A fishing boat returns after a night of fishing in the Gulf.Photo courtesy PDub via Flickr

I hate to say it, but what I’m seeing now in the Gulf ain’t nothing new. The toxic releases, the lies, the cover-ups, the skimping on safety, the nonexistent documents, the “swinging door” with regulators, the deaths. Same ole same ole. 

What is new is the massive nature of the oil gusher and the fact that it can’t be covered up because it’s ongoing and being videoed. This elephant can’t be swept under the carpet, but I’m sure if BP could, BP would. 

There are politicians out there — we’ve all heard them — who say this oil spill is just one accident and one accident does not a case make. Heck, one plane crashes and you don’t stop flying, do ya? Well, this isn’t just one accident. This is the biggest flame among the thousands of fires set by Corporate America on its Sherman-like march across the Gulf.

I run an injured-workers group for people who got canned after they got sick or injured, and for whistleblowers and others who tried to make changes that their companies didn’t want. For many of them, there’s nobody to talk to except me — a high school–educated fisherwoman with a pile of kids and a broke-down truck. One worked in wastewater and said his supervisors were manipulating and hiding wastewater data, sometimes dumping outright or siphoning material out of test samples. Sometimes gauge needles were bent to keep them from showing what they should have been showing. A few times, the worker had to wade through a diked wastewater area the size of two-city blocks with toxic waste coming over his boots. He lost his hard hat, lost his gloves, maggots were crawling everywhere, and right next to him was a high-voltage pump. He said a lot of days he thought he’d die, but telling didn’t do any good. As any good workers knows: You keep your mouth shut, ‘cause a good way to lose your job or lose your bonus is to report a worker injury or a safety violation.

That wasn’t my first dance at that rodeo. I’ve had a Texas wastewater investigator pass me information because he couldn’t do anything with test results showing extremely high levels of priority pollutants like vinyl chloride and ethylene dichloride in the water. He said every time he tried to pass it up further in enforcement, something blocked it. It just so happened that his boss, the director, had applied for a job at the polluting plant. He sure didn’t want to think what that was all about.  Made him sick just thinking about it.

Made me sick, too. Made me want to get on a boat and go out on the bay and forget all of it. Last time I was on the bay, however, a seismograph crew breezed in, looking for oil and gas deposits. There are approximately 4,000 oil and gas rigs out in the Gulf, but there are a sizable number in the bays, too. Seismologist teams sometimes use dynamite blasts to produce sound waves that pinpoint oil and gas deposits. Generally, dynamite charges aren’t allowed near the reefs and they’re not supposed to be so powerful that they blow up fish. That’s the law, anyhow, but who’s listening? I was trotlining for black drum and I had a string of lines near an oyster reef that black drum love to hang around. I picked up my line and there, hanging off the hooks, was a very long line of dynamite charges. Things really got messy when the dynamite blasts started rocking the fishermen’s boats and blowing fish out of the water. To stop the obvious show of dead fish, the company brought in a three airboats. An airboat can generate decibels equivalent to a jet plane, so imagine three giant airplanes ripping and running up and down the bay to scare the fish out of the bay. Well, they accomplished their goal. All the fish ran out of the bay and there went our fish for the entire season. It was nothing but a bleep on an oil company’s corporate work sheet, but for our family-based inshore fishermen, it was devastating.

That’s not all. Just listen. The oil industry dumps over a billion pounds of mercury-contaminated drilling-mud wastes into the Gulf each year. Drilling muds are used to cool and lubricate drill bits as they bore into the earth while plumbing for oil and natural gas. The mercury is present in an element called barite, the main ingredient in the muds. In l996, the EPA limited the amount of mercury that could be present in the drilling muds to one part per million, which could still allow l,000 pounds of mercury to be dumped from the Gulf platforms each year. For 50 years prior to the EPA rule, there were no limits on mercury in barite. A report published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers suggested that, in the past, barite with mercury up to 30 parts per million could have been used. Looking at information supplied by the oil industry and the EPA, hundreds of thousands of pounds of mercury have been dumped in the Gulf via drilling muds since the l960s.

So it shouldn’t be surprising at all that some oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are so contaminated by mercury that they could qualify for Superfund status. The mercury concentrations in many fish sampled near at least one rig were high enough to qualify the area as a contaminated fishery.

And the contaminated drilling mud doesn’t stay in the Gulf. Some of it gets dumped into marshes along small fishing villages on the Gulf Coast. I’ve seen tanker trucks dump 200 loads into a marsh outside of Seadrift, Texas, and another load dumped a half-mile from my trailer. My frequent calls to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission were answered with, “It’s harmless.” I guess I should tell that to my autistic son.

The bottom line is that the Gulf of Mexico dies a little every day from the tens of thousands of chemical plants, oil refineries, and oil and gas rigs that pockmark the Gulf and its coastlines. It’s a death of ten thousand cuts, and many of these offenses don’t get reported at all. We, the public, really have no way of knowing. The companies and the agencies certainly aren’t going to tell us. They’ve proved that time and time again. The truth of the matter only becomes clear when something monstrous like the BP oil spill comes along and wakes us up to the nightmare. 

Editor’s note: Diane Wilson made Grist’s list of 13 badass greens.

No bullet-dodging last week: On October 6, at 3:30pm and after 30 minutes of obnoxious chemical fumes that drove Point Comfort citizens into the streets to wonder what ill wind was blowing their way, Formosa Plastics blew, sending a Nagasaki-style mushroom cloud and three, four, and five explosions thundering over the blistering Texas landscape. Formosa Plastics and neighboring Alcoa plant workers ran for their lives, many throwing themselves into nearby Lavaca Bay, host to one of the nation’s largest underwater mercury Superfund sites. But for those workers, the mercury was the lesser of two evils. The worst was Formosa’s explosion, which sent 11 workers to the hospital, two with serious burns.

Formosa Plastics’ self-congratulatory “jewelness” has nothing to do with its hourly plant workers or Calhoun County’s commercial and sports fishermen or the once jewel-like bays. That’s just Y.C. Wang, aka Chairman Wang, aka El Presidenti, patting Formosa on the back. And he can do that because he owns the company, part of his family dynasty dating back to the late ’40s and the good ole Taiwan Kuomintang days.

You gotta know that it’s important for Chairman Wang to have one “jewel” of a plant, because his other U.S. plants, in Delaware, Illinois, and Louisiana, have either blown up or had serious environmental problems. (In Delaware, the courts finally served a summons by dropping it into the plant from the governor’s helicopter; Formosa wouldn’t let them onto the grounds to serve the summons.) So for everybody’s peace of mind, and chiefly the chairman’s, it’s important that the parent company claim that Formosa Plastics Texas is “the Jewel” they built from scratch, ’cause the rest of their U.S. plants — why, those was just junk plants they bought and made profitable.

But high-sounding labels mean nothing in a county that once ranked No. 1 in the nation for toxic disposal, and where the recent explosion is an increasingly familiar sight. Trophies mean nothing, either. In 1991, a few scant months after receiving the “Safest Plant in Texas” award from the Texas Chemical Council, Union Carbide Seadrift (a few miles southwest of Formosa) blew up, killing one worker and injuring 32 others. Debris as big as automobiles was hurled into the night.

Formosa Plastics Texas, the shiny new chemical plant on the block and the pride of Texas politicians, businessmen, and economic development types, was heralded as the county’s savior (never mind the tax abatements) when construction got under way on the mammoth $1.3-billion-plus PVC plant. But by the mid ’90s it had already earned the rank of worst among a dozen Texas PVC-related facilities. In 1991, Formosa was fined a record $3.7 million by the EPA for hazardous waste violations related to the discovery of massively contaminated groundwater under the facility. Violations included failures to comply with the most rudimentary hazardous-waste regulation — storing waste in leaking containers, lack of adequate employee training, and illegal discharges of wastes.

In 1990, the company was fined $244,00 for 54 water-quality violations, then again in 1992, after a ten thousand pound release of hydrochloride gas that sent neighbors and cows bawling into the night, Formosa was fined $330,000 for worker-safety violations. OSHA inspection found that vinyl chloride levels were not monitored, flammable liquids were not handled properly, and general procedure for maintenance and repair were not followed.

In July ’97, two workers were found asphyxiated and floating in a barge of EDC (ethylene dichloride) at the Formosa loading docks. In December ’98, an explosion containing EDC injured 26 workers, rattled windows 35 miles away, and contaminated a back waterway into the bay with levels up to 400 ppm of EDC. In April 2004, Formosa’s plant in Illinois exploded, killing 6 workers and injuring many more.

Vinyl chloride causes liver, stomach, and brain cancer. An abnormally high number of spontaneous abortions have been reported among the spouses of workers exposed to vinyl chloride, and increased rates of birth defects have been reported in areas where vinyl chloride plants are located. In spite of those alarming findings, little is done to protect the health of the people. In the ’80s, when Formosa released 140,000 pounds of vinyl chloride in one day across the street from an elementary school, the PVC plant received less than a slap on the wrist, fined far less money than one unit made in a single day.

And regardless of Formosa’s assurances of “no toxic emissions” to the surrounding community, it is worth noting that in 2000 the U.S. EPA criminal division and the FBI subpoenaed Formosa’s wastewater documents for suspected criminal misconduct of the plant’s wastewater reports. But I’ll be darned if the investigation wasn’t suddenly dropped after a record 8,000 pages, 12 years in the making.

Sometimes our so-called “jewels” need the equivalent of a Texas-luvin’ death penalty. Adios, Formosa.