Moving from the plant areas to downtown houston has brought a massive improvement in my health. I suspect that 4 years of living next to the plant has caused long-term damage ... but it's extremely difficult to prove anything, especially when there is no data at all that supports an assertion that my apartment was exposed to any leaks at all - not a single one of those near-daily emissions events was caught by the air quality monitoring stations, only a few were voluntarily reported to the EPA, and all of the emissions are permitted by the EPA / TCEQ either on an ongoing basis or one-off "forgiveness" basis after voluntary pro-active reporting.
In one unit that I personally worked in and was responsible for, an intern was analyzing our procedures for emptying our tanks of waste products and realized that we had been "illegally" venting (without a permit) a lot of vapor from a waste tank every couple weeks when the liquid was full and needed to be emptied into trucks for proper disposal. We told the state regulatory authority that we realized we were out of compliance, and asked for permission to continue doing it this way until we had time to fix it. We got permission to continue doing what we were doing for another 2 years, with options for additional extensions. So the "illegal" emissions became "legal" overnight once we reported ourselves, and there were no consequences for the 10+ years of "illegal" emissions. This is very typical - in general if a company "self-reports", they do not face any punishments, but will face some small punishments if the regulatory agencies are the ones who find the problem. This encourages companies to be upfront about acknowledging, reporting, and (eventually) fixing their own problems.
One woman I know worked in a facility that produced a chemical known to cause issues with pregnancies, and suffered 4 miscarriages while trying for a baby before she simply refused to go out into the plant she ran at all during her fifth pregnancy, which she successfully brought to term. It's still not cut-and-dry that the chemicals caused her miscarriages, and there's no hard "evidence" that she was even exposed to those chemicals at all, or in concentrations above EPA limits.
Unless a pipe bursts suddenly and coats you with a chemical and sends you to a hospital, it's very difficult to prove that you were ever really "exposed" to the chemical. Even if you do get an obvious harmful exposure, it's difficult to assign any long-term consequences to that particular exposure.
I'm with reaperman and have some first-hand experience too.
When you're inside the gates of a chemical plant, the vapors may or may not be as toxic as on the neighboring property.
Whether or not the neighbor is residential or another chemical plant.
Depends on where you are.
And everything is supposed to be within OSHA limits, but many times there will be a concentrated location within the plant which is the source responsible for making the whole place barely pass the monitoring they do have. There can be upsets but also some routine or occasional releases which can add up.
If you really simplified, a new plant can be justified for the production of one particular chemical. When they build a plant all by itself way out in an otherwise undeveloped area, there may be a huge quantity of final product (sometimes 100% toxic) being handled that was not being done before, but the variety of chemicals in the vicinity will be very small compared to what you find among the neighbors when they build a plant within a chemical complex. Louisiana has some real bad chemical concentrations too.
For all the time you spend within the gate there, you really need to spend the rest of your time as far removed from those exact same toxins as you can reasonably do. I say any kind of toxin requires a detox period.
When I'm in downtown Houston it's like night & day, but it's still Houston. I think the pollution in central Houston is more from traffic. Spend a weekend twice as far away in the woods outside of Conroe or something, and when I get back it makes me want to change my indoor air purifiers.
Anyway, I came intentionally to work in the industrial environment and it was much rougher for miles around back in the late 1970's. Plus it was plain to see if you wanted to inhibit the proliferation of toxicity to unspoiled parts of the country, you would be better building within established complexes precisely because this is where total abatement is likely to be furthest out-of-reach forever. Besides, it's already been that way since before anybody living was even born.
Didn't Apple start out in California and witness the environmental disparity as it evolved?
From what I know you're not welcome to work with any kind of chemicals in California for decades now, much less research involving chemicals themselves. Not unless you're willing to settle for greatly reduced progress than you could make in so many other places.
It's got to be a dingbat move trying this in a California neighborhood.
Why not a neighborhood that arose (healthwise or not) because of its proximity to the plants?
In one unit that I personally worked in and was responsible for, an intern was analyzing our procedures for emptying our tanks of waste products and realized that we had been "illegally" venting (without a permit) a lot of vapor from a waste tank every couple weeks when the liquid was full and needed to be emptied into trucks for proper disposal. We told the state regulatory authority that we realized we were out of compliance, and asked for permission to continue doing it this way until we had time to fix it. We got permission to continue doing what we were doing for another 2 years, with options for additional extensions. So the "illegal" emissions became "legal" overnight once we reported ourselves, and there were no consequences for the 10+ years of "illegal" emissions. This is very typical - in general if a company "self-reports", they do not face any punishments, but will face some small punishments if the regulatory agencies are the ones who find the problem. This encourages companies to be upfront about acknowledging, reporting, and (eventually) fixing their own problems.
One woman I know worked in a facility that produced a chemical known to cause issues with pregnancies, and suffered 4 miscarriages while trying for a baby before she simply refused to go out into the plant she ran at all during her fifth pregnancy, which she successfully brought to term. It's still not cut-and-dry that the chemicals caused her miscarriages, and there's no hard "evidence" that she was even exposed to those chemicals at all, or in concentrations above EPA limits.
Unless a pipe bursts suddenly and coats you with a chemical and sends you to a hospital, it's very difficult to prove that you were ever really "exposed" to the chemical. Even if you do get an obvious harmful exposure, it's difficult to assign any long-term consequences to that particular exposure.