Vol. 74/No. 36      September 27, 2010

“You are the first candidate that has come to talk about this,” Gordy Santikos, who lives less than a mile from the refinery, told Warshell as he shook his hand. Santikos moved to Texas City, an industrial city of 47,000 about 35 miles south of Houston, in 2008. Hurricane Ike had destroyed his house across the bay on Galveston Island.

BP has admitted to releasing more than 500,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air from April 6 to May 16, including the carcinogen benzene, after a fire broke out in the refinery’s ultracracker unit. This same unit was the site of a fire in the summer of 2005, just a few months after a blast killed 15 workers at the refinery and injured more than 170.

Since 2005 three more workers and a supervisor have died on the job at the refinery. Two chemical releases sent more than 130 people to the hospital in 2007.

After the release of the toxic materials in April and May, BP officials say they filed the necessary paperwork with state agencies and that the emissions were not hazardous to residents or refinery workers. Neither the company nor any state agency informed Texas City residents about the venting. Those in and around the plant, many of whom had developed symptoms including chest congestion, coughing, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and skin rashes first found out about the release from an article in the June 5 Galveston County Daily News.

On August 3, more than 2,000 people filed a federal class action lawsuit against BP. The next day another 3,000 people lined up outside the city’s Nessler Center to join the suit.

The company claims that air quality monitoring devices on the fence of its refinery didn’t show a dangerous level of contaminants over the 40 days. “We should have monitors on each of our houses so that we can see for ourselves and take action when there is a problem,” said Santikos.

“They sure should have them at all the schools so we know when or if the kids are getting blasted by the stuff,” he said. “They call this a safe level but it’s not. They vent gases all the time.”

Warshell said that no worker has to die in order to produce petroleum and that workers must exercise direct control over the pace and conditions of production. “The Socialist Workers Party calls for workers control of safety on each job site to enforce safe operations and prevent injuries, deaths, and disasters,” he said.

Elton Howard, a retired chemical plant worker and longtime unionist who worked for Dow Chemical here for years, told Ulman, “They have used every trick in the book to weaken the unions and ignore safety. These companies act as if it is okay to make us sick, that nothing can be done. There’s plenty that can be done and neither BP nor the government are doing it.”
 
 
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