone years ago. And my history is all over this town now.” The state of Texas first became an oil powerhouse with
the eruption of the Lucas gusher at the Spindletop oil field in Beaumont in 1901. Two speculators, the Gulf Refining Company and the Guffey Petroleum Company, built their refineries on the coast. (Later the two companies would merge into a single entity known as Gulf Oil.) Around the same time, the Texas Fuel Company—later known as Texaco— built its own refinery next door. Port Arthur, which had been founded a few years before as a shipping port and rail-line terminus, suddenly became the center of the American oil boom, and for decades much of the nation’s crude wound up in Gulf Coast refineries. In the years right after World War II, the town was flooded with African American roustabouts and roughnecks drawn from all over Louisiana and East Texas. Downtown Port Arthur and the neighboring communities of West Port Arthur and Port Acres hummed with barbecue pits and seafood boils, brothels and gambling parlors, nightclubs and juke joints. By day a Louisiana transplant named Clifton Chenier drove a truck at the Gulf refinery, but at night he was the King of Zydeco at the Blue Moon Club. Touring blues acts like Big Joe Turner could sell out Bluchie’s Paradise for a week solid. Black-owned nightclubs stretched along West Gulfway and up and down Houston Avenue, many boasting 24-hour bar service. In late 1953 a labor strike against city merchants was portrayed by anti-labor interests as a joint effort by Communists and African Americans to take over the city. One propaganda pamphlet, distributed statewide, pictured white women together on the picket lines with black men, its caption warning: “They drink from the same bottles and smoke the same cigarets.” The following year the U.S. Supreme Court fall 2013
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