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Chris Sellers: Without further ado, let’s go around and just everybody briefly say your name and a brief statement of what your relation to the industry is, whether you’re a community member or you have some kind of tighter relationship with the industry. So, Vicki, you wanna—oh, Carolyn! You go.Carolyn Thibodeaux: Oh, okay!Chris Sellers: You start. You’re a part of this—sure!Carolyn Thibodeaux: I’ll get started, great! Okay, I’m Carolyn Thibodeaux, I’m your librarian here at Port Arthur Public; really, I specialize in Children’s. I’m trying to grow and expand more into regular librarian, because I’m in graduate studies at University of North Texas right now. Not directly related in the industry, but I am a community activist, so I’m honored to be here today to kinda make sure this is successful and that’s why I think it was kinda because of Miss Yvonne, who you worked with in the past—Chris Sellers: Right.Carolyn Thibodeaux: – and her passion, I just felt the need to kinda fill in for her when she was working on this project. So, I’m honored to be here, excited to be part of this. Thank you.
Mickey Breaux: I’m John Michael Breaux, everybody calls me Mickey. I grew up in a household with a parent who worked at a Texas company, and I worked in the oil industry myself for 26 years, and in ’96, I went on staff of the OCAW. They changed to PACE, and I was on staff for PACE, and then I went on—when we merged with the steel workers, I retired as a steel worker. A correction on the sheet that you’ve got, I’ve never was a Vice President, but if y’all wanna give me the consummate pay and retirement money, I’ll be glad to take it. But I was a District Director and on the board of directors for Steel Workers, but I never was a vice President. I started out at Atlantic, and it’s been through about 10 different name, and now it’s called ________.Chris Sellers: Great.Nelson Edgerly: Nelson Edgerly, union representative for 4-23. I’ve been out at Texaco 43 years. I’ve been retired 20 years.
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Chris Sellers: Great.Richard Landry: Richard Landry. My nickname is Hoot. I am celebrating my 43rd year in the union this year. I was born and raised in Port Arthur. My father worked at Texaco. I worked at Texaco, my uncle worked at Texaco. Uncles, my cousins worked at Texaco, and so, we have a history at the refinery. Today, in 2003, I was brought on staff with the PACE International or OCAW. We merged with the PACE International Union or the Paper International Union shortly after that. And, of course, Mickey and I went through the steelworker merger, and I am a steelworker now.
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I am an international rep for the International Union. I am responsible for approximately 3,000 members now, and I negotiate contracts, I help with training, grievance and arbitration preparation, and whatever else the local needs me to do.Glenn E. Alexander: I’m Glenn E. Alexander, pediatric—a nationally certified pediatric nurse practitioner. I’ve worked in public health from 1980 up until this time. I’m in transition of retiring and going back to work.
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I worked out at GUPAW, I believe, in the Air Force, from ’73 to ’75 as an analytical tester in the laboratory. I went on and did, went back to nursing school after leaving GUPAW, did studies at Prairie View to secure a nursing degree there, did graduate studies at Texas Women’s University, got my pediatric credential in that. I came back to Port Arthur and Orange and did solo practice. I’ve taken care of a caseload of close to 4,000 children in this community that were impacted by whatever is in our environment, and I’m still taking care of ‘em. And I take pride in doing anything that I can to help the City of Port Arthur. I’m a proud 1964 graduate of Lincoln High School. I went to kindergarten at Lincoln, started at Carver in ’52 when they first cranked up, went back to Lincoln Junior High School, finished high school.
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I’m a two-time graduate of Prairie View, presidential appointment by President Richard M. Nixon in two officer candidate schools in the U.S. Air Force, trained as a medical laboratory person and as a social psychologist, and I came back and here I am in Port Arthur, doing what I can again to help this city.Tiffany Hamilton: Good afternoon, I’m Councilwoman Tiffany Hamilton for the City of Port Arthur. I’m a lifelong resident of the City of Port Arthur, and my interaction with industry has been through my service with the City of Port Arthur on Council. So, we focus on the industrial agreements. So, my interest is not only environmental but economically, for the growth of our community.
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I’m here to share what I can and learn a lot from the history that’s sitting here at this table, but I want to make sure that our story in Port Arthur is told by us, and we are responsible for sharing our story and our truths. So, I want to make sure that that’s what’s able to happen here, today.Michelle Honey Hamilton: My name is Michelle Honey Hamilton, and I graduated from Stephen F. Austin out in Port Acres. I was born in Port Acres. I met my husband in Port Acres. Tiffany is our daughter. I graduated from Stephen F. Austin and I attended Lamar University. And it took me 17 years to graduate from college.
And as I stood listening to the commencement exercise, the guy said, “You know, it takes some people 4 years to graduate college, and if it took you 4 years to graduate college, then congratulations. And so, those of you who graduated in four years, then have a seat. And those of you who graduated in six, you may sit down. And those of you who graduated in 8, 10, 12—good. And I see we still have some of those who are still standing. So, if it took you 12, 14, 16—good!” And then I was still standing.And he said, “So, what was it that kept you going?” And I said, “My philosophy was, those same years were gonna pass whether I graduated or not, so I figured, I may as well get something done in those years.”So, I graduated. I had babies at the same time and Terry and I were just struggling, trying to make it. And while I was working as a teacher’s aide in the school district, I met a teacher of ours that taught Terry and I English at Stephen F. Austin, and her son had used a nail gun and drove a nail through his finger, and my best friend had burnt her hand, and we ended up at St. Mary’s Hospital at the same time.
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And she said, “Oh, it’s good to see you. What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I work for the school district, I’m a custodian at night, and I work as a teacher’s aide in the daytime.” She said, “I have a whole bunch of friends who have a whole lot of money, and if you don’t mind meeting them, we’d like to give you a scholarship.” And she gave me a scholarship and I went back to school, and as I was working for the school district, my principal said, “What is it that motivates you to come to work in the daytime and work at night?” And I said, “It’s the kids. Because I see, in them, me.”My daddy worked for Texaco. My grandfather worked for Texaco, but we don’t have that same story as you guys talked about—worked for Texaco and moving up the ladder. My grandfather worked for Texaco and he came home, and then he went to work at a gas station, a Texaco gas station. My uncles didn’t get a job at Texaco like my grandfather had. My brothers didn’t get a job at Texaco. You know, we worked hard and, at the end of the day, they worked hard again—all night long.
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And so, I knew that we had to—I had to work hard, and I saw those kids working hard and struggling at Lincoln School and at Booker T. Washington. We were at the deepest end of Port Arthur that you could go to, and they needed help. And I figured that if I could teach them something that I got, then I knew that they could be successful. And what I thought that I could do was, to get them to be quiet all day long and listen to their teachers and learn, and what I thought would help them was, I could teach them sign language. And if you’re learning how to speak with your hands, then your mouths are not moving. And we learned sign language all day. And my principal said, “If you don’t mind, would you like to be a teacher’s aide?” And so, I went from being a custodian to a teacher’s aide. I got a degree in social work. I went back and got my certification as a special ed teacher, and I taught for the school district for 29 years, and I graduated, I retired, and now I stay home and I teach my 2-year-old grandson sign language, Spanish, how to spell his name, how to write his name, how to recognize his alphabets. Anything I think that I can teach him, I teach it to him.
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And when I heard today that there was a seminar on the history of Port Arthur, I thought—this is something else I can learn, so I’m here.Terry Lynn Hamilton: And I’m glad about it. [Laughter]Jim Sutherland: Are you Kobe Hamilton’s parents?Michelle Honey Hamilton: I am.Terry Lynn Hamilton: Yes.Jim Sutherland: I’m Jim Sutherland.Michelle Honey Hamilton: Oh, good! Hi, Jim.Terry Lynn Hamilton: Hi, Jim.Jim Sutherland: He used to rent from me.Terry Lynn Hamilton: Yes.Michelle Honey Hamilton: That’s right—right next door. So, you loved my grandchildren, ________ and Chloe.Jim Sutherland: Really, really good kids.Michelle Honey Hamilton: Yes. Mr. Jim.Jim Sutherland: Outstanding young man.Michelle Honey Hamilton: Yes.Terry Lynn Hamilton: Mr. Jim, yes. My name is Terry Lynn Hamilton, and I’m a Port Arthur native. I was born in St. Mary’s Hospital. My father was an employee of Texas-U.S. Chemical refinery in Port Neches, and he worked there until he could not any more.
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My first job was at, he set it up with one of his friends, a guy from Port Neches named Jim Spivey. And I went to work at Neches Butane for the summer after I graduated, and when I went to college, that was the summer job that I had. I did not finish college, because I got married. I mean, I couldn’t help it. [Laughter] So, I married Honey, and we have three beautiful, beautiful children. God has been good to us. But I was employed here in Port Arthur and worked for a gentleman that had a company at the port, Dixie Compel, he had a fish company there. And I worked for Dickie in the daytime—I mean, at night, and I worked at the police department during the daytime.
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And we put our family, we put our monies together and tried to raise our children. And then I worked at the police department for 17 years. I was a bailiff, I was a jailer. Then I—they opened up 911 communications and I was a communications specialist. So, all the men in my community, you know, they were friends, and it was kinda like the first gentleman’s experiences. You know, my father, my neighbor, his neighbor, his neighbor, about eight or nine of them worked at Texas-U.S. Chemical, and they used to ride together and they used to throw picnics for the community and for the children and all of that. So, it was really, really great.
But I worked at the police department, again, for 17 years and left the police department. My daughter, my great daughter said that she had to go to Xavier. I had never heard of Xavier, but I said, “Well, baby, you can go right here to Lamar.” She said, “No, you don’t understand. I have to go to Xavier.” So, I got out of the police department and went back to the refinery to go and make some money. So, I went to, worked construction for Triple S Industrial. I was the safety coordinator for them, moving around in different places, and Mobil Oil in Baytown and back to different refineries around. However, after that, I got out of that and then I managed some stores here in Port Arthur, furniture stores.
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And after that, my father taught me how to work with my hands. He was a carpenter and a jack of all trades, fixed cars and did all of that. So, he passed that on to me, and I did some work, they had a hurricane, did some work with the church, and we were one of the first responders back in Port Arthur to do distribution for the hurricane from the Church of Christ on Second Avenue and Thomas here in Port Arthur. We had all the supplies. We had food, we had clothing, we had everything, you know? Laundry, furniture. And I was the superintendent, became the superintendent for Southeast Texas Interfaith Organization, remodeling and building homes here in Port Arthur. And that went on, and now they’ve called me to the City of Port Arthur to be, I’m a housing inspector for them, presently.
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Elton Gish: I’m Elton Gish, I’m from Nederland. My father worked at the Port Neches Texaco refinery, and so, I grew up with that experience and I still remember the smell of asphalt, and I liked it, myself.Male: Morning.Elton Gish:So, I went to school at Lamar and graduated with a Chemical Engineering degree and hired on at Texaco in Port Arthur, and I worked there for 46 years, retired two or three years ago.Otis Higgs: I’m Otis Higgs, commonly known as Pat. I went to work for Texaco in 1949. I’m a mechanical engineer, hired in with the Utilities Division. After, what was it, eight years there, I spent a short time with the Manufacturing Department management and the remainder of my career with Shipping Department management.
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I retired in ’82, and I was, I’ve been fortunate to live long enough that I’ve been retired longer than I worked. [Cross talk]Male: I’m workin’ on it. [Laughter]Laverne McMillan: I’m Laverne McMillan, I’m a retired mathematics teacher, 37 years with the Port Arthur Independent School District, and 7 years with Lamar College in Port Arthur. I came to Port Arthur to teach, because at that time, it was widely recognized as one of the finest and most innovative and highly salaried districts in Texas and even in the nation. The oil industries in the area were all so widely recognized as supplying the money for building that type of reputation.
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When I taught later at Lamar part time, an area historian, Yvonne Sutherland, recruited me as a sort of community worker, first at the new museum in town, the Museum of the Gulf Coast, as a leader of student tours, docent of student tours, and then later, as her aide in collecting, preserving, and filing historic materials at the Port Arthur Public Library historic collection. I will say that at the museum, one of the most popular exhibits is the—or popular spots is the History Corner. The students enjoy hearing first about the gulf canon story, and then the Lucas Gusher Spindletop story on the mural there before they turn the corner.
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And then, looking at the exhibits, on the timeline, the history, and the products produced by the oil industry, the petrochemical industries in the area.Jim Sutherland: Quite an act to follow, Ms. McMillan. I always recognize you. You were probably the best math teacher we had in our high school experience in Port Arthur, but I thank you for bringing a bunch of us along. I’m Jim Sutherland. My mother is Yvonne Sutherland. Most of you involved with the history of Port Arthur knew or know my mother. She’s in a full care nursing home now, and she has no cognitive ability to participate in anything like this, so bless her heart.
But my expertise comes from first being a Port Arthur boy. I mean, both my granddaddies were here. My daddy’s daddy was here in the early 1900s. He came down here from Indiana about 1907. And instead of going to work for the refineries, he and his brother, they were orphaned. [Laughter] And they did a lot of things, trying to make money. And one of the things, they had a portable oil rig. They drilled three dry holes at Spindletop Hill. [Laughter] And so, they took their oil rig to Hackberry, Louisiana and parked it, and they went back over there about three weeks later to drill a hole in the ground and it was gone. So, they got out of the oil business [Laughter] and went into the jewelry business on Procter Street.
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My daddy always told me, he said, “Jim,” he said, “Port Arthur’s been good to our family for three generations.” And he said, “It’s our job to give back.” And I kinda took that to heart, but my expertise is not so much in the community as it is outside the community, man-made changes to these coastal marshes and the effects on migratory birds. I mean, we winter just tens of thousands of birds in this coastal plain between Galveston Bay and Vermilion Bay, this cautionary plain. And I retired from Texas Parks and Wildlife about a year and a half ago as a land manager for Parks and Wildlife. And like Mr. Hicks to my right, I’m an Aggie, but I don’t have an engineering degree, I have a wildlife management degree.And I guess my claim to fame in this room is, I grew up with Gary Beavers. [Laughter]Male: I tried to get it right!Jim Sutherland: We were in kindergarten together, all the way through—Male: Apologies.Jim Sutherland: – all the way through high school.
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So, you know, you union guys, my hat’s off to you, but, just until just—Male: Jim’s the old guy. I graduated two years by then.Jim Sutherland: [Laughter] But, you know, if it happened on a landscape, I’ve got a pretty good grasp on it, around here, in the county. And there’s a lot of fun stories about what went on, starting with the ballots being passed, really. And so, you know—but we go forward from there and building the early railroads in the early, navigation channels and things of that nature and how they built up. Anyway, that’s what I have, now.Les McMahon: Alright. Les McMahon, I was born in Port Arthur. I had three grandparents that worked for either Gulf or Texaco.
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I graduated from Thomas Jefferson in ’64, graduated Lamar in ’69 in civil engineering. I went to work for the City of Port Arthur and worked there for 35 years, retired in 2004. And then just didn’t have enough, I worked 10 more years in three other cities in Texas doing basically what I had done at Port Arthur, and that’s in Engineering, Public Works, and City Management.After a brief return of about eight and a half months in 2014 to the City of Port Arthur, I finished up my contract work and I decided I’d had enough. [Laughter] Probably if something else came up good somewhere in Texas, I’d go, but right now, I’m happy working with the Jefferson County Historical Commission. I’m the marker chairman. I’ve been the cemetery committee chairman.
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I also do a lot of work at the DeQuincy, Louisiana Railorad Museum and also, like, Laverne, I do a lot of—or have started doing a lot of work here at the Memorial Library in the Historical Pictures collection, which sit out front in the reference section. That’s about it. I love history. What else can I say?Hilton Kelley: Well, hello, everybody, my name is Hilton Kelley, that’s Kelley, K-E-L-L-E-Y. I was born and raised in the city of Port Arthur, Texas at 1202 E. Carver Terrace in West Port Arthur, the historic African-American community on the other side of the railroad tracks. Growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, you know, it was, it’s an oil town, as we all know, and I grew up in the shadows of the Gulf Oil and Texaco Oil Company that sits right in that corner, there.
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I went to Carver Elementary School. Miss Dixon was my elementary, kindergarten teacher who I love very much, she was a great lady. From there, I went to, I also went for a year to Booker T., and then I went on to Woodrow and Lincoln when I graduated in 1978. I graduated in 1978 and went on to Lamar, but I lost my mom to domestic violence in 1979, so I had to refrain from going to school and go to work full time. I worked at Sears and Roebuck for a brief time, delivering furniture, working at the warehouse. And finally, I decided I wanted a little bit more than that, so I ended up joining the United States Navy in 1980. I left Port Arthur in January, 1980. I did four years with the United States Navy, made E-5 in three years, honorable discharge in 1984. I got out of the service in ’84, I was stationed in Alameda Naval Air Station—that’s the Oakland area, Oakland, California.
Got married. I was out there for 21 years, ended up following my life’s dreams. Got into the movie business, I’m a member of the Screen Actors Guild to this day. I was Taft-Hartleyed into the Screen Actors Guild in 1991, and worked in the movie business, enjoyed myself, enjoyed my life’s cream for about 13 years when I decided I wanted to come home to Port Arthur just to visit in 2000.And I came to Port Arthur just to visit and I went to the Mardi Gras, had a great time. But then I started looking around Port Arthur and I was wondering what happened to our downtown area. And then I was wondering why the kids were playing in the streets and by the Prince Hall, Louis Manor housing projects. What happened to the YMCA? What happened to all our grocery stores?
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And I was really troubled by that. So, after my little stay here for the Mardi Gras, I went back to Oakland, California, but I kept thinking about how something needed to be done in the City of Port Arthur. I just couldn’t help it. And I started writing down little notes and things that I thought should be done, and I was gonna give those notes to someone to possibly carry out those duties. But I couldn’t find anyone to give it to, and I never forgot this feeling I had once when I was shaving, and I just had this overwhelming feeling as if the God Almighty was telling me, “No, I didn’t give you those plans for anybody else. I gave you those plans for you to go back.” And, by May of 2000, that same year, I moved back home to the City of Port Arthur. I hit the ground running with trying to find ways in which to recreate a community center to help get our kids off the streets, because as we all know, the crack epidemic had took a toll, as well, in our communities, our neighborhoods.
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And so, I got to work with that. And in doing that work, I found that we had a disproportionate amount of toxins that were being dumped into the air. I grew up here. I grew up smelling sulfur, benzene, hydrogen sulfide—you name it. But we always thought it was normal and there was nothing you can do about it. But as a man, I found out that you could do something about it and that there were laws that governed these facilities. And we always kinda suspected that most people around here that was doing was dying from cancer, and we felt like we would die from cancer, and it’s still kinda happening today. And so, after fighting to try to get the kids off the street, I kind of fell into the environmental justice field and we started pushing to get regulations changed and started pushing industries like Motiva and Valero and Chevron Chemical, BASF Total to reduce the amount of toxins that they were dumping into the air. Because what we found was that they were disobeying the Clean Air Act laws. They were dumping a disproportionate amount of toxins in the air, illegally.
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And so, with those evidence, we started bringing it forward to the EPA, we got the TCEQ involved in it. And it was a hard fight, but we started to get some reprieve from the toxins that were being dumped into the air. We ended up getting a clinic built on the West Side with the help of the city. We got a community development center now. I ended up meeting the President of the United States in 2011. He congratulated me on my work, I got a Congressional reception. I also won the Goldman Environmental Prize, which is the largest environmental prize ever bestowed upon regular citizens, and I’m the first African-American male to ever win it, and I’m very proud of that fact. And, to this date, I still fight to push so that we all can enjoy clean air, clean water—not only for residents who live on the fence line, but also for the workers who live on the other side who cannot speak as I speak, and that is my claim.Nelson Edgerly: ________ a point of information?Chris Sellers: Sure.Nelson Edgerly: The reason, when the EEOC comes down here, the Texas company did not recognize Lincoln High School as an appropriate diploma.
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And that’s why all the blacks, the first black in the Texaco main plant to pass a test, which they had to take, was Arthur Guidry. And all the blacks had to take that test, because Texaco did not recognize Lincoln High School. [Cross talk] They didn’t recognize their diploma, and that’s why all the blacks at Port Arthur and the plant, Texaco plant, had to take a test. And, as I said, the first one, that was Arthur Guidry that passed the test.Female: Thank God times have changed.Nelson Edgerly: Uh huh.Chris Sellers: Interesting. Yeah.
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So, okay, I think we’re gonna open it up in just a minute for general discussion, but I do wanna give my four folks that I asked to prepare five minutes to talk about—well, I guess, the way we’re gonna do it is this. Les is gonna start out and give us a bit of an overview from, you know, he’s worked with the Historical Commission and so on. So, he’s from the local history point of view, and then three others—Elton, Mickey, and Hilton—are gonna give their answers to this question that I have on the program. From your perspective, what event, development, or trend stands out most in your recollections of the last, you know, 40 years of industry-community relations in Port Arthur—okay?So, we’ll start out with Les and then we’ll have Elton, Mickey, and Hilton speak.
Les McMahon: Okay. I’m gonna do just a very broad brush history of Port Arthur from the start to now, and it’ll be painless, ‘cause I’m gonna read it. I won’t be fumbling around. [Laughter] Port Arthur was founded with the idea of it being a seaport town served by a railroad hauling Midwest commodities to the Gulf Coast for export, and early on had export peers actually built out into Sabine Lake. The dynamics changed with the discovery of oil at Spindletop with several years—or within several years, the gulf refinery and Texas refining companies were up and running, and Port Arthur was no longer just a minor port town. As the refineries expanded, more people of various cultures came to Port Arthur to seek a better life through work at the refineries and to provide services and goods to the growing town. Of note were the Louisiana Cajuns who even had songs about coming to work in the refineries and being homesick for Louisiana.
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Unfortunately, from the beginning, the refineries produced air pollution never seen here before, but which, as Hilton said, were accepted or was accepted as part of the daily life. And I remember riding through one of the refineries—you were exposed to some horrific odors that literally would take your breath away. So, you tried to take in a deep breath before you went through and hoped you could hold it.Hilton Kelley: [Laughter]Les McMahon: People in Port Arthur continued to enjoy steady employment and good paying jobs as the petrochemical industry expanded further in town and in surrounding areas, marred only by the occasional strikes that sometimes actually pitted parts of families against one another. Sometimes that was labor versus labor, or labor versus management, and our family had some good examples of that.
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Port Arthur prided itself on being the city that oiled the world, even as other areas along the Gulf Coast out produced it. As automation came into play in the petrochemical industry and the number of jobs at the big two here in town declined, other, smaller companies helped to replace some of the jobs lost. In later years, and continuing to this day, the petrochemical industries adjacent to or surrounding Port Arthur have provided funding for the operation of the city through, in lieu of tax agreements. And probably, without this funding, the city’s normal tax base, even with the higher rate, could not support, basically, the services that the city provides to its citizens today.Chris Sellers: Okay. Thanks. And I guess, Elton, if you could take it away with your speech.Elton Gish: Alright. My experience has been with the Texaco refinery. I started back in 1969, or ’68, I guess it was. And I guess Texaco really didn’t change a whole lot.
00:34:00
I mean, they kept doing the same thing over and over and processes had been installed back in the ‘20s and the ‘30s and the ‘40s. You know, this is back in the ‘70s and the ‘80s and still using those same old processes that are outdated. In many cases, as they mentioned, you had, like, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide going out into the atmosphere that you can readily smell. And, you know, it’s just—nothing really changed or improved to help the environment, much less modernize the refinery itself. So, there was, you know, some major strikes that affected the local community. The last one that I recall was, I think it was 1982.Otis Higgs: Two. Eight months.
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Elton Gish: That was seven and a half months. That was, it had quite an impact on the local community.So, in about 1984, the refinery was experiencing, you know, a loss of even employees. We used to have 5,000 employees and it dropped down to, like, 3,400, 3,500 employees. And we’re still using the same, old processes.So, management decided, you know, we probably need to make some changes, here. So, they were thinking about actually shutting down the refinery. And they brought in, I think it was the McKinsey team to investigate or look at what they needed to do, and they recommended shutting down the whole refinery, which was pretty major. It would’ve greatly impacted the community.
00:35:57
But the final decision was to see what they can do to streamline and modernize the refinery, and that was the beginning of shutting down all these old processes and bringing in new instrumentation. We had pneumatic controls which were grossly outdated. They eventually brought in computer controls. They got rid of a lot of the processes. They were creating pollution. I can remember burning acid sludge in a boiler house, and like they said, you had to hold your breath as you walked by, because you could see the sulfur dioxide coming out of the stack of the boiler house. It was just really bad. So, it took several years. There was a layoff to streamline the refinery, and they brought in new processes, they converted some of the old units into new processes like catalytic dewaxing units.
And it gradually got to the point where we have a whole new type refinery out there now with processes that are cleaner to operate. But, you know, there’s still—anyway, that was the beginning, what I saw, of a change in how our units, the refinery operated, and a big change in how they operated the refinery environmentally. And I think it greatly improved the impact on the community as a whole. And it kept the economics going, too, for the community, as well—as well as improving the environment.Chris Sellers: Okay.Nelson Edgerly: Another point of information. Is that alright?
00:38:00
Chris Sellers: Well, Mickey is gonna, he’s actually got a speech. I mean, you maybe—Nelson Edgerly: Oh, okay.Chris Sellers: – maybe you could sort of, with Mickey’s comment, add with Mickey’s comment, yeah.Nelson Edgerly: I just wanted to point out that the West Side had, we had built 72—or Texaco had built 72 HMVS, Holmes-Manley Vertical Stills.Male: Yeah, very dangerous units.Nelson Edgerly: And I worked on them. I head ‘em and unheaded ‘em. And they didn’t charge but 2,000 barrels a day, but the emission that’s off the heaters wasn’t worth a darn.Male: Yeah.Nelson Edgerly: So, when they finally decided to tear them down and we increased, on the CAT units, we built a number three CAT, which increased our charge rate to, it tripled our charge rate on number three CAT. We had one, two, and three.
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And then we had the alkies, took care of the gasoline as far as treating it, or finish cracking it. Just a point of information.Chris Sellers: Okay, thanks. Mickey?Mickey Breaux: Hey. My dad was a sharecropper and a short order cook in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, and he moved to Port Arthur, Texas and went to work for The Texas Company, as he called it, in 1924 and retired in ’67, 43 years later. He was a first class welder, so therefore, I grew up in a nice incomed family. I had all the luck. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, when I was growing up, Port Arthur, Texas was a benchmark for success for families. I mean, we were part of the, in all the studies across the nation, Port Arthur, Texas had the highest standard of living for average working class people and average homes being built.
00:40:00
Hall 23 at one time had 8,500 members; now they’re down to 1,500. I believe that decline started for several reasons. One was, in the early ‘80s and on into the mid ‘80s, a combination of labor problems and economic problems and environmental problems, Texaco made the decision—which is now Motiva—to downsize. They used to go from a two train operation, as he expressed, to a one train operation. They shut down probably over half their units. They also had a large mechanical force of probably 400 or 500 pipefitters, 200 or 300 welders, 400 machinists. They did all their own work, all their own repair work, and actually, they did repair work for other refineries. They decided then, rather than paying—a combination of things, but one of the reasons was economics, because rather than paying a pipefitter 260 days a year, you pay a pipefitter the 58 days a year that you really need him, and you just, you know, contract out the other work.
00:41:05
So, in the mid ‘80s—Hoot’s a child of that—they laid off about 2,500 employees, salaried and hourly, to achieve that. And then they went in together and built back. They probably spent over $10 billion or $12 billion in the last, what, 10 years modernizing and building a refinery, Gulf Oil has probably spent, which is now—Nelson Edgerly: Valero.Mickey Breaux: – Valero, yeah. It’s probably spent about 5,000,000,000, and where I come from, the Atlantic, which is now Total, has spent over $3,000,000,000.00 modernizing and increasing it. When I went to school, I graduated in ’64 from Thomas Jefferson, most of my friends’ and classmates’ parents worked with the oil refineries or part of it. And it was a guaranteed job for life and when I went to school, there were three degree plans—Leslie only knew about two, but there was three. There was college prep, general graduation, and escape.
00:42:04
Well, I was on the escape plan and barely made it. Nowadays, they have—I call it an inflated hiring process where they want 60 hours of college to work in an oil refinery. If you can operate a smartphone, you can run a unit. I mean, let’s tell the truth, here. What you really need is the drive, the ambition, and the willingness to do your damn job. You don’t need 60 hours of college, but that’s another story. We had, as late as 1981, we had 5,400 employees at The Texas Company—Texaco. We had 3,600, I believe, at Gulf Oil. Total—we had 13,000 people working on what they called heavy industry at that time. Now, I bet we don’t have 5,000. But the bottom line is, through doing away with maintenance and contracting out the work, you’ve got what I call transient employees.
When you have a big turnaround or big new building to process, people come to town, do their job, then leave after the job’s over with. There’s no sustaining base for the employees. I grew up in a wonderful period of time—for me. Now, there were some people along in that period of time who didn’t have quite the advantages I had. But they had good jobs, lifetime jobs. They very seldom exist any more.If you’re lucky enough to pass all the screening they do at refineries now to put a little stuff here on that valve and take a little stuff here on that valve, you can make, start out at $100,000.00 a year. But that’s probably one-third the jobs it takes to actually keep that refinery running. Those are permanent jobs. Your other jobs are what I call transient jobs, and I believe the mid ‘80s is what took away from the school district, from the city, urban renewal, any other things that these industries helped support went away.
00:44:01
You don’t have permanent, full time jobs like you had in the past. And so, I believe that’s what impacted the area. So, we’ve got cleaner air, we’ve got—with that, comes less taxes, you know, less help for the school districts. And we—I live in Port Arthur. I grew up in Port Arthur. I’ve lived my entire life within five miles, probably, of where I grew up. I grew up on Lake Shore Drive, 5013, now I live at 3349 Birchwood Triangle, it’s about five blocks this-a-way. I live in a neighborhood that’s got four people I worked 25 years with that I didn’t know lived there ‘til after I moved there. But it’s a good city, and I plan on dying in the same city I was born in. I was born in St. Mary’s Hospital. But I do believe that the oil industry built this town and then likely killed it in the mid ‘80s.
00:45:00
Now, they’re starting to spend money again—they spent a lot of money, and they’re hiring jobs, but it’s not near the size of jobs we had in the past. It pays quite well for the people lucky enough to go to work there. But any maintenance work or new construction work is basically not done by area residents, and that takes away from the breadlines—the breadlines—the bread earning ability of families. And so, I’m a firm believer in taking this inflated hiring scheme they’ve got going out and hire local people, and if they don’t do their job, there’s ways for them not to do their job, they call it go home. But you don’t need two years of college to run these oil refineries—hey, I’m living proof! [Laughter] I did it, and if I can do it, any dummy can do it. And I was lucky enough to be the Director ________ Steel Workers in four states—Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Louisiana and Texas produces most, a good painting of the oil products in the whole United States, so I’m quite familiar with the oil industry.
00:46:03
You mentioned Gary Beavers. Gary Beavers was the Vice President. When he became Vice President of the union, he made sure I became Director. So, we’ve got a small web, here. I went to—graduated school with him, graduated the same year as he did from a different section of town, and I’ve got a lot of friends. My father never called it anything except he called it Texas Company. He never was Texaco or any of that stuff. Gulf Oil was Guffy to the old retirees. And I volunteer—thank you for having it there—at the Gulf Coast Museum two days a week. Anybody who’s not gone there recently, I recommend you come by and check the place out. It’s quite interesting. They’ve got everything from the earliest days up until today. They’ve got log cabin replicas in there. They’ve got music from, everything from Janis Joplin to Percy Sledge. They’ve got a beautiful glass collection, a CCL collection, and I think Port Arthur can be a thriving place if people just give it a chance.
00:47:02
The main problem with the downtown area is, the infrastructure is 100 years old. You’ve got 100-year-old, drainage, 100-year-old streets and no stores, like he talked about. And so, all you’ve got downtown now is the police station, City Hall, the post office, and the Gulf Coast Museum. What’s it called?Male: EDC.Mickey Breaux: Huh?Male: EDC, GTEC.Mickey Breaux: EDC’s down there, they’ve done a good job taking the old First National Bank building and revitalizing it. The Gulf Museum is in the second First National Bank. So, I would recommend anybody that’s not been there, come on down. And I’m glad to hear about your photo collection, I’m gonna go look at that. And if you really wanna know about old Port Arthur, you really have to go check out the city directory, the old businesses and stuff. You find people. I’m quite proud to be from Port Arthur, Texas, and a lot of people in the world know about Port Arthur, Texas—not only because of the oil industry, but because of sports figures, the music people.Male: Oh, Janis Joplin.
00:48:00
Mickey Breaux: Yeah, Janis. We’ve got quite a lot of history here. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not so good, but we’re still here and we’re proud to be here.Male: Jamaal Charles.Mickey Breaux: Jamaal Charles, yeah! Sports guy, yeah. Hope he plays next year, too. Joe Washington, Junior, was better than Jamaal Charles, as far as I’m concerned. [Laughter]Hilton Kelley: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that.Elton Gish: It used to be that, if you were employed at The Texas Company or some other refinery, you could get your son on.Mickey Breaux: Yep. No longer.Elton Gish: Yep, and I know several people, their grandfather, their father, their son, and their grandson worked out there, and I remember, not too many years ago, “Can I get my son on?” “No, you can’t.” That résumé goes into the pot, that pot goes to Houston, and they select over there. There’s no more favoritism.
Mickey Breaux: That’s—and no more gratitude towards your employees that made it what it is today, either, I feel, you know?Elton Gish: Right.Mickey Breaux: It’s taken away—what people put into that place doesn’t mean a hill of beans any more. If your daddy was a good worker, if your father was a good worker, hopefully you’ll be a good worker. That consideration now is way down the list. I also, we also graduated with a guy named Smith, was it Smith? He became the President of Lyondell-Citgo. He was an engineer.Richard Landry: This last round of hiring, we had 1,500 apply, 900 tested, and they hired 27.Chris Sellers: Wow.Richard Landry: So, that just goes to show you, they’re getting the cream of the crop.Chris Sellers: Yeah.Carolyn Thibodeaux: Is it his point of interest time?Chris Sellers: Well, no, Hilton has a spiel for us, I guess. Are you ready and prepared for that?Hilton Kelley: Okay, what did you want, yeah—Chris Sellers: Just to talk about, you know, this thing about what event development trend stands out for you in terms of the history.
00:50:02
Hilton Kelley: Well, what stands out for me, I mean, as far as the history of Port Arthur, Texas is, you know, growing up in Port Arthur as a young man, I mean, I thought Port Arthur was a very vibrant city. I remember going down 7th Street, of course, on the West end of town on that side of the railroad tracks down 7th Street, we had the Masonic Temple. The Masonic Temple, those guys always looked out for the youth in our community. We had the YMCA on the corner of Lincoln and 7th Street. You could go there and learn martial arts—that’s where me and my brother took martial arts. My brother is a fifth degree black belt today, and that was his lifelong mission was to become an instructor, and he’s instructed more than 2,000 some kids from here to California. And we still have a school there now at 723 Texas Avenue now.
00:50:55
I remember the swimming pool we had there, the Olympic sized pool right across the street from Sixth Street Baptist Church. I mean, we had the movie theater, we had Golden Steer grocery store. I mean, there was a time when didn’t have to leave that side of town, even though we should’ve been able to go anywhere, but yet, our community was sustainable unto itself.I mean, we were within walking distance of grocery stores, and you would think, in a time like today, the new Millennium, 2017, that community would be more robust than it was back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s.And so, that really stands out to me, the fact that, you know, we’ve lost so much within our growth period to become wealthier and live in more affluent communities. But my thing is, I think that it would be behooved to us to try to do what we can to rebuild communities instead of always looking to try to go where we think the grass is greener. I mean, the grass is green wherever you grow it and you nurture it.
00:51:59
And I think that’s one thing that we should try to do in all communities, whether it’s in Nederland, Groves, Vidor, West Port Arthur, East Port Arthur—I think that it’s time that our local governments, state governments look at ways in which they can assist in enhancing underserved communities and underutilized talent in our communities. Because I remember very clearly when, you know, we had white flight out of Port Arthur because of fair housing practices. As we all know, it wasn’t fair in the city of Port Arthur. I remember when the Vietnamese people came in after the fall of Saigon and black people in the West end of town didn’t even know those homes were available. We never got the memoSo, there was a lot of unfair practices taking place in the city of Port Arthur, which led to the divide in our community, but I think that it’s time that the divide sort of close and that we sort of bring each other together and look at ways in which we can work together and rebuild this once beautiful city that we all love.
00:53:00
And, you know, what else stands out is that I found out in my fight to push for cleaner air and a better environment and a safer community for all the citizens when it comes to these oil refineries and chemical plants is that they’re willing to do things if we talk to them and tell them exactly what we need. Case in point—I mean, Valero had a huge incident back in 2007 where they introduced a large amount of sulfur dioxide into the air that sent a lot of people to the hospital, I have the videotape of that incident. There was a lot of talk about meetings and the refinery folks came out and talked to folks about how the plant worked. And then finally, we pushed the question as to—well, what do you plan on doing to make this area safer for citizens who live in this community? And so, we finally got down to brass tacks with things we thought needed to be changed, and that was the antiquated units that they were processing this petroleum with.
00:54:02
And so, they ended up putting in flare gas recovery units, sulfur recover units. And in 2010, I believe Motiva was up for a—they had their permit, they were trying to expand their operations, and we protested to stop that expansion, because we felt that the toxins that they were dumping into the air was gonna increase. And of course, whenever you have an increase in production, you’re gonna have an increase in pollution if you haven’t done anything to offset that. And so, we pushed to stop the Motiva expansion and, in that fight, we ended up bringing Motiva to the table and sitting down and negotiating a good neighbor agreement with them. And we got them to voluntarily agree to put in flare gas and sulfur recovery units as well. And also, I’ve noticed that there’s been a serious reduction in flaring and incidents that have been taking place at those facilities.
And in meeting with people like Verna Rutherford and some, the plant manager at Valero, we found that when they put in these flare gas recovery units and whatnot, they’re also saving product. They found ways to recover a lot of what would’ve been lost and dumped into the environment. So, these are some of the things that stand out in my mind when it comes to Port Arthur, when it comes to old Port Arthur, what I miss about Port Arthur, which is every community having a place where you can feel a serious sense of community, a connection with people who help one another. And I’ve learned that, you know, what also stands out is that those industries are willing to do the right thing if we tell them and show them what we’re wanting them to do. So, that’s where I’m at with that.Chris Sellers: Okay. Well, I’m gonna throw it open. And I think we’ll—you know, I have a neatly divided program, but I think we’re gonna just have this whole, your responses to people’s spiels as well as this discussion of advantages and disadvantages now, for about 45 minutes.
00:56:08
Mickey Breaux: Another quick point. As he was talking about the recovery units, when they first passed the sulfur recovery units, now they actually make money in these refineries. They also shut down Gulf Sulphur in Beaumont, which employed a lot of people, that had got a sulfur ________ going in the Beaumont area, where they refine sulfur, but they’re making pure sulfur in these oil refineries. So, it created a whole other outsource of revenue for these refineries. It started out as a cost, but now it sustains itself and it’s part of the natural operations and a side effect to everybody in this room—Male: Yeah, it cleans the air.Mickey Breaux: It cleans the air—you bet.Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm, so it’s a win/win.Mickey Breaux: It’s a win/win. It took them a long time to realize that, but…Hilton Kelley: Yeah. Well, they used to call me the bad guy, but [Laughter]…Mickey Breaux: Being from the union, I was called that quite a bit, too.Hilton Kelley: [Laughter]
00:57:00
Chris Sellers: Well, okay, the floor is open for other people to add comments about things that stand out to you in the last 30, 40 years, the relationship between the community and industry. Or we can move on, too, to how the disadvantages and advantages and how you think those have changed over time. We’ve already started that discussion, I think, with our spiels. We’re pretty far into it. But now the floor is open for everyone else to add their own observations.Tiffany Hamilton: Mr. Sellers, I do have a point of interest.Chris Sellers: Sure.Tiffany Hamilton: It was stated on both sides how the impact that the community has had regarding the environmental impact from the refineries and the economic impact from the refineries. And one of the—and also, someone also mentioned the ID agreements. I think maybe you did, Mr. Sutherland.
00:57:57
But with our industrial agreements, with the City of Port Arthur’s industrial agreements with industry, we have, just about two months ago, updated our industrial agreements, which now include, I call it, more meat to the contracts. The contracts are holding more weight to hold industry more accountable for making sure that we are hiring our Port Arthur residents. And it’s our tax payers’ dollars that we’re offering as a discount to these refineries. So, what Mr. Mickey talked about with having—maybe it was you, but someone on this side, I remember you saying, “My granddaddy worked there, my daddy worked there, I worked there, my son works there.”Richard Landry: He said, “My father worked there,” for sure.Tiffany Hamilton: Okay. So, that is something that I wish we could have here. We should have a choice to be able to have first right of refusal for where we live, if that’s what you want.
00:59:08
I do understand that business is business and industry is in it for a profit, and we cannot tell, you know, private business what it is that, and how they’re to run their business. However, when we’re offering our tax payers’ dollars, then we do have a say, we do get to have a voice. And I believe that our voice has been very weak over the last several years, and I’m hoping that we continue to make our voices stronger and stronger and not just by holding—not only by holding them accountable on a contract, but creating these relationships by having them to be more…I’m trying to say this in the politically correct way, but corporate responsibility to our community, but yet our citizens also need to do our part as well.
01:00:10
Like Mr. Kelley said, at some point, he was considered to be the bad guy, but he was doing his part to make sure that they were being held accountable. And although—and also the same thing with the union on the labor side. They may have been seen as the bad guy, but they were doing their part to make sure that industry was held accountable. So, we have to make sure we’re holding ourselves accountable so that when we show up, we qualify. But then also, that they’re being fair. Also, another thing that these contracts have done is to make sure that contractors have the opportunity to have a fair chance at working and serving these refineries. So, Mr. Mickey mentioned previously that the contracts, working with contractors allowed the refineries to spend less money on getting the activity done that they needed, but we have local contractor that can do that as well, who hire local people.
So, we are making strides for this to be a more, a greater opportunity for our residents and businesses to have a seat at the table as well. Yeah, I’ll leave it at that.Mickey Breaux: An example of what she’s trying to say—I’m not trying to speak for her, of course—Tiffany Hamilton: Yes, sir.Mickey Breaux: – is between Jimmy Johnson Boulevard and the airport. There are 11, count ‘em, 11 hotels, and 2 more being completed. Those people aren’t residents. What are they doing here? They’re working at Motiva, they’re working in Valero.Nelson Edgerly: They’re contractors.Mickey Breaux: They’re—what I call them, they’re transients. They move in, suck the money out of the air and bring it back home wherever they live. It’s not a permanent resident to help build a permanent city.
01:02:04
You know, I just, that kind of upsets me, because I have children that would love to have good jobs in this area.Elton Gish: Yeah, our children would have to, if they can’t get a job locally, they have to go somewhere else to get a job.Mickey Breaux: True, true.Tiffany Hamilton: I’m an example of that. I did move away after college and, growing up, you would hear, “Baby girl, to be successful, you have to be an attorney, you have to be a doctor, you have to be a nurse or you can be a teacher—but just get out of here. Get out of Port Arthur.” And I’m not saying that message was from my parents, but that’s something that you would hear just in general conversation around town to say, “If you wanna be successful, you can’t do it here.” And that’s scary.
01:02:53
And so, when I did come home just to visit, like Mr. Kelley said, part of my question was, “Well, what happened?” Because some of the things—and my span of time being away was nothing close to Mr. Kelley’s span of time being away. So, for that much to have been depleted in my short life span—and I don’t mind sharing, I’m 36—Mickey Breaux: Just a kid.Tiffany Hamilton: – and in my short life span, I have seen a decline in the city of Port Arthur. So, I think that the longer we wait to speak up and the longer we wait to wait on somebody else instead of stepping up yourself, then we’re gonna continue to decline. But I’m here because I wanna be here, because I wanna see my city grow, and I’m hoping that we can recruit more people to come so we can sit here and learn from you all and try to understand what it was that was so great, you know, back in the day to try to duplicate it and then add on to it, or how we can continue to improve.
01:04:00
But we shouldn’t have to go away to be successful, but we have to create better opportunity and create better relationships.Hilton Kelley: I’d like to add in a segue, that’s a good segue into what I was thinking is, number one, I think that the forefathers of Port Arthur, the founding fathers of Port Arthur—I mean, when we stumbled into this oil business, it was great. It provided a lot of great opportunities for transportation, it divided work for folks, it brought in a lot of good money. But then I think we got so excited about that one opportunity to where we forgot to put more eggs in the basket.Chris Sellers: Opportunities, yeah.Hilton Kelley: I believe that, even to this day, we still relish in the old glories of the oil business as we watch it slowly dwindle, as we watch things become more automated, as we watch outside work come from various parts of the country and other countries to access this work, but yet our kids are being pushed to the back because why? They demand a little bit more in pay, so to speak. They ask more questions.
01:05:08
I think it’s time that we look at ways in which we can incorporate more good paying jobs into our economy. I mean, the problem is not that we don’t have enough jobs, but jobs with substance. Quality jobs to where you can make a good living and take care of your kids, to buy a house. I mean, everybody don’t wanna work at the plant. Everybody’s not plant material. But some people are literate when it comes to clean technologies. Let’s look at, everything’s going green now. Why can’t we have a solar panel plant here? Why can’t we have a wind turbine plant here? Why can’t we have a factory here where we design and manufacture clothing or shoes? Something. We need to be able to attract a more diverse opportunity base and start getting away from just depending on fossil fuel industries to provide all the top paying jobs.
01:06:07
And there are tons of opportunities out there, but who’s looking for them? I mean, I see them all the time, I go on US.gov all the time and look at all these giant grant opportunities for creating new opportunities in underserved communities, but yet, I’m not a government entity. And yet, there are leaders out there that need to be really diving into this to try and identify how can we attract those kind of opportunities to our city to help it to grow, and to help our young people to have opportunities? Because this is what’s needed. Everybody’s not gonna work at the plant. The plants are mainly outsourced, a lot of those jobs, because most of the time when I talk to them and we get into the topic of, “Well, more people need to be employed here, I’m hearing this from our young people that can’t get employment”—“Well, that’s up to our subcontractors.”
So, how do we break out of that gap and then get into the realm of, “Okay, well, let’s look at how can we create more jobs, better opportunities?” I think that’s where we need to start.Les McMahon: Well, to add to a point that Hilton made, like I said early on, Port Arthur started out, basically, with the intent that it would be a port city. And once the oil industry came in—yes, there was shipping, but it was related to the oil industry. And it wasn’t until 1964 that the city got a port of—a general cargo port. And I think we’ve been missing the boat, [Laughter] so to speak, a lot over the years that things would come in and maybe have potential but there’s no interest because all the interest is over toward the oil industries. And yes, there’s been smaller businesses come in, but with all the land the city has, and fortunately, the Economic Development Corporation here ________ is attracting larger businesses, but look how far behind the curve they and we are.
01:08:08
Tiffany Hamilton: One of the good things is, over the years, we have begun to attract some of the new business, and we are looking into the turbines and having them at least be assembled here, because they can be brought in through the port. And even with our, between them, the port of Port Arthur and the port of Beaumont, we are the largest port to receive and export military equipment. So, we have the opportunity to grow, and especially with—well, already, over the last 15 years or so lobbying for our waterway to be deepened, and if that does go through and we are able to receive the funding for that, then that will allow us to expand even more. But we have—Port Arthur is a great city, and I always say, when someone asks, “Where are you from?” “The great city of Port Arthur” or, “The great state of Texas.”
01:09:11
And I love this city, and several people here love our city. And we’ll go to bat for it and fight for it. But we have to hear a stronger voice from the community of not so much of just what’s wrong, but of these ideas that we’re talking about right now. And there may be things we hadn’t even thought about before, of what we can possibly bring into the port or how we can continue to grow in other areas outside of industry. But there are so many avenues that could end in industry that could employ a lot of people along the way.
01:09:56
Glenn E. Alexander: I think that one thing that I don’t see, and I don’t know what the curriculum is at Lamar University, but this being a seaport city, you can leave right out of the port of Port Arthur and go anywhere around the world. It looks like academia would create something that would offer what we have, our natural resources, have some kind of curriculum that would—and then market it for students to go in that direction. Not just looking at the petrochemical plants, but looking at that water that we have as a resource, like international trade or something, or how you could use the water, how you could use the waterway. What kind of—what do you major in in school that you could learn how to drive a big ship or learn how to drive a tugboat?
01:11:08
How to use the water. The children that I, the young people that I know that’s graduated from school, that doesn’t seem to ring a bell to them. They want to get away from here. But we do have resources here, and one of the big ones is the water. I think that’s one of the reasons why the refineries are here and haven’t left.Hilton Kelley: Oh, no doubt. [Laughter]Glenn E. Alexander: Is because we got the water. It’s a goldmine that’s not being utilized, to me.Nelson Edgerly: Gulf and Texaco had big fleets.Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm, that’s right. My stepdad was a merchant seaman. My uncle was a merchant seaman. And they would go to Turkey, different places, exporting oil, bringing oil back—all kind of products. But the thing is, I think that, you know, with the expansion I think of, of the electronic age, it sort of turned our youths’ heads another direction away from that manual labor type work to more, everybody wanna be into electronics and computers and what have you. Which is great, but at the same time, that is a field that is still wide open.
01:12:16
I mean, shipping is not gonna go away. I mean, but now we’ve got—like you said, we’ve got to widen our ports. We’ve got these mega ships now to where you don’t need as many ships, but at the same time, the port is gonna be widened, from what I understand, the LNG tankers that are gonna be coming in. But yet, when it comes to cargo, it could be used for that as well, so it’s a win/win kinda in that way.Tiffany Hamilton: It is definitely a win/win. And just because of funding—this is about a $40,000,000,000.00 project. And so, right now, we’re petitioning the House to even open an account to fund it, to help us to begin to fund it. But this is a true golden triangle, wave the white flag, you know, “We surrender, we surrender. We need help, right now.”
And, because of how much it costs, it started out as a widening and deepening project. Because of the cost, they forewent the widening part and now we’re focusing on the deepening. But to answer your concern about education, there is a maritime degree that is now being offered.Glenn E. Alexander: At Lamar?Tiffany Hamilton: Mm-hmm, and this is—don’t quote me on this, but I don’t know if it’s just this past year or maybe it’s been for the last two years, but there is a maritime degree. And there is one student, McKenzie, I think you may know him—Glenn E. Alexander: Yeah.Tiffany Hamilton: – he’s actually focusing on that. And so, the port of Port Arthur has a program for students called the Seaport Project. I may have the name of it wrong, but they do have a program for the youth, to introduce them to the maritime industry, along with the Coast Guard.
01:14:00
And so, now, the city of Port Arthur is an official Coast Guard city.Glenn E. Alexander: We have a station.Tiffany Hamilton: We have a station—yes, sir. So, we do, we are growing in that area. I wish it was, you know, for much longer, but we’re here right now. We’re here now, and we have to market it and let the community know that it’s available. And they do—however, it’s unfortunate we have not done a good job in the past of letting the community know all of what is available. So, we have to do a better job and we’re asking for those that are interested that if you hadn’t heard about anything in a while, please call, to hold us accountable as well, [Cross talk] but there are a lot of things available.Mickey Breaux: The problem with—Chris Sellers: Mr. Sutherland.Mickey Breaux: – sorry, I wanna say something [Cross talk].Chris Sellers: No, no, I’m just trying to get his attention.Mickey Breaux: The problem with—and I’m glad, hearing about that degree plan. The problem is, there is really no, to speak of, American fleet any more.
01:15:01
You look at the flags that fly through all these ships and trailers, I mean, tankers and stuff—they’re all foreign flagged ships.Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm.Tiffany Hamilton: About 90 percent of our cargo coming in is international.Mickey Breaux: Yeah, a foreign flag, which means they don’t have American workers. They’ve got people on there working for, you know, SIU—SEIU?—whatever the seafarer’s union was, and they’re pretty much starving for jobs. The problem is gonna be, through deregulation and world freight or whatever you wanna say, for some reason, we used to have quite an American fleet. We don’t have many to speak of any more. Like Nelson said, Texaco and Gulf had their own fleets. Now, they just contract it out. I wish I knew the answer. I hope the answer is, we make a lot of good employees and they start hiring us instead of them, but—I don’t know. For some reason, everybody looks at the bottom line in the quarterly statements rather than 10 years down the road.Hilton Kelley: That’s right.Mickey Breaux: I’m not a friend of Henry Ford, but one thing he did do was, he doubled the wages of all his employees.
01:16:04
And the other companies said, “Why’d you do that?” And he said, “Well I got”—at that time—“10,000 employees who can’t buy my product. Now, I’ve got 10,000 employees that can buy my product.” Now, we’re not worried about that, we’re worried about what the quarterly statement says for this month and what my buyout when I retire as CEO. We’re not worried about the guys in Port Arthur, Texas.I don’t know how you change that mentality, but we went from a society—you know, it used to be trickle down was true. If you were rich and you had a company, you expanded that company, you hired people, and they made you millions of dollars, but you had millions of jobs. Now, the deal is, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s trickle on, I guess, rather than trickle down.But I like the idea. I had an uncle that was a seaman. I’ve had a lot of friends that were seamen, and they don’t exist any more. As a matter of fact, one of the guys in charge of the river pilots, I grew up with across the street from, Mr. Raspass, if I remember that name right. He died a few years ago. He’s about 6, 7 foot tall and had a 3 foot wife. [Laughter]
01:17:08
You know, he was a great guy. So, the pilots still, it used to be, regulations required, when you come down that channel, you had to have a pilot. Now, because of changes in regulations and insurance, whatever, you don’t have to have a pilot. You can have your own captain pilot through that channel. And those were high paying jobs, and some of those are going away. I wished I knew the answers. I hate to be the guy that’s always saying negative, but I mean…Hilton Kelley: [Laughter] Well, you know, we’re living in a global market now. I mean, and it’s nothing to have a bunch of guys come up from the Philippines or come up from China, and let’s just face it—the reality is, their hourly wage is a lot less than what we would require here in this country, and this is why we’ve lost so many American companies to south of the border or to India and what have you. It’s huge. And this is something, I didn’t vote for Trump, but this is something that he’s talking about stopping [Cross talk] is all of our major companies fleeing to countries where they can pay 50 cents or $1.00 an hour for wages.
01:18:12
A lot of our jobs would—Mickey Breaux: When you’re working for 50 cents an hour, you don’t buy many goods.Hilton Kelley: You don’t buy anything, that’s right, you’re living—Mickey Breaux: When you’re working for 30 bucks an hour or so in refineries, you buy new cars and homes and stuff like that—Hilton Kelley: That’s right.Mickey Breaux: – locally, and you support the local economy. When you’re buying—and I’m the world’s worst about this, too, I’ll say it. Look at your clothes when you go home tonight. I’ve got a pair of socks on that I know was made in the United States, but I bet that’s the only thing I’m wearing that was made in the United States.Hilton Kelley: That’s right.Mickey Breaux: We’ve already lost the textile industry. It’s gone.Hilton Kelley: Yep.Mickey Breaux: Never to return, probably.Hilton Kelley: I remember Port Arthur had a lot of mechanic’s shops along 7th Street. There were steel workers. They were making motors. They had all kinds of shops that were catering to the plants. I recall that there was a metal shop right on Austin and 7th Street, not far from my place of business.
And I think it’s a Korean guy that runs it, that’s been running it for years. But he’s a mechanical engineer. He builds all sorts of machinery there for the ________ still to this day, but he’s the last of the Mohicans. So, you know, a lot of those jobs has been lost, but how do we bring that back?Richard Landry: Well, part of that, I believe, is the fault of the companies. Because when they laid us off, for about two years, there was stagnation and no movement whatsoever.Hilton Kelley: In ’76, right?Richard Landry: No, it was ’83, ’82—Hilton Kelley: During the gas crunch? Okay.Richard Landry: – is when the strike first—that was the first strike. They laid off approximately 300 in ’82, 900 in ’83, and 1,400 in ’84.
01:20:02
So, from ’82 to about ’86, there was absolutely nothing. You couldn’t even go get a job at a mom and pop grocery any more, because they were going out of business, and the company was responsible for doing that. I was out of work a year before I found a job, and the job I found was helping people get back to work.Hilton Kelley: [Laughter] Wow.Richard Landry: And I was talking to Chris yesterday about some of this. For a period of probably five years, there wasn’t anything for us to do. So, we had to cut grass and clean up and paint houses and do whatever you could do during that period of time.
01:21:04
But there was a point in the industry when they brought in contractors, and that was about a four or five year period. Because, when I got laid off in ’83, there were no jobs. You would have to go to, there were a few jobs in Houston. You could go to work, but you wasn’t making a whole lot of money. And so, ’83, ’84, ’85, somewhere around ’86, they started bringing the contractors back in and you could actually go hire on with a contractor doing the same work that we were doing when I got laid off. But there was a period of nothing there for several years.
01:21:56
I still believe that the strike, that the layoffs devastated Port Arthur for a period of, I think it still devastated Port Arthur.Hilton Kelley: Still, yeah. It never recovered. [Cross talk]Richard Landry: B the mom and pop businesses are gone.Hilton Kelley: Are gone—they’re gone.Richard Landry: The companies used to stimulate additional businesses. Like, when I went to work for Texaco in ’73, on 18th Street, there was a sales terminal there where they hauled gasoline, and that was a big deal. They employed about 100 people there, the trucks, they had loaders, you know, and all kinds of people. And that industry just went away.Hilton Kelley: Your machine shops, yeah.Richard Landry: Well, yeah. They moved it all, and you were talking about mechanics and we had a mom and pop gas station, you had plumbers, you had hardware stores, grocery stores.
01:23:08
What I remember as a kid going downtown, we went down to Procter Street. That’s where I went.Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm, that’s right.Richard Landry: That’s where I went. We didn’t go to where the new town is, where the mall is, or—I mean, we used to go down there when I was a kid because of the Parade.Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm.Richard Landry: TGMY, Western Auto. All those places moved away, and they’re gone, and they have never come back since the layoff. And I blame the corporations for not rebuilding, not encouraging smaller businesses to come into the area, because they used to have a direct hand in that.Hilton Kelley: Yeah.Richard Landry: The supervision for Texaco was the mayor of Port Arthur.
01:24:02
Arthur Guidry, a very good friend of mine, was a city councilman. He was one of the first black supervisors in our refinery. He was responsible for recruiting engineers and management people to the city of Port Arthur to buy a home or to build a home and to bring their family here and their children here to put them in our schools. And I think that’s, I personally believe that’s the fault of the companies. I really do. And they have held Port Arthur and the surrounding cities hostage for year.Chris Sellers: Okay, one more comment and I think we’re gonna take a short break, and we have snacks back there and so forth, and then we’ll come back. I wanna talk with a couple of you to get us started again.Tiffany Hamilton: I—Chris Sellers: Cool—did you?
Hilton Kelley: Oh, yeah, yeah. I just wanted to say something real brief, and that is, you know, I think we all kinda hit on the point that we are dealing with a one man industry, here. And I think, within this discussion, what I’ve discovered is that, you know, what I’ve always kinda thought of was the fact that we have one egg in the basket. We need to look at ways in which we can create more opportunities. It’s obvious. Because if we don’t, we’re doomed to repeat what has been done in the past. We’re starting to go up now, but if we don’t get something in the basket along with the petroleum industries, then we’re gonna repeat what we’ve already been through. There’s a serious lack of opportunity and our young folks leaving. The ones that are trying to stay here, we have to give them a reason. And what’s that reason?Richard Landry: Well, one of the bright spots in our area is that industrial park out there—Hilton Kelley: Yeah.Richard Landry: – in Port Acres, and that’s great.
01:26:01
In Houston, a thing like that would fill up in a couple of months.Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm.Richard Landry: We have been fighting, trying to get people down there for years already, and we just do not bring people in this area. I still blame it on the companies, I really do.Chris Sellers: Okay, so, let’s have a brief break, like five minutes, and we’ll come back and everybody can—there is a snack back there, and we’ll have a windup discussion. I wanted to talk about benzene, and then I wanted to talk—we’ve already started to talk about the future, what this past suggests about the future. So, we’ll continue that discussion. I think what I wanna do now is, it’s a little more specialized in terms of—and this is actually one of the things that got me started on this book was, I’ve written before about the history of environmental health. One of the things you find in that history, especially over the last 50 years, is that we’ve learned a lot more about what chemicals can do to the human body.
01:27:09
And, in particular, the long term exposures, we’ve learned that there a lot more long term, low level exposures to chemicals like benzene. They’re a lot more severe than people had suspected early in the 20th Century, or even the mid-20th Century. So, this is how come I’ve given you—and benzene is, of course, a lot of you Port Arthurians know benzene. I think most of you have heard the name and are familiar with how central it is to the process.Terry Lynn Hamilton: And familiar with the smell, mm-hmm.Chris Sellers: And the smell is, like—yeah. But one of the things I’ve done research in is the history of the science of benzene, the regulation history of that, and I’m just trying to summarize what I’ve found here, just in terms of nationally and internationally, they’ve really discovered that it was a cancer causing agent and began to take that into account in environmental and workplace rules only in the middle of the 20th Century. Only, really, into the 1980s did they figure that in.
01:28:14
Hilton Kelley: I don’t have that sheet.Chris Sellers: Here, I can turn it over to you.Hilton Kelley: No, I’ll get one.Chris Sellers: Okay.Hilton Kelley: Does she have one over there?Chris Sellers: Do you have another? Yeah, this is, so this is, actually—Carolyn Thibodeaux: In the program?Chris Sellers: – this is in the program, everybody has that?Hilton Kelley: Where’s the program, up here?Chris Sellers: Yeah, some of you, it looks like you didn’t get that, coming in, but—Hilton Kelley: Anybody else need one?Chris Sellers: – I can pass this sheet around to people. You got it? This is—but this is, you can see the standards, how drastically they’ve come down, like, from 25 parts per million they allowed it in the air in workplaces back in the ‘60s, way down. And now the recommended, it’s like, it’s almost 100 times lower than it was 40 years ago, because, largely, of the cancerous effects.
01:29:00
And as sort of our health practitioner here at the table, I’ve asked Mr. Alexander to give us a bit of a summary about his—what I wanted us to talk about is the, what did this change mean here in Port Arthur? Did you guys—when did you guys first learn of this sort of added danger to benzene? You know, what was it like, I understand there was a lot of close, hands on working with benzene.Male: Yeah, in the ‘70s, when I worked there.Chris Sellers: In the ‘70s. So, I’m just trying to gather people’s reflections and perspectives on how they got wind, so to speak, of this change in what we know about benzene, that it’s much more toxic and hazardous than a lot of people had said. Yeah?Glenn E. Alexander: Well, personally, I had a special incident with benzene. My stepfather worked at Gulf Oil for 42 years, and the unit that he worked on was the benzene unit.
01:30:09
So, I heard a lot of stories about benzene, and he told me it was something that he didn’t want me to play with or be around because of how dangerous it was. One of my chores, I remember they bought me these long, yellow gloves from Sears, and when my pop would come home in the evening, one of my duties—this was in the early ‘60s—was to take his overalls and his denim jacket that he worked in, and we had clotheslines back then. He wasn’t allowed—my mom wouldn’t let him bring that stuff in the house, the stench of it, and we knew it was bad.
We would hang them up on the line and we had a wash house in the back. I would wash those things myself, for him. And he had these shoes that looked like Frankenstein shoes. They were made out of wood. They had wood bottoms on the shoes. He said, “Glenn, you have to wear this on the benzene unit, because if you go out there with them Converse like what you wear, that stuff will eat the bottom off of it.” He said they had a lot of critters, possums, and rabbits and things that would get caught in those little ponds of that stuff, and he wrecked it. He wrecked it—the old man didn’t die of no leukemia or nothing. He lived into his late 70s. He had a lot of problems, but I don’t think he had leukemia, but he told me things about it. In 1986, being a public health person, I was chosen to go to MD Anderson for two weeks, and I became the cancer screener and diagnostician for the city of Port Arthur to be able to examine a person and diagnose whether they had the major, major types of cancer.
01:32:11
And one of the things that I learned way back then in working with the March of Dimes, that this substance right here was very dangerous as far as leukemia was concerned and as far as pre-term infants. If the moms were exposed to that, it was easy for her to delivery early or even the worst thing could happen. Benzene was nothing to play with. And you can look on this chart right here—it was permitted 25 parts per million was permissible, and it went all the way down to—this was open. This was alright, 25 parts per million. And when it was regulated all the way down after OSHA came in, it was down to 0.1.
01:33:04
But this is what, in 1976, when I left the lab at Gulf Oil, this is what ran me out of the lab and found me going back to school to do something else. I had a degree in Biology, but I just had the degree in Biology with a minor in Health, but really, no profession. And I ended up going to nursing school. But one of the things that got me out of the lab—and I had what was called a good job—it was, I knew enough about chemistry that this stuff wasn’t being pulled out of there good. I used to do vapor pressures, I would do ash points, I would do flash points, just all kinds of stuff on petroleum. But I had enough sense to know that if I stayed sniffing that, I wasn’t gonna last long.
01:33:56
So, that led me to go back, what can I do with a Biology degree? I hooked nursing onto it, and in two years, I got a Baccalaureate in Nursing because I had a degree in Biology. But about benzene? It’s very dangerous. And they used to—every now and then, if you look at the paper, I don’t know what reports it was, but they had leaks over Port Arthur. I lived in the 1000 block of 17th Street, that’s one block off of Savannah, and there used to be a leak on 19th Street and Savannah. That was the Texas Company people that had that at the time. I know it was a leak there. You could smell it. You could smell it all over town. It would make you nauseated. A lot has been done, because those smells that I used to smell, I didn’t smell them no more. You don’t smell that any more. So, I know through the watch groups and environmental people coming in and the refinery improving in what they’re doing—they’ve improved. They’ve improved, but at the same time, we’re still in the midst, our neighbors are petrochemicals people.
01:35:12
Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm.Glenn E. Alexander: So, we have to take the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is where most all the people, where we made our money from, and you had to deal with the backlash of what you was making the money from. And it was sniffing this stuff all the time. We didn’t give no thought to it. Working in the clinic, I could tell just from my patient that came in that it was something in the atmosphere. I don’t know where it came from, but my little asthmatic people would come in, like, follow the leader. One came and the other one came in. They came like that. They just, it was something that was triggering these kids off, that all of my asthmatics ________ bad and those that would go into status asthmaticus, they would come in for medicine or for breathing treatments.
01:36:07
And I wasn’t hesitant. I gave them all machines. That was one thing I did. I didn’t mind using the referral system. As a nurse practitioner, this is what I’m supposed to do. When it’s out of my hands, send it on to a specialist. And I would send the person that could give you real stats here in Port Arthur about children with asthma, air pollutants, with children with bronchitis and bronchiolitis, it would be this Dr. Singh. He’s an allergist and an asthma specialist. But I would refer all of these kids that I suspected—and I was betting, I’m betting 98 or 99. If I told you they had it, they had it. I could hear asthma, and something was triggering it off.
And usually, when you have what’s called eccentric asthma, it’s coming from something from outside. It’s not like your bronchiolitis or your respiratory syncytial virus, it’s something that’s—Tiffany Hamilton: Unnatural.Glenn E. Alexander: – that’s out there.Tiffany Hamilton: Unnatural.Glenn E. Alexander: Yes, yes, and they would come in. But the limits—we’re down to a good area here, compared to what was permissible, I think. What was permissible, going from 25 parts per million to 0.0—that’s good work, to me.Mickey Breaux: Actually, the enforceable limit is still 1 percent.Male: Yeah.Mickey Breaux: Now, it’s not covered by law, it’s just a recommendation. But something people need to realize about benzene is the threshold limit of smell. Before you can actually smell benzene, it’s 25 parts per million.Hilton Kelley: Wow.
01:37:58
Mickey Breaux: If you smell sweet stuff before that, it’s toluene or xylene. Benzene, you can’t recognize that smell ‘til you get to 25 parts per million. So, if I can smell benzene—if you smell benzene, you’re way the hell overexposed, that’s all I can say, because hit 1 part per million and, you know, you’ve got a lot of benzene in there, so.Elton Gish: Well, at the dock, whenever they were loading barges, before they had vapor recovery—Mickey Breaux:Yeah, they got that now.Elton Gish: – they were not allowed to go above 20 parts per billion—Mickey Breaux: Whoa! That’s good.Elton Gish: – in cleaning tanks, too.Mickey Breaux: That was good. That’s low.Elton Gish: It’s really, really low.Mickey Breaux: Yeah, 20 parts per billion.Otis Higgs: You know, when did the—when did the regulations actually go in that got it? I can remember way back, we washed our hands and then—Mickey Breaux: Well, sure. And your tools, too. You know, what is it, NASH? I forget the name of it but the Association of Hygiene, the NCCIGH folks have been around for years and had regulations, unenforced, that were recommendations. In 1970—’68, they had OSHA, was put in effect in 1970. And then, like it says here, about ’72, they had a benzene standard of 20 parts per million.
01:39:15
Otis Higgs: Yeah.Mickey Breaux: So, that’s what I say, it was the mid-‘70s before they ever actually started mandating that you have to limit exposures. And then, unless you were audited by OSHA or you had somebody like me fussing at you all the time, they never did anything—at least in my plant—any industrial standard tests for it, and we were lucky.Richard Landry: They were still being used.Mickey Breaux: Yeah, it was still being used. Now—Richard Landry: In the late ‘70s.Mickey Breaux: – like you said, though, they load the barges, they’ve got a benzene recovery unit where the vapors go through this system and get burnt up and everything, so it is a heck of a lot better. But benzene is really, it’s not good for you. I’ve got some friends that died of leukemia.
01:39:55
Hilton Kelley: Well, one thing is certain, I mean, the Environmental Protection Agency came along in 1970 and then it took them a while to get their wheels turning. But up until that time, ‘til the EPA started coming in with some enforcement, the state really wasn’t doing a whole lot. They looked the other way, because it’s just the way of doing business.Mickey Breaux: It’s a cash cow, [Cross talk].Hilton Kelley: Yeah. So, it took a long time for, you know, certain agencies to even kick in with regulations and start to enforce reducing benzene emissions in the air.Mickey Breaux: No, they’re serious now. They got—Hilton Kelley: Oh, yeah.Mickey Breaux: The refineries that I’m familiar with all have tags on all the green valves and they have to have plugs in ‘em and they’re sniffed on a regular basis. But, you know, when we worked out, like he said, you used to wash your hands in it.Hilton Kelley: Right. I heard about that. [Laughter] Yep.Mickey Breaux: Or take your clothes, you get some grease on your clothes, you put some of that and you rub it, rinse it out with kerosene and wash it, and it’s brand new clothes.Hilton Kelley: Keep it moving.Jim Sutherland: Suck on a water hose to put gas in your buddy’s car.Hilton Kelley: Yeah! Oh!Jim Sutherland: Yeah. Remember that mouthful of gasoline?Hilton Kelley: End up getting a mouthful of that. [Laughter]Jim Sutherland: I don’t admit crimes.Hilton Kelley: [Laughter] [Cross talk]
01:41:01
Jim Sutherland: It was not—it was all collusion. It wasn’t even funny.Elton Gish: Now they have processes that destroys the benzene in the gasoline before it’s blended.Chris Sellers: What does? What does?Elton Gish: They have new processes now that they built out at Motiva that destroys the benzene before it goes into the finished gasoline.Mickey Breaux: Yeah, and also, they’ve got alcohol they’re putting in it, which is a whole other thing. It doesn’t affect a human as much as it does the groundwater, but that’s a whole other issue.Elton Gish: Oh, yeah.Chris Sellers: Yeah, I think EPA came in later with this. It was OSHA that was the first agency to really regulate it tightly. But EPA came in, and it was only in the 2000s they started to set the standards for benzene in gasoline, so that’s probably this process you’re talking about.Mickey Breaux: Do you want to recognize the mayor that just got here.Chris Sellers: Sure, yeah.Mickey Breaux: That’s Bobbie.Chris Sellers: While she’s talking, maybe can, for the—Mickey Breaux: Yeah, okay.Chris Sellers: Okay. So, any other comments on the benzene piece? Recollections memories?
01:42:02
I think we’ve done a pretty good job with that. Thank you. That will be helpful for me when I get around to writing this book.Well, we have a new guest here, a participant, Mayor Prince, I guess everybody is familiar with her. Welcome.Well, she’s arrived just in time for our final discussion, and this was—I kind of set this up as legacies and their meaning for the present and future of Port Arthur. Of course, we’ve already kinda got into that, but I do want to return to that. And I thought a good way to do this might be, since people were talking about other eggs in baskets, you know, economically speaking, the maritime industry.
I thought it might be a good idea to get some perspective, just briefly, on what the petroleum era of Port Arthur contributed to the waterways that Port Arthur now has and all the reconstruction of earlier times to look at what the legacy actually was, water-wise, of the petrochemical industry to have Jim Sutherland give us just a bit of an overview about how those waterways have been transformed from their natural time, natural period into sort of man-made waterways.Jim Sutherland: Without having a map to talk to, I’ll do the best I can.Chris Sellers: We could get a map up, but I don’t—Jim Sutherland: Most of you are fairly familiar with South Jefferson County, and [Cross talk] I’ve made some presentations on the navigation development of Western—west of Sabine Lake in Jefferson County a couple of times for other venues.
01:44:00
But I got to know this subject fairly well, and it’s a really funs story, because it all starts with a Civil War battle at Sabine Pass. Big oyster reef—very, very limited access for any kind of a ship to go through that reef except on either edge, there were two little trenaches, they were about 18 feet deep. The problem the Union Navy had when they came into Sabine Pass to take the pass and invade Texas was that they all had deep draft ships. They didn’t have anything that could come in across that oyster reef. And the Confederate shipping was either nonexistent or it was river boats, starweathers, all flat bottom. And they could run across the reef, take a shot at a Union boat, run back across the reef, and go back to orange.
01:44:53
I would recommend that, if you get a chance to go to the Museum of the Gulf Coast, they have a book on the shelf called The Battle of Sabine Pass: The Thermopylae of the South, which is what Jefferson Davis called that battle. It’s a fun read, it’s about 150 pages, if you like war stories. But it wasn’t a very long battle. It lasted about 45 minutes. But that said, shortly after the Civil War was over with, Congress passed a number of bills that would open up these shallow ports, these shallow rivers in the Gulf so that, next time there was an uprising in the Southern United States—and I don’t mean to offend anybody, here—that their shipping could get in and out. And in 1876, they cut the reef at Sabine, all the way into the mouth of Sabine Lake there, about where the causeway is, and established a navigation channel there, a federal navigation channel.
01:46:04
Then when Arthur Stillwell and his investors came into Port Arthur, they dug a ditch around the West side of Sabine Lake from the mouth of Taylor Bayou all the way to Sabine, and they were gonna connect to that channel. Well, you can imagine the folks that ran the Port of Sabine and how they felt about, “Well, now, it’s gonna pass us up and go to the refinery in Port Arthur”—of course, the refineries weren’t there quite yet, but the railroad connection was planned. And there was a lot of hoo-ha in Washington with the Secretary of War, who was the regulatory agency at the time for rivers and harbors.
01:46:54
But Mr. Stillwell and his bunch—I think Port Arthur, I forget. Port Arthur River and—let’s see. No, Port Arthur—I don’t know. They had a little name like Channel Company or something. But it’s what exists as the Sabine Nature Ship Channel from Sabine back to Texaco now, whatever Texaco is now.But that happened in 1898, and probably 1911, there was a connection dug from what we call Texaco Island, I guess, across the North side of Sabine Lake to the Neches River. And the problem there was, there were big money interests in Jefferson County bringing rice water off, fresh water off the Neches River just a couple of miles above the bridge. I believe Grigsby’s Bluff, is that where the park is?
01:48:07
Male: Yeah.Jim Sutherland: That’s where the big, the big pumps were that were bringing rice into the middle part of Jefferson County, south Jefferson County. There were, like, they were watering like 18,000 acres of rice. And the politics of the county at the time wasn’t driven by oil and gas as much as who was still by agriculture. And so, when they dug that channel from Texaco Island to the Neches River, they built a set of locks in the middle of it. They called them saltwater guardlocks. Interesting thing, but when—in the early 1920s, and if I recall, about 1924, the Jefferson County Commissioner’s court declared those locks a nuisance to navigation and they dredged around them in order to deepen and widen the channel to the river.
By then, the people that had the rice fields also had oil and gas underneath them, and so, it was a coin toss for them or profitable for them. Those locks stayed in that channel until the year I was born, 1952. But they went around them for a long, long time. Every time something’s done, something else was done to mitigate or modify the big plans so that it was passable to other folks. Interesting enough, the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway that was dug through Jefferson County to Galveston Bay started in 1930. And about two years before that, there was a channel dug from Orange off the Sabine River to Lake Charles, with private money, to access the oil fields between Orange and Lake Charles in those big marshes.
01:50:00
That channel was dug 30 feet deep. The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway was maintained at 12. They never had to re-dig that channel going to Lake Charles. But until World War II, there was not a Calcasieu Channel. All the shipping came up the Sabine and went across Calcasieu Parish to Lake Charles and back. So, all the shipping to Lake Charles came through that way. And I always thought that was remarkable.Tiffany Hamilton: How deep is it right now?Chris Sellers: What’s that?Tiffany Hamilton: How deep is it right now?Jim Sutherland: Oh, it’s probably 30 feet less. How much silting can happen in 100 years? But 12 feet is the operational depth, so they don’t have a problem. But—Male: They’re trying to make it 50, right? They’re trying to deepen it to 50?Jim Sutherland: No, I’m talking about the channel between Lake Charles and [Cross talk].Male: Oh, oh—Lake Charles, okay.Tiffany Hamilton: The dream is 52.Jim Sutherland: But yeah, the—you know, about that same time, the Neches River was channelized to Beaumont to bring our friends at Magnolia Oil into competition with the folks on the South end.
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Channelization has affected the hydrology of this whole coastal plain. Every time you dig a channel from the Gulf or deepen it or widen it, you bring in more tidal energy on every tide. That increases the elevation of the tide, and it also increases how much water leaves in that tidal cycle. It looks like sea level rise, because your amplitude increases.Male: Wow.Jim Sutherland: You put in a bigger pipe, you have less resistance to the Gulf, water comes in faster, leaves faster. When it comes in faster, it goes in—comes in higher. As much water as Ike put on us with the channel we have, we haven’t looked at what’s gonna happen when we have this new, bigger channel and we get Ike again. What’s the difference?
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All those things can be modeled. Our hurricane protection levee, which saved Port Arthur in Hurricane Ike—Male: Mm-hmm. Barely.Les McMahon: Barely, yeah. It was close—it was close. [Cross talk]Jim Sutherland: You know, it’s got a, it varies in elevation, crown elevation, from 17 to about 14 feet, depending on where you are on that levee system. You know, that’s what we need to be thinking about when we increased amplitudes for tidal cycles and we look at the next big storm push. The other thing is, you know, the everyday impact of that additional water on these marshes that buffers storms, that provide habitat for tens of millions of birds on the Gulf Coast in the wintertime, mostly.
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And, you know, I believe, because I’ve saved Port Arthur, is that a lot of people that stay here because they get access to some of the best hunting and fishing that you can imagine. And it’s a pretty well-kept secret amongst the locals, but it’s a big deal. There’s a lot of money in it. And it keeps people here. “Well, I’ll work at the refinery and put up with this, but every day when I get off of work, it’s 15 minutes to the water, and I fish ‘til dark.” You know? [Laughter] Or, “I’m shift working [Cross talk] and I can duck hunt for the next week and a half and then go back to work.” And those kind of perks are—you know, not everybody has those in their community. We got a real opportunity here to do things like that.But anyway, just very brief and maybe too brief—you know, the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, I believe, was dug as an inland waterway to get shipping out of the way of the U-boats that showed up in World War I that were sinking tankers and stuff off of—off the beach out here in Jefferson County. [Laughter]
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And, you know, every time we have a problem, we get a fix for it, then we’ve got something else. So, you know, a lot of this is—it’s no different than security today. Back then, it was, “Okay, well, we’ve got U-boats. How do we handle that? We’re gonna dig a canal that, everybody go to Galveston from”—actually, from Brownsville all the way to, where does it go in Florida? Way down there?Mickey Breaux: It goes all the way up the East Coast now, I believe.Jim Sutherland: Does it? And I mean, you can stay behind on the beach with a tugboat and go a long ways.
And anyway, long story short—unprepared for presentation. [Laughter] These things come together and they get done and there’s good about them, but there’s always a concession, you know? One of the problems with the big windmills that produce all that free power in the wind is, they kill tens of thousands of birds and bats at night. [Cross talk] With no regulation to protect those birds or those bats or—you know, the wildlife. And, you know, all these guys are bug eaters. [Laughter]So, you know, there’s a trade out.Male: Yeah. I never thought about that.Tiffany Hamilton: Mr. Jim, I’m gonna call you when we start adding eggs to the basket to make sure we thought everything through. [Laughter]Carolyn Thibodeaux: Right? He’s a brain. Full of wisdom and knowledge.
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Jim Sutherland: Well, but, it’s because it’s unregulated in the wind business.Carolyn Thibodeaux: Right. I worked in the windmill business years ago when FIS leak had to come and grab these big businessmen, bankers from setting up all these businesses just to erect all the windmills. That was a big business at one time, in North Texas as well. That’s where I was living at the time.Jim Sutherland: Yeah. But, you know, wind farms are remarkable in that they generate power.Carolyn Thibodeaux: Right.Jim Sutherland: But they’re also remarkable in that the things that—we almost have to turn our back on to accept them.Tiffany Hamilton: Yeah, because you’re trading the environment for money and energy—well, energy.Jim Sutherland: Anyway, I’ll get off of that. I don’t know if I’ve covered the channelization very well, but as it developed, it’s been really interesting. And the next step is to make the channel deep enough to take the Panama ships. Now that the Panama Canal is big enough, they’ve got a bigger ship, it can’t come in here. If this port’s gonna thrive, if this waterfront’s gonna thrive, it has to be deep enough to handle that new state and that new—help me out, here.
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Les McMahon: Those new—yeah, tankers. [Cross talk]Jim Sutherland: Yeah, tankers, trader—whatever it is.Hilton Kelley: Super tanker is what it is.Jim Sutherland: They call it Panama class. And, you know, that’s the intent of this is to be able to get those big boats to Beaumont.Hilton Kelley: But then the side effect of having the channel dug that deep, you know, there’s a price to pay for that as well.Jim Sutherland: There is. There’s always gonna be a price.Mickey Breaux: Don’t remember when the Manhattan used to come here, they’d have to offload about half of it off of, out on the Gulf because they’d dug too much draft to get into town, so they’d take about a third of the cargo off from the smaller ships or barges and bring it in, then it would finally come in. That’s a long time ago.Hilton Kelley: Well, I know there’s some—Jim Sutherland: We’d all go downtown and watch them come through that old bridge at Pleasure Island.Mickey Breaux: Yep.Hilton Kelley: Mm-hmm.Jim Sutherland: And I promise you, that ship didn’t have a foot on either side.Hilton Kelley: Jeez!
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Mickey Breaux: Yeah, there was one at the port yesterday that looked like it was as wide as this library. I watched them work right there at the turning basin when they come in to turn around and bring them back into port—that’s quite interesting, too.Hilton Kelley: And I know the people on Pleasure Island have some major concerns about the deep—Mickey Breaux: Erosion.Carolyn Thibodeaux: Erosion, yes.Hilton Kelley: – major concerns about that. Because it’s true, I mean, you’re gonna have land erosion as the ships go in and out, and of course, just, as the land erodes, the island gets thinner and thinner. Case in point—I remember there was a time we can go to Galveston from Port Arthur, you go through the plants, go to Sabine, through Sabine, and take—what is that 82?Jim Sutherland: 87.Hilton Kelley: 87 right on into Galveston. Well, now, you’ve gotta go to Winnie, because the water has already taken that road out.Jim Sutherland: Yeah. Well, that’s been a problem since the ‘80s, the last time it washed out.Hilton Kelley: Yeah.Mickey Breaux: When Betsy got it [Cross talk].Hilton Kelley: It’s done now, and it’s getting closer. I just went on a cruise the early part of December, and we went to Galveston, we went down 87, went to Winnie, came down South, got to the beach.
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And it was just one lane open because it was storming that day, and that road coming back from Galveston was closed off and we all had to stop to allow that traffic coming in to go by and then we had to go by because the surf was right there on the road, and it’s getting worse. Climate change, global warming—well, a lot of people debate it.Chris Sellers: Well, okay, I wanted to—this is great. I do want to sort of step back a little more for our final few minutes of discussion and go back to connecting just people’s observations about how the past connects with the present and future of Port Arthur. One of the key things I think we’ve all heard about is the responsibility and sort of causal influence of the oil industries, for good and for bad, but also as a legacy that, more recently, is—Port Arthur is trying to overcome some of this legacy.
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Are there other sort of legacies that Port Arthur is gonna have to overcome in order to thrive more and to flourish? And I think you had a point you wanted to make along those lines?Tiffany Hamilton: I did. It was mentioned previously that industry has a huge responsibility of the downfall in our economy and our environmental status in the city of Port Arthur. But we—I’m grateful that industry is here, and I’m proud to be an industrial city. So, when we see, you know, not all the time do I think negative when I see a smokestack. I think money, too, when I see a smoke stack. Or when I see a ship pass by, I’m thinking money, because it’s boosting the economy in our community.
On the other side, we definitely have to hold, you know, whatever industry it is accountable for the safety of our community. But another responsibility is to us as citizens, how we take care of our environment, but then also, our local government has a responsibility. Not just city government, but county and state on up to the federal level. But our local government has the responsibility on how we are writing these contracts with our industrial agreements, and making sure that we are not just giving away our tax payer dollars. When we have some of the refineries here, hiring 80 to 90 percent of the local residents, and a city less than 50 miles away from here and are not receiving any tax abatements at all, they’re being good corporate partners.
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And here in Port Arthur, that has not been the case over the years. So, fortunately, we have taken a stronger stand, and over the years, our stand has gotten stronger and stronger, making sure that we’re not being overlooked. But when we talk about responsibility, every single person has a piece of responsibility that we need to be holding each other accountable for. It’s not just the fault of industry, it’s not just the fault of local government, and it’s not just the fault of the citizens. We all have to own up to our own responsibility because we have a piece of the pie. And think of things not what’s going to be most effective for me in the next 30 days or 3 years, but we have to make decisions that are going to benefit our community for our children and our children’s children 30 and 40, 50 years from now.
02:03:05
Bobbie Prince: Can I say something in reference to that?Chris Sellers: Of course.Bobbie Prince: And please allow me, first of all, to apologize to you all for coming late, but there’s a little man in my life that I had to take care of, 18 months old, and it was more important than anything else in the city of Port Arthur at this time.Carolyn Thibodeaux: Right.Bobbie Prince: And he was leaving, going home and about to leave the country. But I came here in 1956 as a child, so you’ll know how old I am. [Laughter] And I came here because my uncles were here, they had brought my grandmother here. They came here because of industry. They came here because of the Gulf refinery and the Texaco refinery and because they had heard that they could make a decent living here in the city of Port Arthur.
02:03:56
So, they came here, and we followed. My mom brought her girls here, and that is why we ended up in Port Arthur. And throughout the years, I think people were so grateful to refineries for providing them with the abilities to take care of their families, to educate their children, you know, to send them to college to buy cars, buy homes—that I think the piece about making, holding industry responsible for some of the things, Tiff, that you were talking about didn’t come about. It wasn’t part of the thought process. It should’ve been, but it wasn’t. And up until recently, I think it was like, “Well, we’re so thankful that we have industry”—and we are. And we are blessed to be an industrial city. It has its faults, but I think that we should’ve been more responsible in holding industry accountable, and today, you know, we wouldn’t be looking at the infrastructure that we have that we’re trying to correct.
02:05:04
Because we are an industrialized city and we have enough industries here where we should—I’m not saying we should be driving on streets of gold, but it could’ve been silver.Mickey Breaux: Or at least asphalt.Male: Bronze would’ve [Cross talk].Bobbie Prince: You’re so right.Carolyn Thibodeaux: You’re good. [Laughter]Bobbie Prince: But I think we forgot about—those in power forgot about holding them responsible for helping us to overcome some of the obstacles that we should’ve been overcoming, because of the fact that it provided us with such a decent way of living. Even though it did affect our health, you know what, I know that Hilton, before I got here, when I walked in, Hilton was talking, and I know that his cause has always been, you know, the environment. So, I think we forgot that piece.Carolyn Thibodeaux: As a matter of fact—Hilton Kelley: And, you know, that’s why, when we talk about preparing and trying to think about the future—our kids, our kids’ kids—this is what we’re doing.
02:06:07
Bobbie Prince: Right.Hilton Kelley: Because it’s important to have our kids grow up in an environment where they can be healthy and strong and also have opportunity.Carolyn Thibodeaux: And I think those in power took advantage of the lack of knowledge—Hilton Kelley: Lack of knowledge.Carolyn Thibodeaux: – of those like your parents and my parents.Bobbie Prince: Yes.Carolyn Thibodeaux: I’m Southwest Louisiana, similar to this area.Bobbie PrinceThat’s true.Carolyn Thibodeaux: I’m almost home, when you say Lake Charles and Port Arthur. So, that’s kinda how Mayor Prince and I became connected is educating our kids and grandkids so they can be more prepared for those quality jobs so they can have a better understanding in how to make their environment healthy. And as a librarian, as a parent, as a grandparent, I think that’s crucial is to come up with a solution between city government, state government, U.S., and our academia—elementary school, preschool—to come up with the curriculum to prepare our kids for the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math industry.
They need to be able to build these industry plants, not just maintain ‘em. They need to be able to build equipment or design equipment to go out on the marshland to save the erosion problems. They have the creativity to do that, but we’re not stimulating them. We’re not investing in our children. That’s my passion. That’s what brings me to this table today, and most projects, when you see me, it’s because I’m representing the young people and trying to make their life better. I’ve lived over half of mines, but I have kids and grandkids right now, and I’m trying to stimulate and promote in this community. Because I feel like, when we’re representing our community, be it your home town where you grew up at—because I love Port Arthur like I love Lake Charles—who you’re sowing seeds to and giving knowledge to, information to, yours is gonna be taken care of across the country, because the higher power will send someone else to help labor where they are.
02:08:05
And we have to come up with some type of communication like today on a regular basis, and I wanna thank Mr. Sellers for putting this together, and maybe we can make this happen again. Because, fortunately, I know most of you at this table to great degrees, but it has to be done if Port Arthur is gonna be another great city, another great community like I hear you talking about. Because when I came, I came to help make a difference. Little did I know it would be where I am today, because I feel like I am proactive.And sometimes, that’s not an easy job when you’re really determined you’re not going to your next level in life until you finish here. And I think today is part of my assignment. Not just particularly this assignment, but the assignment for people like us to come together and make a difference—changing our environment, changing our academics so we can have a legacy for our kids and our kids’ kids.
02:09:03
Hilton Kelley: You know, I served on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to EPA, I think, 2010 to 2012. And we were selected as an EPA showcase community project. Mayor Bobbie Prince was heavily involved in that. We got Region 6 EPA that was here and they brought industry together, local government. And one thing we talked about was how important it is to get local government involved in the environmental movement to understand exactly how we’re being impacted and what we can do to change that. And I think we’ve still got some momentum behind that, even though Israel Anderson has retired from Region 6, Ron Curry is out now. So, they’re getting some new people there, but we are moving in that direction, at least we started, and I think it’s gonna continue.Bobbie Prince: Now, my fear, Hilton, is that—and I think we need to be honest about this—is, with the new administration, that we’re not going to see that support.
02:10:05
Hilton Kelley: Nope.Bobbie Prince: Frankly, I expect EPA to go down to—you know, it’s got three letters, to two, you know, in the coming months. But I don’t think that we’re going to see that support that—Hilton Kelley: You’re right.Bobbie Prince: – to continue the work that [Cross talk] Israel Anderson was always involved in, Dr. Pringolin Wald—I don’t think we’re going to see that support.Hilton Kelley: Yeah. It’s like starting all over again.Bobbie Prince: Yes.Carolyn Thibodeaux: You know how you do that, though? Someone’s gonna be connected with that force. Someone, maybe not exactly in this room, but it’s—who was fortunate to connect with our President Obama like this man was? I didn’t know anyone else that had that type of relationship built. So, it’s just gonna require faith, and who in this city is gonna make connection with this current—Hilton Kelley: Well, we’re already gearing up. As a matter of fact, you know, they’re trying to appoint this guy from Exxon Mobil to be the head of the EPA.
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Carolyn Thibodeaux: Right, right.Hilton Kelley: And so, we’ve already sent letters to Washington, D.C. protesting his nomination for that particular seat. It’s ludicrous to have the head of Exson Mobil to be the head of the EPA. [Laughter]Carolyn Thibodeaux: Right.Hilton Kelley: But that’s what Trump is pushing for. So the battle has already begun. In about two weeks, I’m going to D.C., there’s gonna be a huge protest and rally out there. The letters and protests have already started going to D.C. to our senators and whatnot. And that’s what we have to do, start to contact our senators, let them know that—no, we care about our environment, we care about the future of our environment for our kids, for our grandkids and what have you, but we all have to get involved. And one thing they talk about on Capitol Hill, and then I’ll be quiet, is the fact that more local governments have to get involved in this fight.Carolyn Thibodeaux: Right. Exactly.Hilton Kelley: Because many times, what local governments do is leave it up to the state regulatory agencies or the EPA, but yet they have some say in what happens in their city as well.
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Carolyn Thibodeaux: You said a whole workshop, right there. It’s educating and how to make that happen—protests, dialogue, conversation, so the government, from a national level can hear us and what we desire for our communities.Mickey Breaux: To show you hope, in 1980, I was active in environmental issues quite a bit, along with labor issues. And I was sent to D.C. from the National Council of Counties, funded by EPA. And we had a big seminar from all over the United States in Coolfont, West Virginia. And it was, like, November the 20th of 1980, and you know who got elected a week or two before that. And it was like a big weight, man. Everybody thought the world was gonna die and the EPA was going away, and the EPA’s still here, you know, almost 40 years later.
There’s always life after death for certain people. I mean, you know, somebody else can be born to take your place when you pass away, so—you know, everything is cyclical, and we’re gonna be around worrying about what we’re breathing and swallowing and our folks behind us well, as long as we’ve got some people to carry the water. And I think there’ll always be somebody to step up when it comes to quality of life, so.Hilton Kelley: Well, what’s really frightening is when you know that EPA is there, just like under the Bush administration, EPA was there, but Bush tied their hands and took away their budget so they couldn’t even do anything.Mickey Breaux: Same thing with OSHA.Hilton Kelley:[Laughter]Bobbie Prince: See, that’s what I was kinda sitting here thinking about. I said now, you know, they—in good, as a show of good faith, which, you know, I have to think about this show of good faith thing—issue some mandates. But if it’s an unfunded mandate, it’s not having any at all.Mickey Breaux: Yeah, don’t do it at all.Hilton Kelley: No teeth, yeah.Bobbie Prince: Yeah, no teeth.Hilton Kelley: Right.
02:14:00
Les McMahon: As far as the school system is concerned with the local industries, we need more leadership from the petrochemical industries. In the old days, we had representation on the board and interest on the school board. And often, proposals that were sent in from faculty members were passed with approval very quickly, or they were improved when they went through the board. For instance, when we sent in a proposal for math labs for slow learners, a board member from industry suggested that we have an aide in the math lab in order to help the slow learners, as well as the teacher—which we would have never proposed because of the money. When we sent in the proposal for computer math, one of the first school systems to have it in this area, we had asked Texaco to run the cards. It was so early here, we were using cards.
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But they improved it by a board member that had been to a meeting in Atlanta, suggesting that we try to get time sharing from General Electric. So, in the future, it seems like we don’t have the local people as executives in these refineries any more that have the interest in Port Arthur.Male: They all live in Beaumont.Les McMahon: And leadership is very important in improving the city—Hilton Kelley: You’re right.Les McMahon: – the school board, the school system, and our way of life.Bobbie Prince: There is a group, Port Arthur Industrial Group, that’s highly involved and heavily involved with the school system here in the city of Port Arthur. It’s informed by industry, and they are working with providing educational tools for students here in Port Arthur, including a lab, I think, at the 9th grade campus, and providing them with scholarships to further their education.
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So, right now, I think industry is getting involved, but it’s at—basically, at the high school level. But then again, each one of the refineries here have adopted a school here in the city, and I’m not sure to what extent that they’re involved right now, but they have adopted schools here in the city. But I think somebody needs to kinda like, push that a little bit more. Hilton Kelley: Spearhead it, yeah. Bobbie Prince: Yeah. Hilton Kelley: But it’s 5:01, I’m [Cross talk]. Chris Sellers: Okay. Well, we’re kind of out of time, and so, I really appreciate you guys coming, speaking your minds, and I think it’s been a great event. As far as from somebody coming in from the outside, I’ve learned a whole lot of things and I’m really looking forward to also seeing the transcript to actually start absorbing all the things that you guys have put on the table.
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