Corpus Christi, Texas, US – “It’s a beautiful bay, and it was even more beautiful in the beginning,” says 72-year-old Encarnacion “Chon” Serna, a retired chemical engineer, as he describes Corpus Christi Bay, which lies just some toes from his doorstep in Portland, Corpus Christi in Texas. It’s the house through which Serna and his spouse raised their 4 kids and the place their 10 grandchildren typically go to to play within the waters that may be heard hitting the shore from their home.
Now, because the oil, fuel and petrochemical industries threaten to take what’s left of the Gulf Coast together with Serna’s yard – petrochemical services are at present being inbuilt Ingleside, not removed from his residence – and as large-scale desalination initiatives, which can service these industries, acquire approval to discharge wastewater again into the bay, he wonders how for much longer it’ll survive.
“I’m not going to take this house or this bay to the coffin. It’s a legacy. It must be here in a healthy form so that future generations can enjoy what I enjoyed,” Serna says.
Simply minutes from Serna’s residence lie the shores of the La Quinta Channel, residence to the Port of Corpus Christi that’s owned and operated by the counties of Nueces, San Patricio, and Corpus Christi and is the biggest gateway for US-produced power exports. There, the port authorities and the Metropolis of Corpus Christi are every planning to construct and function a brand new desalination plant – making two in complete on La Quinta Channel – if granted ultimate permits by the Texas Fee on Environmental High quality (TCEQ).
The La Quinta desalination vegetation are simply two of a complete 5 proposed desalination vegetation to be constructed within the Coastal Bend, an space of Texas shoreline that meets the Gulf of Mexico. Moreover the La Quinta Channel vegetation, the port authorities additionally wish to construct one other desalination plant in Harbor Island, within the bay, and town authorities are planning one other in Internal Harbor – an industrialised space, which incorporates residential neighbourhoods, near La Quinta. A fifth has been proposed by Corpus Christi Polymers, a plastic resin producer, in Corpus Christi Bay on the Joe Fulton Hall, which connects to the port’s transport channel.
If permitted, the 5 vegetation will all draw water from the Corpus Bay to feed the huge oil, fuel and petrochemicals industrial hub in Corpus Christi.
Not solely will native residents not profit from the desalinated water produced by this undertaking – many of the water will go to industrial premises – they concern that the last word outcome would be the lack of their houses in an space that features one of many metropolis’s final predominantly Black communities as the commercial space slowly expands. They need to know – they’ve already confronted down this menace as soon as earlier than, in 2020, when building of the brand new Harbor Bridge started. That bridge will in the end substitute the prevailing arch bridge, spanning the Corpus Christi Ship Channel and connecting the US 181, and I-37 freeways between south and north Corpus Christi and north of Serna’s residence.
For Serna, the bay represents the happier aspect of his life: “I swim, I kayak, and I fish. My children and grandchildren all come here, and they swim, kayak, and fish. A desalination plant with these discharges would ruin it.”
An avid fisherman, Serna describes seeing the sluggish extinction of native species in Corpus Bay for the reason that business started increasing within the late 2000s and the way they’ve lengthy threatened the atmosphere round them.
“There’s still life in there. I can tell you that it’s not as abundant as it used to be. You still see the blue crab, but you don’t see it in the same numbers as before. The redfish is very resilient. The black drum and other species like trout and flounder, you don’t see very much of them.”
Serna’s daughter, Blanca Parkinson, an elementary college instructor in Corpus Christi with three teen kids of her personal, feels comparable ties to a childhood she doesn’t assume is feasible for her kids to have.
“I grew up on the shores of Corpus Christi Bay. My dad at all times dreamed of us dwelling near the water. I bear in mind our neighbours all having swimming swimming pools, however we didn’t as a result of my dad was like, ‘Swim in the bay’.
“My childhood was very much tied to the bay. It does affect you very much to think that by the time my children are grown, it may very well be a dead bay.”
Parkinson, who lives minutes from what locals name “Refinery Row”, a 16km (10-mile) petrochemical facility made up of six refineries, on the north aspect of Corpus Christi within the Hillcrest group, says that the bay near her mother and father’ residence as soon as provided respite from a lifetime of uninteresting smoke and flares.
She describes the bay because the place the place the group might bike, birdwatch and have some “quality of life”. Now that’s all underneath menace.
With two proposed vegetation downstream of the La Quinta Channel and her mother and father’ yard – and a 3rd proposal within the Corpus Christi Ship Channel, or the “Industrial Canal” as it’s referred to as by the Port of Corpus Christi, simply minutes from her personal home – these three proposed vegetation particularly go away no escape.
Whereas the world the place Parkinson lives to the north aspect of the brand new Harbor Bridge has lengthy been industrialised, her mother and father’ residence to the south aspect of the bridge – as soon as a haven for her and her kids to flee to every now and then – is now additionally falling inside the industrial space.
“It’s affecting us everywhere,” she says. “It used to be that we lived in an area where there was more industry, but we would go to grandma’s; now it’s all under attack. My kids will pull [the car] over, and they’ll cast their nets, and they’ll come up with shrimp. You see the stark difference between life and death. And it will make you cry.”
Serna’s and Parkinson’s conditions usually are not remoted circumstances, and neither are the La Quinta vegetation. For the better a part of the Coastal Bend and its residents, desalination is a looming menace to their water, life and, for some, even their houses, as 5 proposed vegetation and the industries they may service advance across the bay.
The Port of Corpus Christi didn’t reply to questions in regards to the proposed vegetation or some other points raised by Al Jazeera on this article.
Serna, who has been preventing the development and their permits for the final three years with little success, is left with one conclusion about these in energy.
“They don’t care about the people,” he says. “They don’t care about our natural resources.”
Desalination – no ‘Holy Grail’
Corpus Christi Bay has traditionally attracted refineries and firms due to its abundance of liquefied pure fuel (LNG), petroleum and crude oil. It’s already residence to 30 petroleum refineries and one-fifth of the nation’s petroleum and coal business jobs.
The town and the firms working within the bay have tapped these assets for many years. By way of the institution of Humble Oil in 1927; the opening of Brauer Company and Reynolds Metals in 1950; the constructing of the CITGO oil refinery in 1990; and the next building of a number of 1,000-foot (305m) vast and 45-foot (14m) deep oil docks, which stretch alongside what the port authorities name the “Inner Harbor”, the oil business’s stronghold on the bay has solely deepened over time.
And, as increasingly industries have arrived, the demand has intensified on water assets they depend on for distillation, extraction, washing processes, and cooling techniques. The town and its planners have lengthy believed that large-scale desalination of sea water is the answer to this downside.
At first, the thought of eradicating salt from ocean water could have appeared revolutionary, however consultants and environmentalists disagree about the advantages.
“Everyone thinks that the solution to water problems is desalination. But it hasn’t turned into the Holy Grail that I think some of the proponents hoped for,” explains Robert Glennon, a water rights lawyer on the College of Arizona.
If granted wastewater and discharge permits by the TCEQ, the desalination course of may very well be extremely energy-intensive, environmentally difficult, and injury present water techniques past restore, Glennon explains. Within the case of Corpus Christi Bay, large-scale desalination among the many vegetation which can be within the means of buying permits will imply diverting greater than 2,270 litres (600 gallons) of water from the bay each day.
A portion of the diverted water can be desalinated or handled whereas the remainder can be combined again in with the extremely saline stays to dilute the brine earlier than it’s put again into the ocean. In Corpus, this might imply greater than 1,033 litres (273 gallons) of brine being pumped again into the bay a day, doubling ocean salinity each time water goes by means of the desalination course of, harming ocean organisms and inflicting the coral to die, Glennon explains.
“Dumping that much salt into salty water in a fragile marine environment is the last straw for those communities,” he provides.
Moreover the salty brine, the largest concern for residents is that the desalination undertaking received’t profit them. It’s unclear what quantity of the water will go to the residents, however it’s identified that almost all might be for industrial use.
Elida Castillo, a resident of Taft in San Patricio County within the Coastal Bend and the co-founder of Chispa Texas, an environmental rights organisation, explains how town has a protracted historical past of “selling out” the group water to firms. “Our access to water is not great, and in an area prone to historic droughts, they [the city] continue to approve large-volume water users, which pits the community against the fossil fuel industry.”
Castillo is referring to the 2015 citywide droughts, throughout which the Corpus Christi water district reservoir degree fell beneath 30 % capability, resulting in long-term issues with the provision of water. On June 14, 2022, town positioned “Stage One” water restrictions on residents, after the reservoir fell beneath 40 %, formally marking the beginning of a drought that has solely worsened ever since. In the beginning of this 12 months, the studying hit 29.9 % – the bottom it has been since 2015, and marking the beginning of “Stage Two” water restrictions, underneath which water sprinklers, for instance, are allowed simply as soon as each two weeks.
In 2021, town supervisor permitted the constructing of ExxonMobil-SABIC’s manufacturing facility and a $9.3bn petrochemical plant in San Patricio County alongside Corpus Christi Bay. To function this plastics plant, town broke the protection margin, utilizing water that’s meant to be saved as a final resort in case of a drought and promoting 75 million litres (20 million gallons) of water a day to ExxonMobil and SABIC and an extra 19 million litres (5 million gallons) a day to Metal Dynamics, whose undertaking went up concurrently. Three years later, the identical water shortages are snowballing.
Purchasable drought exemptions, which permit firms to purchase further water from town, present how town prioritises water distribution, Parkinson says. Whereas residents are topic to restricted water entry and face fines as excessive as $500 in the event that they exceed their allotted restrict – for instance, by watering their lawns – industrial water clients should buy drought exemptions from the Metropolis Council, costing simply 25 cents per 3,785 litres (1,000 gallons) of water, and face no restrictions in any respect.
ExxonMobil, SABIC and Metal Dynamics didn’t reply to requests for remark about this or some other difficulty raised on this article.
Following a sample of ‘environmental racism’
From the Hillcrest neighbourhood on the opposite aspect of the Harbor Bridge from Portland, the place Serna lives, residents can glimpse the transport channel past the oil docks – what they name the “Industrial Canal”. For them, the information of a brand new desalination plant to service a proposed Ammonia plant in Robstown, in Nueces County simply 32km (20 miles) from Corpus Christi Bay, simply confirms a wider sample of historic and environmental racism confronted by the Black and brown communities of town, activists say.
Within the early 1900s, the Hillcrest space was residence to the native nation membership and was solely a white space of Corpus Christi. As present Black and Hispanic communities in different elements of town turned overcrowded, the Corpus Christi Housing Authority allowed Hillcrest to be opened to African People in 1944 – simply as town began allocating areas of the group as industrial land, beginning with the development of “Refinery Row” within the Nineteen Sixties. On account of that, extra prosperous, predominantly white, residents moved out and the neighbourhood turned predominantly Black.
With Jim Crow-era legal guidelines nonetheless in place again then, the Hillcrest neighbourhood was one of many solely locations in a segregated Corpus Christi the place Black individuals from town have been permitted to purchase houses. Now, this energetic, interconnected group of locals who as soon as loved a large buffer zone between the flares of the oil docks and their houses, has been dragged fully into the commercial space itself. Residents say this was performed by stealth, with none overt announcement, with the event of Internal Harbor – a skinny industrial channel to the west of Harbor Bridge.
“We kept hearing about ‘Inner Harbor’, but we did not know that ‘Inner Harbor’ was our neighbourhood,” says Monna Lytle, who has lived within the Hillcrest neighbourhood for the previous 20 years.
Jestine Knox, the assistant principal at Sanders Elementary in Corpus Christi – who has lived within the Hillcrest neighbourhood, one of many final remaining predominantly African American communities in Corpus, for the previous 59 years along with her daughter and husband, LaMarcus Knox – explains how the neighbourhood feels it’s underneath fixed menace of being purchased out by firms.
From preventing the development of a wastewater plant on the finish of their road in 2002 to submitting greater than six title complaints in regards to the refineries operated by CITGO, Valero and Flint Hills Sources within the final 20 years, over time, residents say they’ve come to seek out out that refineries have bought land inside what was meant to be a 1.6km (one-mile) buffer zone between the commercial space and the residential areas surrounding it, however that they didn’t even realize it had been purchased out.
“Big industry feels like they can just walk over us, and that’s what they’ve been doing for the last 20 years,” says Knox.
She recollects the a number of blocks of residential houses whose inhabitants have been provided “voluntary relocation” in 2020 by the Port of Corpus Christi to construct the Harbour Bridge. The port employed legal professionals to handle relocations for householders, who weren’t monetarily compensated, she says. Residents who opted for relocation have been merely given new houses elsewhere chosen by the agency by means of personal offers. Those that refused to go have been instructed that building would proceed regardless, explains Knox, who alongside along with her household refused to relocate.
Knox says a number of of her neighbours who selected to relocate had no concept once they needed to transfer out, typically being instructed to go away inside hours’ discover. She fears that the identical might be provided to her once more if the desalination vegetation are permitted.
The present space designated for the Internal Harbour desalination plant was bought to the Metropolis of Corpus Christi two years in the past by the Koch brothers’ Flint Hills Sources, which had owned the land since 1995. Flint Hills didn’t disclose how a lot it paid for these neighbourhoods when it first purchased them in Hillcrest. The sale between the corporate and town was contested by Hillcrest residents in a personal assembly in early 2022, Knox explains, describing how the residents requested the refinery to not hand the land over for desalination – and the way their requests have been dismissed.
A Flint Hills spokesperson instructed Al Jazeera by way of e mail that through the assembly with native residents the corporate had “conveyed our intent to sell the property, noting it would be within the city’s authority to acquire this land through the use of ’eminent domain’ [a power of local government to seize private property for public use] if a voluntary transaction could not be arranged”.
Approvals of those gross sales typically occur underneath the radar, the residents declare.
Residents consider that the selection of location for the desalination plant – the transport channel that’s used to move crude oil, pure fuel, grain and wind power parts to and from the port – can be strategic. It’s fenced off to residents and can’t be seen straight from the bay entrance.
Essentially the most seen a part of the bay and vacationer zone is Ocean Drive, the place no vegetation are deliberate.
Knox says that the chosen location implies that the results that the plant may have on the bay might be hidden from view.
“You put it in this area, then you can’t just see what it’s doing to the bay. How many people come here to this neighbourhood to see the destruction that they’re doing? Why hide it out over here? It’s an environmental cover-up.”
The most important concern for Lamont Taylor – a 71-year-old resident of Hillcrest who has lived right here since his household moved to the neighbourhood from the next-door Washington-Coles district, a predominantly Hispanic and Black group which is adjoining to Hillcrest, after the Civil Rights Act in 1964 – is that the neighbourhood will disappear and not using a hint, identical to different elements of the group.
Taylor alleges that metropolis authorities have steadily remoted them and at the moment are threatening to squeeze them out solely.
The development of the brand new Harbour Bridge runs alongside the jap aspect of the neighbourhood, whereas the west aspect is lined by Refinery Row. The final remaining aspect is true subsequent to the channel – the situation of the desalination plant.
“They’re still trying to encroach in. Making it an industrial area and desalination will be the nail in the coffin,” Taylor says.
As increasingly areas in Hillcrest get eaten up by business, residents consider that constructing a desalination plant in the identical zip code as residents and calling it the “Inner Harbor” is an element of a bigger cover-up. They are saying nobody ever instructed them that their very own neighbourhood was thought of a part of this industrial space – and their largest fear is that the hurt of it’ll go unnoticed.
“They are putting it [a desalination plant] in a neighbourhood and calling it ‘Inner Harbor’. Why do you do all of that? All of it is to push the people out,” says Reverend Claudia Rush, pastor of the Brooks Worship Heart Church, which lies on the centre of the group.
The church stays a cultural cornerstone in the neighborhood; a desalination plant simply minutes from it could forestall entry to the congregation and affect the well being of a whole lot of attendees, residents say. Jackie Caldwell, a 67-year-old resident of Corpus Christi and a retired educator with Enlightenment Consulting in Corpus Christi, who has been attending Brooks Worship Heart for the previous 40 years, worries that the congregation she grew up with will disappear altogether. “It’s where we gathered on Sunday afternoons. It’s where I took my kids to play in the park. It’s where we meet people regularly. Now the city says it’s not even a neighbourhood?”
Some are beginning to marvel what life will appear to be with the noise and air air pollution and say they concern worsening well being circumstances which will nicely include the creeping industrialisation of their residence – and even when they may have the ability to keep right here in any respect.
“If you’re going to bring that desal plant that’s going to destroy us – our health, our breathing, the unknown? What are you trying to do? You’re trying to kill us. You’re trying to kill our joy, our lives, and our peace,” Lytle says.
Caldwell, who was beforehand an academic advisor for a agency in the neighborhood, is worried in regards to the worsening well being of scholars attending college close to the desalination plant. “We have children who have all kinds of medical conditions. Oak Park Elementary is right there on the edge of it,” she says.
“There’s this history of diseases, illnesses, and the medical conditions of the residents of Hillcrest, and it’s been tied directly back to the refineries,” she provides.
In a 2021 well being report [PDF] carried out by Nueces County, researchers discovered that the predominantly Black and Hispanic communities of town within the Hillcrest and Washington-Coles zip codes had life expectancy some 15 years shorter than individuals dwelling in different elements of the Coastal Bend. The report additionally indicated that the identical residents have been at the next threat of “facing a confluence of social, economic, and environmental challenges”. Amongst them have been persistent circumstances resembling hypertension, weight problems and diabetes.
Moreover, a well being survey of Refinery Row [PDF] was carried out by the US Company for Poisonous Substances and Illness Registry (ATSDR) between 1993 and 2008 utilizing numerous air high quality assessments. It discovered that the Corpus Christi Refinery Row space confirmed greater charges of bronchial asthma, two sorts of start defects and sure cancers in contrast with different areas. It additionally linked long-term publicity to petrochemical substances to sicknesses.
Compounding what its members see as a sample of environmental negligence and class-related well being points, the Hillcrest group believes this constitutes environmental racism. Now, as building of those vegetation enters the ultimate levels of approval from the TCEQ – a spokesman for which confirmed to Al Jazeera by e mail that “draft wastewater discharge permits are not often denied” – residents within the Hillcrest group and inside the better Corpus Christi space are refusing to go away and not using a combat, even underneath unfavourable odds.
Having been requested to go away beforehand underneath the relocation act with the Harbor Bridge and when the primary oil refinery vegetation have been constructed on Nueces Bay, they consider they are going to be requested – and even instructed – to take action as soon as once more.
Corpus Christi and its metropolis supervisor didn’t reply to requests for remark about this.
‘Environmental racism’
In 2022, the Hillcrest Residents Affiliation (HRA), which has led the authorized combat in opposition to business in the neighborhood for years, lodged a “Title XI” criticism with the US Division of Justice (DOJ) in regards to the “environmental racism” and “industrialisation, isolation and pollution” {that a} desalination plant would probably trigger the predominately African American and Hispanic neighbourhood.
Greater than a 12 months later, nevertheless, the TCEQ is transferring together with the overview course of and nonetheless has not determined if residents might be granted a proper contested case listening to underneath the legislation. Residents additionally say they’ve but to listen to again in regards to the DOJ criticism they filed, even because the TCEQ course of strikes ahead.
“We’ve been fighting for 40 years, and it gets old and it becomes tiring,” Reverend Rush says in regards to the battle between business and the individuals, which to her appears infinite.
Again in Portland, Serna says he participated in a year-long “contested case” in 2021 to dam the approval of the water rights allow for town’s desalination plant within the La Quinta Channel. A contested case listening to is the one authorized avenue that the state permits residents to pursue to have a allow denied. Even then, the authorized listening to course of can take months, in between process depositions, cross-examinations, and witness testimonies. These circumstances additionally grow to be pricey initiatives that burden communities who’re making an attempt to combat the system.
“They’re very stressful efforts, take a lot of energy, and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Serna says. “What individual on his own has half a million dollars to fight for two years, to hire witness experts, to hire people who can do modelling, to hire lawyers to fight this?”
Serna and the opposite residents who participated within the listening to in the end misplaced their contested case listening to in opposition to the Port of Corpus Christi in La Quinta Channel final December. The port was granted 238,064 litres (62,890 gallons) of water per minute in water rights for “industrial purposes” by the TCEQ.
Now, Serna says, there may be little or no recourse for residents to combat town authorities. However regardless of this blow, all shouldn’t be misplaced, say campaigners, who’re decided to proceed the combat.
Isabel Araiza, who co-founded the nonprofit For the Better Good in 2015, has fought desalination for the previous 4 years and explains what grassroots work within the anti-desalination motion seems like.
“The institutions that exist now are not designed to serve people like us. Historically, they were used to exploit people like us, to disenfranchise people like us, and to take from us. We have to start building the possibility for a better tomorrow within our community so that our community can demand it through our public institutions,” she says.
For the HRA, years of neglect by town have fuelled a stronger dedication to claim their proper to exist, and it’s this dedication that retains the combat in opposition to huge industrialisation mobilised.
“You’re being lied to in your face. That’s the thing that makes me frustrated. You’re going to piss me off. Okay, let me show you. I’m going to fight,” Rush says.
For them, it’s a matter of life and loss of life. “We will fight to the end because we have families and this is home. If we wanted to move, we would’ve left at the relocation that they gave us, but we did not want to relocate; we want to stay where we are,” Lytle says, as all of them await public hearings, city halls and phrase on their Title XI criticism.
“I’ll lay down so they can’t even bulldoze, and take the first hit if I have to,” Lytle asserts.
