Thomas Environment

The Other end of BP’s pipeline - From the Alberta TAR SANDS to BP’s Whiting Refinery.

via [ Democracy Now ] Indigenous Groups Lead Struggle Against Canada’s Tar Sands

Thomas Energy, Environment

via [ NWI Times ] “Volunteers from BP dig in at nature park - EAST CHICAGO SITE TAKES SHAPE WITH HELP OF REFINERY WORKERS” By Steve Zabroski

TONY V. MARTIN | THE TIMES Ty-Azia Leonard, left, and Briana Smith, both 12 and from East Chicago, on Thursday hold some of the plants used to make the garden area between Block Junior High School and Franklin Academy in East Chicago

EAST CHICAGO | An expansive nature park envisioned by Indiana Harbor students took shape Thursday through the volunteer efforts of an international group of oil workers.

“It’s all about giving something back,” Corey Webster, a heavy equipment operator at the BP refinery in Whiting, said of the annual community service projects that are a part of the event known as the BP Classic.

Fifth-grade students at Franklin Academy wanted to replace the lawn at their school with a landscaped garden of native plants and found help from the BP volunteers and the Maryland-based Wildlife Habitat Council.

“They’re playing a major role in the installation,” said Ryan Templeton, coordinator with the Wildlife Habitat Council, as summer school classes ended and successive waves of students joined in the digging and planting of echinacea, coreopsis, rudbeckia, alium, panicum and koleria.

“They’re replacing a sustainable dune-and-swale habitat that’s mostly gone now,” Templeton said. “We hope (the garden) will be established as a teaching tool.”

The BP Classic began 26 years ago as a softball challenge between workers at the then-Amoco Whiting refinery and colleagues at a similar facility in Texas City, Texas.

Heavy rains during the competition’s third year in Arkansas led to participants filling sand bags to prevent flooding at nearby farms, and the community service component was born, said John Amato, of Texas City, who has been participating for 15 years.

“We enjoy the community service,” said Pete Nichols, of Texas City, who retired in 2008 but continues with the annual event as he has for the past 18 years. “It’s people that make the company.”

“It’s like a family reunion,” Amato said. “You get together and see everyone’s kids growing up.”

The volunteers don’t just toil in the sun — today they will golf at Aberdeen Country Club in Valparaiso, and Saturday the two-dozen BP workers will join 200 others in Whiting for a 5-kilometer run to benefit the Whiting Food Pantry and the city’s new history museum.

Over the years, the classic has been held in every state in which BP operates a facility, including the province of Alberta in Canada.

The workers pay all of their own expenses and are expected to use valuable vacation days for the time away from their jobs.

“It’s a passion for many employees,” Webster said. “This is an outstanding project for us and for the students.”

This is perhaps the Grossest example of exploitation journalism I have ever read, and they are using my neighbor’s children, who live and suffer under the plume of BP, as a vehicle to fix BP’s image.

I would like to refer to a previous post. [ { BP } Live / Work Conditions ]

Thomas Environment

Thomas The Water I Drink

We all remember these ads from BP. You couldn’t miss them, they were all over the airwaves.

Thomas Energy, Environment

via [ Post Trib ] “Rainbow-Push Leader Leads BP Spill Protest” By Christin Nance Lazerus

Photo by Stephanie Dowell/Post-Tribune

As crews struggle to contain the largest oil spill in American history in the Gulf of Mexico, critics of BP are starting to turn up the heat.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson led a group of protesters on a march outside of BP’s Whiting refinery on Wednesday afternoon to focus attention on what he says is the lax environmental enforcement that allowed the Gulf oil spill to occur — and problems closer to home.

“We need the (Environmental Protection Agency) standards enforced,” Jackson said. “At this point, businesses look at EPA fines as the cost of doing business.

“This reckless behavior is a threat to us all,” the Rainbow-PUSH leader said.

About 20 pickets walked along the busy stretch of Indianapolis Boulevard, carrying signs emblazoned with “Spill Baby Spill?,” “We Want Clean Energy,” and “Don’t Pay the Bill for the Spill.”

Jackson and Sierra Club Illinois director Jack Darin criticized BP for its $3 billion expansion of the Whiting refinery, which could see an increase the pollution due to processing oil from tar sands.

“There is a tragedy occurring right here in our midst,” Jackson said. “We all deserve the right to breathe free.”

Many of the protesters belong to Greater First Church in East Chicago.

Bishop T. Lane Grant II criticized the air and wastewater permits approved for BP by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

“There’s no plan to ensure that BP wouldn’t continue violations,” Grant said.

East Chicago resident Tanya Moss said concern about the Gulf oil spill prompted her to act.

“We want to to make sure they take every safety precaution,” Moss said. “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their ‘oops,’ since they wouldn’t pay for my ‘oops’.”

Darin said he hopes this critical time prompts political leaders to action on planning a cleaner energy future.

“We’re well positioned to act,” Darin said.

“We have a president who is pointing in that direction, and the House passed an energy bill. It’s one of big things on senate’s agenda this summer.

“We want a future free of oil spills.”

Thomas Environment

• Pre-cautionary:

if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.

• Post-cautionary:

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, the lack of full scientific certainty shall be used as a reason for not implementing cost-effective measures until after the environmental degradation has actually occurred

Thomas Environment

H2oil animated sequences from Dale Hayward on Vimeo.

Thomas Energy, Environment

via [ Huffington Post ]

As BP’s Earth Day Disaster continues to spread beyond the Gulf more and more questions are being asked.

Thomas Energy, Environment

via [ WBEZ - Chicago Public Radio ] Worldview Segment “Will the Gulf Spill Affect BP Investment in Chicago Area? By Michael Puente.

Officials with the oil giant BP say it’s recovering about 3-thousand barrels of oil a day from that huge leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The company is spending millions to stop the leak and may have to shell out billions more in cleanup costs and economic losses to the region.

Closer to home, in Northwest Indiana, there’s concern that all this expense may affect BP’s multi-billion-dollar investment in its Whiting, Indiana refinery, just a few short miles from Chicago’s city limits.

The Gulf catastrophe also has emboldened BP’s local critics about the company’s environmental record here.

WBEZ’s Michael Puente brings us this report from our Northwest Indiana bureau in Chesterton

Michael’s Interview with me comes toward the end at the 6:10 minute point

Thomas Energy, Environment

Early this morning, Marian Byrnes, the longtime environmental activist of the Calumet Region passed away.

“Her incredible legacy will be remembered in all of our hearts, and future generations will hear stories about her strength, vision, wisdom, and compassion for nature. Without her endless pursuit of open space protection in the Calumet region, many acres of invaluable wetlands, prairies and forests would surely have been lost. A debt of gratitude is owed to her for her years of dedication and service to both people and nature. I am simply humbled by all she accomplished.”

- Nicole Kamins

Thomas Environment

via [ Post Trib ] “Anti-pollution plan subject of hearing - Grace Davison wants to install diffuser to reduce the toxicity of salt discharges” By Gitte Laasby

EAST CHICAGO — Enough people were concerned about Grace Davison’s proposal to put a diffuser in the Grand Calumet River to dilute pollution that the Indiana Department of Environmental Management has decided to hold a hearing on it.

As the Post-Tribune reported on March 26, the chemical manufacturer in East Chicago has been allowed for the past four years to discharge enough acid salt into the Grand Calumet River to kill at least 85 percent of certain small water critters. To make the salt less toxic, the company wants to put in a diffuser to dilute the pollution.

If you go

What: Public hearing on Grace Davison request to put a diffuser in the Grand Calumet River.

Where: Indiana University Northwest, library conference center room LC 105 abc, 3400 Broadway, Gary.

When: 6 p.m. Wednesday, May 26.

For more information: You can view the application and draft documents at the Lake County Health Department, the Gary Health Department, the main branch of the Gary Public Library and at IDEM’s regional office at 8380 Louisiana St. in Merrillville.

How to comment

Questions can be directed to

Ms. Nahir Bacardi, Office of Water Quality/NPDES permits branch, Indiana Department of Environmental Management, 100 N. Senate Ave. (mail code: 65-42), Indianapolis, IN 46204-2251. Phone: (317) 234-4222 or e-mail nbacardi@idem.in.gov. Comments must be postmarked by June 11.

IDEM didn’t initially plan a public hearing but decided to hold one after five Post-Tribune readers requested it.

“The public meeting… is being held to address the concerns of all interested parties prior to a final determination on the proposal,” IDEM said in a public notice.

The hearing will be held on May 26 and is supposed to provide information about the application and allow public participation. IDEM has also made the company’s application available for public review at various local places including IDEM’s Merrillville branch.

In 2006, IDEM permitted Grace Davison to discharge an average 39,000 pounds of sulfates (salt) per day into the Grand Calumet River just east of Kennedy Avenue.

As a condition, the company had to conduct monthly lab tests for six months on how toxic the discharge was to two kinds of water fleas and the fish fathead minnow.

The company’s 2007 lab tests showed that at least 85 percent of the critters died when exposed to undiluted wastewater.

The wastewater had well below the concentration of salt that IDEM allowed.

Thomas The Water I Drink

25-years-ago BP abandoned its professional training facilities in Robertsdale, donating the facilities to Calumet College, and moved to a 200-acre LEED certified campus in Naperville. They did so because they could no longer attract professionals to this location due to Quality of Life issues. Quality of Life issues they had a major hand in creating.

Today BP’s professional staff enjoy the healthy work environment of a green campus with ample buffering between office buildings and roadways, while residents adjacent to the BP’s refinery are not so fortunate. Today BP is constructing a whole new facility at their East Chicago / Whiting Refinery to refine the “No Good, Very Bad, Dirty” heavy sour crude from the Alberta Tars Sands and to do so they are constructing 6 cokers directly across the street from the Marktown Historic District where more than 120 children under the age of 18 live, play and sleep.

BP likes to refer to the project as a modernization or retooling project. This is an important distinction to them because to call it what is, a “new facility” or “new construction,” would trigger all sorts of regulatory reviews and permitting, including a new-source review requiring an environmental and health risk assessment. I am not certain if there has ever been a risk assessment done on the impacts the BP refinery has the neighboring communities. I don’t know if that is because they have been grandfathered in or what. I just know that new construction ought to trigger a new source review and that is not happening.

For labor purposes BP calls the project a “maintenance project.” Thus they bypass all sorts of labor rules in terms of pay, scheduling, and work conditions as would be the case for new construction. Let’s make this simple, if I tore down my house to construct a brand new home, I could not go to City Hall seeking a maintenance permit for the new construction. I would be required to seek the proper permits and follow requirements for new construction. This is just one way in which BP has been cutting corners here to save themselves costs. I can’t say what other cost cutting measures BP is making, but I do know they did not do this without the aid of regional leadership. I wonder what our regional leadership is thinking now as we learn more about the costs of BP practices to the gulf region.

This is a good environmental justice example of how benefits-without-risks are created and separated from risks-without-benefits in a free-market economy. Free-market corporations and present day land use policies have a very intentional consequent of accumulating wealth and benefits in one location while clustering risks and blight in another. All too often the geography of separation is as clear as the “Northshore” and “Southshore” designations.

It makes me wonder if anyone working in office complexes similar to the BP complex in Naperville feel any sense of culpability for the lives negatively impacted on the other side of their company’s production line. What about Kraft Foods? what about Grainger? what about Cargill? and U.S. Steel? and ArcelorMittal? Boeing? GATX? or Ryerson?

[ Wikipedia list of Corp HQ in the Chicago Met area ]

Compounding problems, BP extracted an additional $165 million in tax abatements from the mostly poor people of Marktown and East Chicago. They did this behind closed doors, and without a single public hearing, all while lecturing the region on “Good Government.” Despite efforts, residents, who pay the highest property taxes in the state at 7.4%, still do not know that they gave up $165 million to BP. BP accomplished this feat by spreading the wealth to voting districts outside the plume of negative externalities while taking advantage of their partnerships with corrupt local political enterprises under the plume. BP is well known for this form of philanthropic activity and I could go on about “to whom” and “how much” was given, but that will have to be for another post. Let these two examples suffice for now.

Three years ago a $25-million donation from BP capped Phase 1 of a three-part expansion and renovation campaign. Since 2002, BP had agreed to more than $125 million in state and regional legal settlements over pollution problems.

Art museums are often the beneficiaries of largess from corporations wishing to polish their sometimes less-than-gleaming image. (Cigarette, anyone?) Oops.

via [ LA Times ] BP Grand Entrance at LACMA looking not-quite-so-grand

In 2009 BP gave to Napperville for $1 an extremely expensive Hydrogen fueling station with multipliers of positive effects.

Thomas East Chicago Portrait Series, Energy, Environment

This video reminds me a lot of how political and regulatory authorities in Northwest Indiana behaved when BP was seeking permits to retool their facilities to refine the Alberta Tar Sands in East Chicago

Thomas Energy, Environment

[ The Gulf Oil Slick ]

Thomas Environment

Like most fence line industrial communities Northwest Indiana’s political attitudes toward environmental issues are determined by local industrial interests.

Northwest Indiana is a Big Oil & Big Steel region.

When faced with the kinds of environmental devastration that I have illustrated on this blog elected officials have the all too familiar instinct to double-down on their love of these industries.

A simple thought - Solve the environmental problems for fence-line industrial communities and you solve the problem for middle-class America and the causes of global warming.

Thomas Environment, Northwest Indiana

Yeah, we do, and we need more information than just these photos.

Thomas Energy, Environment

UNDER THE PLUME OF PERMITTING

Thomas Environment, Information Graphics, Ways of Seeing

Sometimes it takes a disaster like the Earth Day Disaster to realize our hometowns and our future have been colonized.

Thomas East Chicago Portrait Series, Economics, Energy, Environment, Infrastructure, Politics

[ Skafish ]

Another by-product of East Chicago.

Thomas The Air I Breath, Ways of Seeing