Living on a Superfund Site, 1984-1991, by Anonymous
From MemoryArchive
Who: Anonymous What: Living on Superfund Site When: 1984-1991 Where: Houston,TX
The neighborhood where I was born and spent the first 7 years of my life in was your typical slice of suburban Americana. Kids rode their bikes up and down the streets, retreating inside during the evening for supper. I remember one of the best things about it was that everything seemed so close together. My school, Weber Elementary, only resided about 4 or 5 blocks from where I lived, so I when I was old enough, and after my mom was confident I could find my way there on my own, she let me walk or ride my bike to school with my friends. The school itself opened out in the back onto a huge expansive field (at least it seemed that way to me at the time), where a playground was setup along with a sandlot baseball diamond. On the weekends, anyone could go there and play around, as the school did not have any fences around it. My parents, my brother and I used to bike ride around the neighborhood in the evenings, in what I remember as supremely tranquil outings. All and all, it was a great place to live.
It appeared as if I would never have to move. My dad had a good job working with Monsanto at a huge chemical plant about a half hour away in Alvin. The house my family lived in appeared as close to permanent as anything I would know. My mom even had two trees planted in our backyard for myself and my brother. She got them as saplings and told us that we would each have a tree that we could refer to as “our tree”, something that we could take care of and watch grow as we also grew up. I became friends with a girl my age named Kasey across the street and a couple of other kids on my block. I did not really have a care in the world. That would all soon change.
Despite all the great things about it, my neighborhood possessed a couple of peculiarities that I guess I would have found a little ominous if older. Among them was the huge deserted field that existed behind our neighborhood to the south, hemming it in. I remember a couple of signs posted in the ground surrounding the field warning people to keep out, but never really understood why, as it looked like a normal field that did not have anything of real importance. Towards the far southern edge of the field, about 200 or 300 yards away, across Dixie Farm Road, stood one rusted tin building and a huge storage tank. Certainly something not worth going to so much trouble as to post a sign over, I thought.
I was six years old the first time that I heard the word Brio mentioned. I remember watching the local news with my mom, who insisted on watching it over my objections of the TV being switched from Nickalodeon. On the news, I saw a reporter standing in front of the field that bordered our neighborhood. My first thought was that this was pretty cool. I could even see my neighborhood in the background on TV. This was the first in what was to soon be an avalanche of local TV coverage on our neighborhood.
As it turns out, the field actually belonged to a defunct chemical disposal company called Brio Refining Inc. Over the course of nearly 30 years until 1982, a number of companies had dumped highly toxic byproducts from Houston’s petrochemical industries into the ground with no reliable means of containment. The site was so toxic that the EPA put the Brio Site on the Superfund list, a federal program that came out of the Love Canal scandal of the late 1970’s, marking Brio for toxic waste cleanup. What I saw on TV was part of an escalating debate between local residents and the EPA over what to do with the site. Despite assurances from the EPA that everything was under control, a number of birth defects, childhood leukemia, and other mysterious ailments had started cropping up in our subdivision. At the same time a huge class action $500 million lawsuit had been filed against Monsanto, one of the primary companies behind the dumping, by neighborhood residents alleging the company covered up what happened there.
In the months to come, things became increasingly hectic. TV trucks started showing up at our school. I remember one time I had come back from running errands with my mom and saw a TV crew walking across the lawn towards us. I actually ran from the car to meet them, as I thought I could get a chance to appear on TV. My mom however grabbed me and yanked me inside, telling the TV crew she did not wish to be interviewed. At our school, rumors flew, whether they were true or not, I don’t know. One in particular that kept on cropping up concerned the bubbling up of toxic waste right underneath our jungle gym out back. Kasey’s younger brother suffered from health problems her parents suspected were due to Brio. Relations between my parents and neighbors, particularly Kasey’s parents and mine, became icy. In fact, in one of the few times that I had ever seen my mom really angry in public, she got into a heated argument with Kasey’s mom on our front lawn.
I later learned that it concerned the fact that my dad worked for Monsanto. The situation between residents, the EPA, and the corporations that did the dumping had become increasingly poisonous. The paranoia of our fellow neighborhood residents had reached such a height that other residents, like Kasey’s parents, suspected my dad of being a corporate spy working covertly for Monsanto. That they thought this about my dad, a man whose spying ability rivals Maxwell Smart’s, I find laughable. Other residents did not. In fact, my mom later told me that dad and she were told they were no longer welcome at homeowner’s meetings discussing the Monsanto lawsuit, which the residents eventually lost.
Finally, in the summer of 1991, our family moved. It was a very somber day for me. All the memories I had of that house would now be just that. By that time, we were one of the last to move, as Kasey’s parents and most of the people on our block had already done so. The neighborhood itself continued to stand for nearly six years after we left. By that time though, it had become a rundown ghost town of boarded up homes and weed ridden lawns. Before they closed off the entrance to the neighborhood, I remember riding with my mom one day and on a bit of a lark, her driving past our house one last time to stop and look. At that point, it had become rundown and unrecognizable. “Our trees” out back had vanished. I mentioned that to my mom, who with tears in her eyes said she had also noticed. Standing there, I felt extremely sad about what had happened to our neighborhood and at the same time a sense of closure with my past there. Now where a neighborhood used to be a field surrounded by chain link fence with a “No Trespassing” sign is all that remains.
Looking back, the entire Brio experience injected a dose of cynicism into my life relatively early, and a genuine loathing for all things concerning Big Business. Recent scandals in the corporate world, like Enron, only help confirm something I felt I found out about long ago with Brio, that being most businessmen don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves, whether it concerns outright fraud like Enron or selling residents poisoned property like what happened at Brio. For all the sadness that Brio had caused my family, we eventually did get something out of it. In 1994, in another class action lawsuit against Monsanto (who continues to deny that the Brio chemicals affected anyone) and the other Brio dumping companies, current and former neighborhood residents received a $207 million award, the largest ever award at that time for a toxic waste related case. The proceeds from that lawsuit have in turn enabled me to attend any college of my choice without really having to worry about finances.
