Credit the following to the authors, Steve Taylor and Claudia Perez-Rivas of Steve Taylor the Rio Grande Guardian. They will be publishing more articles on Mission at the Rio Grande Guardian, www.riograndeguardian.com.
Indian students compare notes on Mission chemical plant and Bhopal disaster
By Steve Taylor and Claudia Perez-Rivas
Gauri Karve (photo by Guillermo Sosa)
MISSION - A group of graduate students from India visited Mission over the weekend to compare similarities between the city’s highly contaminated old Hayes-Sammons chemical plant and the Bhopal gas leak disaster.
The students, who study at the University of Texas at Austin, were given a tour of the former mixing plant and warehouses Saturday and introduced to Mission residents with chronic medical conditions.
Ester Salinas, a local community activist, and Iris Salinas, a journalist who runs a Web site about the Mission chemical plant and who is also a congresswoman for La Raza Unida's environmental committee, organized the tour. UT-Austin students in the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) organization and young activists from the United Farm Workers also participated.
“We are here to learn more about the Mission struggle, to share our experiences, and to offer our solidarity,” said Gauri Karve, an engineer and member of the Association for India’s Development.
“I think there are a number of similarities between Mission and Bhopal. In both cases, poor communities were exploited. In both cases, the chemical plants were not cleaned up.”
Karve told the story of Bhopal. On a December night in 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanine over a city with a population of a half a million people.
“Union Carbide had turned off all the safety systems and all the safety alarms to save money. So, people were gassed to death in their sleep,” Karve said. “3,000 people died in the first three days. After all this happened, Union Carbide left the country and left all the toxins. The factory still exists in the center of the city. And they got away with it.”
Some reports suggest as many as 20,000 people died as a result of the gas leak, with more than 120,000 still suffering from ailments caused by the subsequent pollution. The ailments include blindness, breathing difficulties, and gynecological disorders.
In 1999, local groundwater and well-water testing near the site of the Bhopal accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and six million times those expected. Cancer, brain damage, and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water.
“What we are trying to do is correct what has gone wrong and get the communities the medical help they need, the economic rehabilitation and the clean water that they need,” Karve said.
“A tanker comes once a week; they get two buckets of water. How are you supposed to survive? How is a family supposed to survive, it’s impossible. It’s very sad.”
Ester Salinas said there was a direct link between Bhopal and the Hayes-Sammons site. “When they closed one of our plants down in 1976, Monsanto and Dow took the poisons to India,” Salinas said. After the disaster, Union Carbide was bought out by Dow Chemicals. Ester Salinas said Dow was one the companies named in a lawsuit Mission residents have filed.
A report released in January by the Environmental Protection Agency showed that the levels of four chemicals found in the soil at the Mission plant were more than 100 times greater than the state of Texas allows for industrial sites. The report also found that pesticides that destroy hormone systems in the body are present at alarmingly high levels.
Iris Salinas gave the visiting students a potted history of the Mission chemical plant. She said that the Nazis were the first to experiment with deadly chemicals during World War II. When the war was over, she said, scientists in the United States began diluting the same chemicals so that the mixtures only killed pests. She said Valley farmers welcomed the arrival of the Mission chemical plant in the late 1940s because they thought fertilizers were being produced.
The students heard how the Mission plant used to produce 54 chemicals. Of these, eight have since been declared among the most hazardous contaminants known to man: Aldrin, Chlordane, DDT, Dieldrin, Endrin, Endrine Keytone, Heptachlor, and Toxaphene.
Iris Salinas said ample documentation had been collated over the years to show the negative impact the chemicals had on the neighborhood, with official reports of dermatitis outbreaks and the discovery of dead fish and birds. “We’ve got cancer clusters, sarcoma clusters, carcinoma clusters. TCEQ and EPA have a responsibility but they are not addressing them,” she said.
The students got to meet 76-year-old Mission resident Jose Garza, who, as a young man, used to gather grapefruit and oranges from around the chemical plant for his family. He also used to buy Chlordane, DDT and Toxaphene from the plant to kill the cockroaches in his house.
“We did not know anything about the chemicals in those days,” Garza told the Guardian. “They used to dig a hole and bury the powder and the fruit. When the hole was filled, they would cover it and start another one. I went in and grabbed the fruit. We never knew.”
Garza was a keen photographer and some of his photos of flooding in Mission in the 1950s and 1960s were on display. “We had no drainage or sewers and the floodwater was contaminated. The fire department used to get us out with boats, on Conway Street,” he said. Garza told how some of his family members have since developed tumors.
The students also visited Joe Salinas, a disabled man who lives across the road from the mixing plant. Salinas' home is considered the most contaminated in Mission. Instead of utilizing a smoke stack, exhaust from the plant was blown out by a fan in the roof directly into the neighborhood. Joe Salinas told how, before the plant was opened, his mother would win prizes for her gardening. After the plant opened, white dust engulfed everything, he said, and now nothing grows.
Iris Salinas declared the tour a great success. She said many thought the story of the Mission chemical plant and its “devastating impact” on residents and the environment would die out as its former workers passed away. She said that was not the case.
“They never counted on students finding out about this, having access to the Internet and feeling passionate about this,” said, Salinas who is also chair of MEChA's environmental committee. “We are getting a lot of ‘hits’ from everywhere and a lot of it is because students are raising awareness. They are talking to each other. We are making history with this. It is bigger than Mission.”
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