Emmett Dunn lives in a modest ranch house in Southeast Houston's Manchester neighborhood, a working-class residential area that borders the petrochemical complex along the Houston Ship Channel. A fence divides Dunn's back yard from the Texas Petrochemical refinery, though it does nothing to protect Dunn from the plant's noise, odors and toxic gas releases that he blames for stunting the vegetables in his small garden plot and turning his new white roof charcoal-gray in less than two years.
The refinery's flare burns just a few hundred yards beyond Dunn's property line. When its emissions are highest, usually during rainy or stormy weather that prompts more accidental releases, or "upsets," Dunn notices that his eyes and throat burn. He also guesses that the skin lesions that have bothered him for the past few years are connected to what's coming out of the stack.
 |
| Emmett Dunn surveys the Texas Petrochemical refinery from his back yard (Photo/Carlos Antonio Rios) |
When Dunn got an invitation from Houston Chronicle environment reporter Dina Cappiello to participate in an air-quality monitoring study conducted by the newspaper, he took the opportunity to find out exactly what he was breathing.
With $20,000 in funding from the Chronicle, Cappiello set up the study that monitored the air in four neighborhoods adjacent to some of the state's largest oil refineries and chemical plants along the 50-mile-long Ship Channel during the summer of 2004. One hundred monitors were hung at homes, public parks and playgrounds, with the help of 84 volunteers who offered their residences as test sites. The results were analyzed for 18 chemicals known to pose human health hazards, including cancer, kidney and liver damage.
Dunn found out that benzene levels in his community were so high that one scientist said living there "would be like sitting in traffic 24/7," Cappiello reported. Four other homes in Allendale, a mostly Hispanic neighborhood near Manchester, showed levels of another known carcinogen, the rubber ingredient 1,3-butadiene, at levels 20 times higher than federal guidelines used for toxic waste dumps.
At 49 of the 100 sites, the Chronicle found quantities of up to five different chemicals that exceeded levels considered safe in other states with stricter guidelines for air toxics. Three compounds measured consistently higher than the EPA's screening level, the national standard for acceptable exposure. All of the compounds found at elevated levels have been linked to cancer.
Dunn shared his story with a busload of journalists in his backyard during a Sept. 29 Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) field trip led by Cappiello, whose 5-part series based on the study, "In Harm's Way," appeared in the Chronicle in January 2005. Cappiello in turn shared the results of her reporting on the all-day tour of the Ship Channel corridor that also brought participants face to face with industry executives, state environmental regulators, and activists. On the tour were Ted Scripps Fellow Jeff Johnson, who writes for Chemical and Engineering News, and CEJ News/Views editor, yours truly.
The series received SEJ's new Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting, Print, at the organization's annual awards presentation during its conference held Sept. 28-Oct. 2 in Austin, Texas. The stories' impact has been dramatic, and Cappiello, 31, has set an impressive standard for her colleagues.
We spoke with Cappiello in early November to learn more about "the story behind the story."
When she joined the Chronicle as its environment reporter in 2002, Cappiello knew her beat would cover the Ship Channel and petrochemical industry, and that it would include major corporations such as Exxon-Mobil, Shell and BP. While she had covered PCB contamination of the Hudson River as a reporter for the Albany Times-Union before moving to Texas, most of that pollution had occurred as a result of actions years before. In Houston, air pollution is a current and ongoing issue, and that angle appealed to Cappiello's reporting interests. "Contamination happens every day," she said.
After a year or so on her beat, she recognized a pattern in certain events. "What I saw happening over and over again was there would be these releases – upsets, they're called – and I would hear from people that their eyes would run, their throats would burn." She would repeatedly follow up, calling state regulators and industry personnel, and they would repeatedly tell her, "There's nothing in the air."
"I covered that over and over again," she said, "and frankly, I got really frustrated…Something didn't add up."
Usually she did not think anyone was intentionally being deceptive, though "in one case I was outright lied to," she said, choosing not to name the company involved. "There was jet-black smoke in the air, a signal of incomplete combustion. I knew something was in the air, but how could I get at that?"
The answer, she concluded, was to set up her own monitoring project. With a B.S. in biology and a master's degree from Columbia University in Earth and Environmental Science Journalism, Cappiello had the knowledge not only to recognize incomplete combustion when she saw it, but to carry out a rigorous scientific study of the sort she knew was necessary to get credible results that made sense. "You have to make it air-tight," she said.
The next step was pitching the story to the Chronicle's projects desk. She spent several months doing her homework before drafting a lengthy memo outlining the story's methods, projected cost and timeframe. Not surprisingly, she recalls, her editors' response was initially lukewarm: "The air is polluted? What's new?"
The story Cappiello wanted to do "came out of my journalistic gut," she said, and she spent time pondering her reply. The news angle, she contended, was, "It's worse than you think, and how things work in Texas obscures that." As her coverage reveals, Texas air-quality standards are far more lax than most of the the nation's.
She convinced her editors the project was worth pursuing, and thus began a year-long process of research and reporting, funded with approximately $50,000 invested by the Chronicle. The work was all-consuming, and Cappiello had no bylines from August 2004 until the stories debuted in January, five months later.
The path to publication was fraught with challenges, most of them involving the logistics of getting data. Cappiello recalled the hundreds of hours she put in contacting, recruiting, training, interviewing and arranging photographs of her 84 volunteers. Many who lived in the neighborhoods she was studying worked in the industry and said, "No way, Jose," when she invited them to participate. Others were reluctant because they knew how much the plants provide economically to their communities.
"This is Texas," she explained, "A lot of these schools wouldn't exist without money from these chemical companies." Especially in the less-well-off fence-line communities, industry achieves much good will through its contributions, Cappiello said.
Ultimately, she found enough willing volunteers, though she also encountered obstacles of a more threatening sort. At a lunch she attended in Austin, a spokesman for the Texas Chemistry Council, an industry association, told her "their people" – lawyers, she presumed – "did a background check on me."
Even the feds got involved. "I can't say for certain this was sabotage," said Cappiello, but in one case the monitors that some Chronicle summer interns had placed in a public park were ordered removed by the FBI.
 |
| Children playing in Milby Park near Houston breathe dangerous air (Photo/Carlos Antonio Rios) |
The park was on land owned by one of the chemical companies, and word had made its way back. "The companies knew what we were doing," she said. The agents who forced her team to take the monitors down said the company had called them with "concerns about terrorism." "Calling a tiny monitor a possible bomb is a bit of a stretch," she said with wry understatement, but "we got no data near that facility."
Undaunted, Cappiello completed the study and the Chronicle had the data analyzed at a laboratory at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Publication of the results brought rapid and broad reaction, including legislative revisions in air toxics standards and voluntary commitments by several companies to further reduce their emissions of certain hazardous compounds.
But it was the public's response that was especially gratifying to Cappiello. The paper set up a hotline when the stories ran, which received hundreds of calls. She found satisfaction in knowing "that I got the discussion flowing on an issue that was taboo." One reader told her she had revealed "the elephant in the living room in Houston."
Most rewarding to Cappiello is "when people near the plants see a change." Dunn, however, noted that while the air smelled cleaner and the plant was quieter after the series appeared, within about two weeks he began to notice new releases from Texas Petrochemical's flare that gradually increased in frequency.
Clearly, Houston's chemical industry must remain an object of close scrutiny on Cappiello's environment beat. And she remains convinced that her reporting – and journalism generally – can make a difference, even in a climate where news often tends to be shaped by the commercial values of profit-driven media conglomerates.
The Chronicle, owned by the Hearst newspaper chain, "is the poster child – one of many poster children -- " for contemporary working conditions, Cappiello said. "We have a small staff, we have tight budgets. But what this series shows is that you've got to get the most bang for your buck. We got a lot of bang out of this. Certainly more than if we spread that $20,000 out somewhere else."
What the series' success shows, said Cappiello, is that "there's hope that you can set the agenda, and that agenda does not necessarily have to come from your readers." If the paper had done a market survey on topics its audience most wanted to read about, petrochemical industry releases or even air pollution probably wouldn't be high on the list, she said. But the huge response to her story from all strata of the public revealed that the interest was there, and perhaps people just didn't realize it.
 |
| Houston Chronicle reporter Dina Cappiello and photographer Carlos Antonio Rios |
She also applauds the Chronicle's public-service commitment, citing the decision to translate the entire series into Spanish for an audience that typically does not subscribe to the paper yet that is impacted by the findings. In today's tight financial climate, "that shows some hope," said Cappiello.
While the Chronicle's willingness to devote major resources to an in-depth investigative story may be unusual in contemporary journalism, Cappiello encourages fellow environment reporters, even those young in their careers as she is, to pursue such stories.
"Investigative reporting is essential to covering the environment," she emphasized. "Trust your journalistic sense," she advised. Share it with your editors. "Don't be afraid to ask, to pitch. You may be turned down, but you may not be turned down."
However, she stressed that it is essential to create a record of credibility and reliability first. "It doesn't matter that you have a degree in journalism from Columbia. It's about what you put in the paper…You have to set some kind of precedent. Every bit of your work reflects on you. Do your homework; do good work every single day. That gets you the people who will talk to you."
"In Harm's Way" is a finalist for the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, bestowed annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Dina Cappiello recently returned from New Orleans where she analyzed the National Response Center database for spills following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
No comments:
Post a Comment