Toxic Landscapes

Goodbye and Good Riddance to Philadelphia's Refinery

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Around 4 a.m. on June 21, 2019, I awoke to a loud and insistent series of booms. My bedroom, which faces northwest, filled with a strange yellow light. After briefly wondering whether the nuclear apocalypse had finally arrived, I convinced myself it was yet another in that week’s string of summer storms. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I didn’t look out the south-facing window in my office. Had I done so, I might have caught a glimpse of this:

I live in West Philadelphia, about 2 miles as the crow flies from what was then known as Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the East Coast’s largest refinery. The existence of the refinery wasn’t news to me—you can’t miss it on the trip to/from Philadelphia’s airport—but the potential devastation of the explosions still came as a shock. According to an investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the fire and subsequent explosions released 676,000 pounds of hydrocarbons and more than 5,200 pounds of hydrogen fluoride (HF). An estimated 90 percent of the hydrocarbons burnt in the massive fire, but approximately 3,271 pounds of HF gas were released directly into the atmosphere.

Philly got lucky. HF gas is a lethal chemical that destroys body tissue and bone. By the refinery’s own admission, a worst-case scenario could have released 71 tons of HF into the air breathed by more than a million people in Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey. It’s nothing short of a miracle that no one died that night.

Emphasis on “that night.” The explosion created the kind of crisis that’s hard to miss, but refinery operations had been slowly killing workers and neighbors for more than 150 years. The PES refinery was the largest stationary source of toxic air pollution in Philadelphia and the city’s single-largest industrial contributor of greenhouse gases. Having started production in the mid-19th century, well before the era of environmental regulation, its operations have polluted the surrounding ground and water to an almost unimaginable extent. The National Cancer Institute estimates that Philadelphia has the highest cancer rate of any major U.S. city. Nearly 3 out of 4 of the 45,000 people living within a mile of the refinery are people of color, and a third of residents live below the poverty line.

In the days immediately after the refinery blew itself up, area politicians (especially those representing constituencies upwind of the facility) outdid themselves to assure the public that they’d have the refinery reopen in no time. But then something amazing happened: They stopped talking. They listened. And what they heard was that Philadelphia didn’t want a refinery.

As more details emerged on how close the city came to having hundreds of thousands of refinery-induced casualties, the argument that the refinery helped Philadelphia more than it harmed became less credible. Philadelphia Thrive, a local environmental justice organization that had long opposed the refinery, consistently turned out neighborhood residents to public meetings to share the stories of how the fumes and the toxins had harmed their neighbors, their children, themselves.

In the aftermath of the explosion, PES declared bankruptcy for the second time in less than a year. The city issued a report detailing the myriad reasons that South Philadelphia shouldn’t have a refinery, but dodged responsibility, claiming that only a bankruptcy judge could decide the site’s fate. Eventually, under pressure from Thrive, other organizations in Philadelphia, and election-year politics, City Council issued a resolution expressing its preference for something other than a refinery. The reports that PES had consistently been releasing extraordinarily high levels of benzene from 2018 until the time of the explosion didn’t help the case for ongoing fossil fuel operations.

In the end, the 1,300-acre site—bigger than Philadelphia’s Center City—sold to Hilco, a Chicago-based developer who has no plans to restart refinery operations. We won.

Yesterday, I stood on a bridge with about 80 people from Thrive and other organizations who had participated in the fight. We gathered to mourn, celebrate, and let Hilco know that they’ll be held accountable, too. The bridge offers a spectacular view of the scale of the operations—this photo, looking south, shows less than a quarter of the site. It’s awesome, in the terrifying sense of the word.

I participated in the fight as a member of POWER, an interfaith, multiracial social justice community organizing group in Philadelphia. I protested, testified at hearings, wrote letters and made phone calls, and cajoled other people into doing the same. I made an active decision to do this work primarily as a resident, as a person with asthma who breathes Philadelphia’s toxic air, rather than as a historian of science. This decision had consequences, as the city’s Refinery Advisory Group made clear that it only wanted to hear from “experts,” not “advocates.” Residents, apparently, cannot be “experts” on their city.

Even for someone with some expertise (!) on the dynamics of expertise, this was an eye-opening experience. Credentialed experts on business, labor, and health had a seat at the table; Thrive’s fenceline members did not. Scholars talk a good game about “listening to and learning from” activists and community members, but some of them are better at this than others. It was informative to watch which credentialed experts used their access to provide a platform for community members and who used residents as data or props. It was equally fascinating to observe which city officials preferred to hear from me as an “expert in science and democracy” and who was more receptive to me as a middle-aged, middle-class, United Methodist white woman wearing a POWER button.

Shutting down that refinery was a group effort. I learned so much—and so many different kinds of things—from the various people who shared their knowledge, experiences, and political strategies last fall and winter. But the most obvious lesson was that policy experts alone could not effect change. That took a movement.

Farewell, PES. We knew you all too well.

What’s in Your Neighborhood? The urban United States is riddled with long-forgotten toxic sites. Bars, parks, restaurants, and even luxury townhomes sit on lots that once housed industrial manufacturing. Scott Frickel and James Elliot’s Sight Unseen explains how this happened, how we forgot about it, and what to do about it.

Climate Justice is Racial Justice. If anything about this phrase is new to you, check out Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt’s podcast and newsletter, Hot Take.

Audra on the Internet: This isn’t on industrial pollution or embodied expertise per se, but I did write a review for Science of a book that explains how “we” “value” life. I do not recommend the book.