Nelson suspects the towering plants and refineries are to blame, rising like a lit-up city at night around her squat brick apartment building in the rugged Texas Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur. Ask Nelson what protection the federal government and plant operators provide her African American community
HOUSTON — Danielle Nelson’s best monitor for the emissions billowing out of the oil refineries and chemical plants surrounding her home: The heaving chest of her 9-year-old asthmatic son.
Under President Donald Trump, federal regulatory changes are slashing requirements on industry to monitor, report and reduce toxic pollutants, heavy metals and climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions, and to work transparently with communities to prevent plant disasters — such as the half-dozen major chemical fires and explosions that have killed workers and disrupted life along the Texas Gulf Coast over the past year alone.
But environmentalists call the EPA's waiver during the coronavirus crisis the latest in a series of alarming moves. During the Obama administration, Kelley traveled to Washington for signing ceremonies for rules tightening regulations on pollutants and other health threats, and requiring industries to do more to report hazardous emissions. These days, Kelley's trips to Washington are to protest rollbacks relaxing those rules.
Even before the Trump administration began the rollbacks, Houston’s urban freeways and industries were pumping enough poisonous refinery chemicals, heavy metals, and diesel and car exhaust to “almost certainly” be to blame for some respiratory problems and early deaths, as well as an “unacceptable increased risk” for cancers and chronic disease, concluded a landmark city task force, started in 2005 to study the health impacts.
One recent day, 50-year-old Felicia Lacy hummed a hymn in the early-morning darkness as she nuzzled her 4-year-old granddaughter, Kdynn, who lay in bed with a plastic oxygen mask on her face. Lacy wakes the girl at 5:30 a.m each morning for an hour of asthma treatment. Port Arthur and Houston residents say it's difficult to find out from authorities what they're breathing and how bad it is.
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