Texas Public Radio’s "Texas Matters" is partnering with the non-profit newsroom Public Health Watch to highlight their reporting for the podcast, "Fumed."
Reporters with Public Health Watch have been exposing a developing story in Channelview, an unincorporated community outside Houston, which is in the heart of America’s petrochemical industry.
The podcast tells the story of some of the residents of Channelview who stood up and are demanding accountability for the industries.
For the people profiled in the podcast the pain of industrialization is real.
Last week a study by the Texas Department of State Health Services found “significantly greater than expected” rates of leukemia, lymphoma, cervix, lung and bronchus cancer on Harris County’s industrial east side.
“It should not be acceptable that our communities live with disproportionately high rates of cancer,” said Jackie Medcalf, the founder of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance, an environmental nonprofit group.
“The water, the air, the soil and the seafood in our community are contaminated, and we cannot ignore that any longer,” she said. The state’s cancer study was conducted at their request.
Harris County Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey spoke alongside Medcalf at a recent news conference. He called the situation “an atrocity.”
“We're not going to be quiet. We've been quiet far too long. People are dying because of our silence,” said Ramsey.
The reporting in the podcast examines communities in the floodplain of the San Jacinto River. There’s a Superfund site on the part of the river that flows past Channelview. It’s filled with dioxin, a chemical linked to most of the cancers identified in the study.
Listen along as Public Health Watch unpacks the stories of people who live in the shadows of America’s chemical plants and oil refineries. The reporting tracks two stubborn Texans as they try to salvage what’s left of their working-class community.
