The Center for Public Integrity

By now images of the April 2010 Gulf oil spill are indelible: The rig engulfed in smoke, oil gushing into the ocean, beaches stained on the coast. These images defined the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history — and sealed BP PLC’s reputation as a corporate polluter.

But two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers and spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP was spewing a different kind of pollution — in a major case that has received far less attention.

This case involved dirtying the air around its refinery in Texas City. Throughout most of April and May of 2010, the Texas refinery belched massive amounts of pollutants — toxic chemicals including benzene, toluene and hydrogen sulfide — from a towering flare designed to burn only during emergencies. The single “emissions event,” as BP reported it to the state, triggered by an equipment breakdown, lasted 959 hours and 30 minutes — or 40 days.

“The release went so long,” said Bruce Clawson, of Texas City’s emergency response division, which tracks such incidents. “We’ve never had a release go that long before.”

Now two years later, with the Gulf spill legal maze including $4.5 billion in fines, corporate guilty pleas to 14 criminal charges and an Environmental Protection Agency ban of the company from new government contracts, the so called “40-day Release” case churns slowly ahead, with a $500 billion lawsuit pending in Texas District Court.

MIRA LOMA, Calif. – Lawyers alleging wage theft from mostly immigrant Latino contract workers at a Southern California warehouse complex took steps today to add Walmart as a defendant in an ongoing federal lawsuit.

The move is expected to draw the nation’s largest retailer into a case in which it had, heretofore, been tangentially involved – and raises questions about the human cost of Walmart’s tightly controlled supply chain, which relies heavily on contractors and subcontractors.

“Walmart employs a network of contractors and subcontractors who have habitually broken the law to keep their labor costs low and profit margins high,” Michael Rubin, a lawyer for the workers, contended in a written statement to the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting. “We believe Walmart knows exactly what is happening and is ultimately responsible for stealing millions of dollars from the low-wage warehouse workers who move Walmart merchandise.”

A court document filed today in Los Angeles claims, "Recent discovery has established that Walmart bears ultimate responsibility for the violations of state and federal law committed against plaintiff warehouse workers," who "perform hard physical labor for long hours with little pay under hot, hazardous, and dust-filled conditions, unloading and loading trucks destined for Walmart stores and distribution centers throughout the United States."

The class-action lawsuit, filed in October 2011, accuses the owner of the Mira Loma warehouse complex, Schneider Logistics Transloading and Distribution, and two staffing agencies of cheating contract workers out of pay.

WINDSOR, Ontario — When some women walk onto a factory floor, punch their time card at a food processing facility, or start their shift at the foundry, they are literally dying to go to work, union members and health care advocates say.

A study that showed women working in those industries have a higher risk for breast cancer raised calls for protection of those workers.

And after the study’s principal researchers presented the results of their work to about 40 people here Monday, the reaction was anger, rather than fear.

“We have to say enough is enough,” said Terry Weymouth, a skills co-ordinator with the Canadian Auto Workers. “We are not dying because we need jobs.

“It’s time we stand up and say this is not right,” she said. “We should be mad. One in nine women are diagnosed with breast cancer.”

The six-year study, published Monday in the journal Environmental Health, examined the occupational histories of 1,006 women in Essex and Kent counties who had breast cancer, and another 1,146 who did not.

The researchers, who came from Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., took into account factors like smoking, weight, alcohol use and other lifestyle and reproductive factors. The women in the study worked in auto parts plants, casinos, food canning factories, on farms, and in metalworking plants.

The researchers found that women who work in the automotive plastics industry were almost five times as likely to develop breast cancer, prior to menopause, as women in a control group.

Lead researcher James Brophy called the work “a local study that has far-reaching implications.”

A federal enforcement blitz targeting coal mines with potentially dangerous levels of dust found a host of violations at more than a dozen sites where conditions left miners at risk for developing black lung disease.

Following the April 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia, regulators have focused on problem mines under a new special enforcement program. The most recent round of inspections, however, used new criteria to target mines likely to have problems controlling the dust that can lead to black lung.

The inspections followed a Center for Public Integrity-NPR investigation that highlighted the resurgence of black lung disease and exposed widespread misconduct by coal companies and often-lax enforcement by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

In September, inspectors found more than 120 violations at 13 coal mines. Many companies failed to ventilate working areas properly and relied on broken-down equipment to suppress dust, citations allege. Two of the mines cited are owned by Robert Murray, who has lent strong support to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. A representative for Murray Energy Corp. could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The inspections focused heavily on mines in Appalachia, where the increase in black lung has been most dramatic. Overall, rates of the disease have declined since 1969, when, in a landmark law, Congress forced companies to control dust levels.

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.

Three Center for Public Integrity investigations examining environmental and health hazards have been honored in recent weeks with four national reporting prizes.

The investigative reports ranged from a year-long examination into clean air hazards in the U.S. to an exploration of how a rare kidney disease is killing laborers and confounding scientists across continents.

The work honored: