A Texas chemical plant spent years running from clean air laws. New evidence suggests it bent the law.
, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions. The project was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Michael Holtham, Oxbow’s plant manager, had been preparing for this moment. He had been on the job for nearly a decade. He loved coordinating his 60-person team and had enjoyed watching many of them grow in their jobs. But they were now facing a new challenge., or TCEQ, was allowing Oxbow to capture nearly real-time data from the monitor.
Jacody Boone, 28, a native of Port Arthur, lives about two miles from the Oxbow plant. “People feel like they’re getting sick or their chest is cloudy,” he said.Abraham Lincoln Middle School, which has more than 700 students, is about 1.5 miles from the Oxbow plant.Homes on Foley Avenue between West Fifth and West Sixth Street are just two miles north of Oxbow’s Port Arthur facility. Residents in the area describe a sulfurous odor in the area that just “stink, stink, stink.
Oxbow acknowledges in court records that these “experiments” were conducted for at least a year. But a Grist analysis of 2.5 years of internal operational data shows that, for at least another year, Oxbow’s kiln modifications continued — and occurred primarily when the wind blew in the direction of the air monitor, a likely violation of the Clean Air Act.
According to the latest public data, Oxbow still emits more sulfur dioxide than any facility in Texas aside from five coal- and gas-fired power plants. One simple but pricey solution is to install sulfur dioxide scrubbers, which run emissions through a slurry of chemicals to mitigate their toxicity. But for at least three decades, in four different states, Oxbow has been trying to outrun environmental regulations that might require this expensive step.
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