The Center for Public Integrity

BATON ROUGE, La. — Shirley Bowman noticed the smell after 8 a.m. on June 14, 2012, her 61st birthday. In Baton Rouge, where the petrochemical industry dominates the landscape, foul odors resembling burnt rubber or propane are perennial. But this odor, caustic and potent, seemed especially foul — “like some sort of chemical,” she recalls.

Bowman found her daughter crying over a migraine. Her neighbors experienced headaches, dizziness, nausea. One family reported a toddler son coughing up phlegm; another, an elderly father collapsing on the floor. She soon suspected the cause: A leak of “steam-cracked” naphtha, a liquid mixture of volatile petrochemicals, occurring at the ExxonMobil Baton Rouge petrochemical complex a half mile away.

Four hours earlier, Exxon operators detected an odor in the East area tank field, and discovered a “bleeder” valve on Tank 801 dripping naphtha into a sewer. The leaky valve dumped 411 barrels into the underground system, company records filed with the state show. The liquid traveled a mile before pouring into a separator pit, vaporizing along the way, and releasing tens of thousands of pounds of benzene and other toxic chemicals into the air.

What happened that day in Baton Rouge is one thread of a larger story about the often toxic, sometimes hidden releases emanating from oil refineries, chemical plants and other industrial facilities along the chemical corridor of Louisiana and Texas. Those unplanned emissions — known in regulatory parlance as “upsets” — are occurring more often than industry admits or government knows, according to more than 50 interviews with regulators, activists, plant representatives, workers and residents, and an analysis of tens of thousands of records by the Center for Public Integrity.

Nothing in the law allows for the invisible danger from “upset” emissions to persist, but legislation and reality often collide.

On the contrary, the federal Clean Air Act was meant to reduce harmful emissions by requiring continuous pollution limits for industrial facilities. But since its passage in 1970, state and federal regulators have created loopholes involving accidental releases — loopholes that have for years been challenged, re-written and bogged down in bureaucracy.

Nearly from the start, regulators began waiving pollution standards when equipment unexpectedly malfunctioned and had to be shut down, started up and maintained.

By 2004, 29 states had devised what University of Texas-Austin researcher Kelly Haragan calls “a flat-out exemption” for such emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency offered similar immunity for those involving hazardous air pollutants.

“There is a big caveat here,” acknowledges Adam Kushner, who headed the EPA’s air enforcement unit until last year. “They didn’t necessarily count against your compliance picture.”

This murkiness began fading after environmental groups sued the EPA in 2003, alleging its exemption violated clean-air laws. By December 2008, a federal court agreed, vacating the language. The agency has lagged at fully closing its loophole; earlier this year, it unveiled a proposed rule that would require facilities in any state to follow pollution limits during periods of start-up, shut down and maintenance.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general has begun a review of the EPA’s use of internal watch lists to target enforcement of federal pollution laws. The watch lists first came to light as part of a 2011 investigation by The Center for Public Integrity and NPR.

The inspector general is exploring “potential improvements in the protection of human health and the environment by ensuring the EPA is enforcing environmental laws and cleaning up communities,” the IG’s office wrote last month to Cynthia Giles, the EPA’s assistant administrator for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

The watch lists include allegedly chronic violators of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which governs the handling of hazardous waste.

The EPA began to post the previously secret lists online in the fall of 2011 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Center as part of the “Poisoned Places” investigation.

The project revealed that – two decades after Congress sought to crack down on chemicals that can cause cancer, brain damage and other ailments – toxic air pollutants continued to plague parts of the United States. The reports found that there were some 1,600 “high priority violators” of the Clean Air Act – nearly 400 of which were on the EPA’s watch list – and that federal and state regulators sometimes had trouble keeping tabs on oil refineries, power plants, steel mills and other industrial facilities that showered communities with contaminants.

DETROIT — In an economically distressed pocket of southwest Detroit known by its ZIP code — 48217 — the weekend of September 7-9 was one of the worst, pollution-wise, residents like Theresa Shaw could remember.

“I started smelling it on Thursday,” said Shaw, who immediately suspected the Marathon Petroleum Co. refinery a half-mile from her house. “I kept the windows closed because I couldn’t breathe. On Friday, I thought, ‘What the heck are they doing?’ My eyes were just burning, my throat was hurting, my stomach was hurting. I was having migraine headaches.

“The smell, it was like this burning tar, with that benzene and that sulfur. I wanted to scream.”

Shaw retreated to her sister’s house on the north side of town. Responding to citizen complaints, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality traced the powerful odor to Marathon, which had been cleaning several large vessels, and wrote up the company for a nuisance violation.

Marathon says it is “committed to environmental responsibility” and acted quickly to correct the odor problem, a byproduct of plant maintenance.

Yet the episode further eroded residents’ trust in the company and underscored their fears about a $2.2 billion refinery expansion that will allow Marathon to process more high-sulfur Canadian crude oil.

The build-out, nearly complete, won’t add to the air pollution burden, Marathon promises. In fact, the Ohio-based company vows, emissions of some pollutants will go down and job numbers will go up.

Shaw doesn’t buy it. “They’ve disrespected us in this neighborhood over and over and over again,” she said.

Fifteen residents of Corpus Christi, Texas — so sickened by pollution they have been deemed crime victims — are asking a federal judge to force Citgo Petroleum Corp. to set up multimillion-dollar trust funds to cover medical and relocation costs, in a case with national ramifications.

A jury in 2007 convicted Citgo of criminal violations of the Clean Air Act, concluding that the company’s Corpus Christi refinery allowed toxic chemicals to drift from two large, uncovered storage tanks into a nearby neighborhood for a decade.

The company was to have been sentenced last month; the Department of Justice has proposed a fine of slightly more than $2 million. Lawyers for the 15 residents, however, asked U.S. District Judge John D. Rainey to grant the residents crime-victim status so they could testify at the sentencing hearing and, perhaps, win compensation from Citgo. Rainey granted that status on Sept. 14 and postponed the hearing.

In a court filing Wednesday, lawyers for the 15 residents are seeking $80,000 from Citgo for medical screening.

They also want Citgo to establish an $11 million trust fund for treatment of cancer or other illnesses suffered by the more than 300 people who have submitted victim impact statements to the court. A court-appointed special master would decide whose expenses should be covered.

Days before Citgo Petroleum Corp. faces its long-awaited sentencing for criminal Clean Air Act violations at its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, a Justice Department court filing alleges that a “wide range” of environmental and worker safety violations continue to plague the plant.

Citgo was convicted in June 2007 of two criminal counts stemming from 10 years of toxic emissions from two massive, uncovered storage tanks. Such convictions are rare: The Center for Public Integrity reported last year that Clean Air Act cases have been prosecuted at a far lower rate than Clean Water Act or solid waste cases.

In its filing this week, the Justice Department asks a federal judge to fine Citgo $2,090,000, the maximum allowed under the statute, and put the company on five years’ probation — also the maximum — for illegal emissions of benzene and other hazardous chemicals from the tanks between 1994 and 2004.

The department says the refinery made almost $1.16 billion in profits during that period.

Citgo’s sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin Monday in U.S. District Court in Corpus Christi and could last several days. In an e-mailed statement Friday morning, the company said it “embraces a culture of safety that is reflected in everything we and our employees do. We are proud of our record and of the important role our refineries play in providing good jobs and much needed tax revenue for the communities they serve, including Corpus Christi.”

The Justice Department document alleges that Citgo “has violated a wide range of environmental and worker safety regulations” — as recently as this year in some cases.

In the Mississippi River town of Muscatine, Iowa, concerns about a corn processing plant that belches smoke and ash over the South End neighborhood have festered for years.

On Monday, those living in the plant’s shadow took a step that, until recently, would have seemed unlikely at best: They sued the plant’s owner, Grain Processing Corp. — a vital piece of the town’s economy and a political force in Iowa.

For years, the lawsuit alleges, residents have put up with constant pollution that has damaged their property and affected their health. The Center for Public Integrity detailed the persistent haze hanging over the community and the company’s long history of run-ins with regulators as part of its “Poisoned Places” series with NPR last year.

“We’ve reached a tipping point in Muscatine,” said Tony Buzbee, a Houston lawyer with a history of winning high-profile environmental cases who has agreed to represent the residents. “I think that you’re going to see hundreds and hundreds of people who have the courage to stand up and say, ‘We’re in the right, and we’re not going to take it anymore.’ ”

Buzbee joins Jim Larew, who was general counsel to former Gov. Chet Culver, and Des Moines lawyer Andrew Hope in representing the residents, who are seeking to make the case a class action that anyone living within three miles of the plant could join.

The petition filed Monday, Buzbee said, is “just the tip of the iceberg.”  He plans to file hundreds more cases. “It’s going to cost a lot of money,” he said. “It’s going to be a big fight.”

Three separate Center for Public Integrity investigations examining toxic air, green energy contracts and hazards in oil refineries have won 1^st place honors in the Society of Professional Journalists’ prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Awards.

The prizes, among the national winners in a contest attracting more than 1,700 entries, were awarded for:

• Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities: Produced in partnership with National Public Radio and the Investigative News Network — won top honors for Public Service in Online Journalism. The series explored how, more than two decades after enhancements to the Clean Air Act, many communities still suffer poisoned air and regulatory neglect. The Center’s main stories were written by Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Elizabeth Lucas and Emma Schwartz.
• Green Energy: Contracts, Connections and the Collapse of Solyndra: Written by Ronnie Greene in partnership with ABC News, won the top honor for Online Investigative reporting. The series of reports documented breakdowns in the process by which the Department of Energy awarded lucrative green energy grants and loans.
• Fueling Fears: Written by Jim Morris and Chris Hamby, won top honors in Online Non-deadline reporting. The reports examined worker and environmental hazards at America’s aging oil refineries.

The national prizes were announced this week, and will be presented at a July 20 ceremony at the National Press Club.