Living on the Fence Line

09/19/2003

Only a barbed wire fence separates the residential community from the oil refineries and chemical plants in Port Arthur, Texas. Local activists are trying to force companies to improve their safety standards and reduce the emissions that, many believe, are causing health problems.

CURWOOD: People along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast face some big challenges when it comes to sharing a neighborhood with industry. They live alongside the largest concentration of petrochemical plants and oil refineries in the nation. Some five hundred of these facilities run from Houston along the upper Gulf Coast. And unplanned releases of hazardous chemicals are frequent. These accidents have become a way of life for people who, as they call it, live on the fenceline. But not everyone accepts the status quo.

Producer Deepa Donde reports from Port Arthur, Texas.

[COUNTRY MUSIC]

DONDE: Port Arthur, population 58,000, is at the far tip of the Texas coastal marshland, about 90 miles east of Houston. As you approach, signs for Spindletop, the first American oil gusher, and Janis Joplin???s hometown museum pop up on your left.

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

DONDE: Nearer still, plumes of white smoke rise from the treetop ??? the green wall between the highway and the gulf coast refineries. The plants seem hidden but they have been here since the oil boom at the turn of the 20th century. And so have generations of Port Arthur residents.

KELLEY: See the housing projects over there? That???s where I was born, right there and my grandmother used to walk from there all the way down what we call Dunt Road.

DONDE: Hilton Kelley recently came back to Port Arthur from Hollywood. He had plenty of work there, in film and television, and his Screen Actors Guild card is still current. Kelley says he always knew he wanted to inspire kids with his success. But when he did come back, what struck him was the air.

KELLEY: I grew up looking at an orange sky. I thought it was normal until I moved away, went to California and found out that hey, at night the sky didn???t have to be a bright glowing orange. You didn't have to smell sulfur all day long.

DONDE: In a freshly pressed shirt and khaki linen shorts, Hilton Kelley stands before a barbed wire fence. It divides some thirty houses from a tank farm, dozens of smokestacks, and a maze of piping.

KELLEY: And you can see the refineries right there, bordering this community.

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