Travel Reference
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Kelley was also working with a group called the Southeast Texas Bucket Brigade, doing
grassroots air-quality measurement, in hope of filling the massive gaps in monitoring left
by industry and government. The figures available for refinery emissions, one environ-
mental lawyer told me, are based not so much on actual monitoring as on calculations made
by the EPA—calculations that can be decades old. As a result, it's nearly impossible to
know exactly what's drifting out of a refinery in any given week.
“Toxic exposure!” Kelley said. “You've got hydrogen sulfide. Benzene, a known carci-
nogen. Thirteen butadiene. Occasionally, you've got explosions that will rattle your win-
dows. Some people are living with storage tanks sixty feet from their backyards. If one of
those things went up, it would incinerate everything within a quarter block.” He had strong
words for the state regulators—“They have to actually do their jobs!”—as well as for the
Environmental Protection Agency, and before I knew it, he had become a one-man poetry
slam, performing a piece called “My Toxic Reality,” written after he'd spent a sleepless
night listening to his house being rattled by a nearby refinery flare.
In Kelley's pickup truck, we rode slowly through West Port Arthur, taking what he
called his “toxic tour” of the city. Until 1965 or so, he said, segregation meant that African
Americans weren't allowed to live anywhere but the West Side. It was no coincidence that
this was the part of town closest to the refineries, hemmed in by Valero and Motiva.
As we drove, Kelley told me his life story with the fluency of someone used to talking
to journalists. He grew up in Port Arthur in the 1960s and '70s, then joined the Navy and
ended up in California, where he became an actor and stuntman. In 2000, he came back to
Port Arthur for Mardi Gras and was shocked by the poverty and hopelessness he found.
“I would take these little walks,” he said. “And I started wondering, what the hell
happened?”
He decided to move back, hoping to find some way to help, and soon found himself
focused on the local environment: lobbying for better monitoring and enforcement, and
standing by the refinery gates with signs demanding change.
“I thought I'd be here two or three years when I came back,” he told me. “Now it's been
ten years, and I don't see no end to this environmental fight.”
We drove on, heading along West Seventh Street, the artery running from downtown,
through the poor neighborhoods, toward the bridge that crosses the ship channel. “People
are just appalled to even drive through here,” Kelley said. “They talk about building anoth-
er bridge, just so people don't have to drive down Seventh Street, so they don't have to go
through the West Side.”
He told me it was part of a larger pattern—a conspiracy, even—that threatened to starve
West Port Arthur out of existence. “I think a plan was developed,” he said. “A sinister plan.
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