n the afternoon of October 7, 1999, Amanda Maynard, a Deer Park High School cross-country racer, started her daily training run. After a few minutes, Maynard was coughing violently and gasping for air. She struggled back to school, where she found her teammates similarly afflicted. When Maynard's mother, Louann Barnett, came back from work that afternoon, her daughter was home in bed. "She couldn't stop coughing," recalls Barnett. "This was a kid who'd been to the doctor maybe five times in her life."
The following morning, Barnett noticed that the air looked and smelled especially bad. Residents of Deer Park, a Houston suburb, get used to foul air; the community is virtually surrounded by a sprawling belt of petrochemical plants and oil refineries, each an apocalyptic mass of belching smokestacks and steaming reactors. But that day, says Barnett, "it was pea-green outside." She called city and county officials, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and everyone else she could think of -- to no avail. "I wanted to know what made my daughter sick that day," she says. "I never got any kind of response at all."
But Barnett did find an explanation in the newspaper: Deer Park's ozone (smog) level that day had been twice the legal maximum set by federal law. At 251 parts per billion, it was the highest reading in the Houston area in a decade. Environmental officials suspected that the ozone spike had been caused by an illegal chemical release from one of the twenty-five industrial plants directly upwind.
The incident was merely the worst in a series of ozone exceedences that had Houston ranked as the smoggiest city in the United States that year. And unlike in Los Angeles, where the smog comes mostly from automobiles, in Houston much of it is due to the heavy industrial development in Harris County. More than 120 chemical plants, oil refineries, and petrochemical storage terminals are clustered in the eastern part of the county. Ozone is just one of the hazards they create. According to EPA statistics, industries in Harris County released more than 25 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air in 1999 -- third highest of any county in the nation.
Is life in Harris County hazardous to your health? Definitive evidence is lacking, but numerous studies of the individual chemicals emitted suggest the answer is yes. And in 1999, the city of Houston commissioned an air quality report from independent out-of-state researchers. By comparing Houston's air pollution levels with the results of toxics health-effects studies performed elsewhere in the country, the authors estimated that 400 people die every year in the area because of ozone and fine airborne particles alone. In fact, most medical professionals acknowledge (at least privately) that exposure to the masses of chemicals in the air has its consequences. "There's no question that there is some risk associated with living in the chemical soup that we've created," allows Chip Carson, an assistant professor of occupational medicine at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. But Carson is cautious. "There is so little known about the effects of mixed exposures," he emphasizes.
Apparently, the local medical research institutes are content to let it stay that way.
