The Dark Side of Texas: Pete Maiden Reports on Corpus Christi's Koch Industries

Yet Corpus Christi is hardly the only place where Koch has been accused of violating environmental standards. In 2000, Koch was fined $35 million -- the largest civil penalty ever imposed on a company under federal environmental law -- for more than 300 oil spills into lakes, streams and waterways from its pipelines and oil facilities in six states. In one case, the Environmental Protection Agency reported, almost 100,000 gallons of oil was spilled in Texas and caused a twelve-mile oil slick on Nueces Bay and Corpus Christi Bay.

In Texas, many blame the state for failing to curb Koch's pollution. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which is responsible for monitoring pollution at Koch's refineries, lists pages of "Air Emission Event Reports" on its Web site that describe repeated violations by the company. Yet the commission has taken little or no action against Koch. Instead of being a watchdog, the TCEQ is "the lap dog of the industry," says Dr. Neil Carman, who served for twelve years as a regional investigator at the commission. "The failure of the TCEQ's investigators to take action on the refinery's serious benzene violations reflects how poorly the agency is doing its job at large industrial plants."

Since effective oversight by the state of Koch isn't forthcoming, citizens in Corpus Christi have taken it upon themselves to monitor the pollution. Suzie Canales, the director of Citizens for Environmental Justice, lost a sister to cancer and has two young grandchildren with birth defects. She has teamed up with Melissa Jarrell, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M University who is working on a book about Koch called Environmental Crime and the Media. The two women are organizing local residents, maintaining a constant watch on the company's refineriesand checking the surrounding area for elevated levels of toxins. "An estimated tens of thousands of Americans die each year as a result of environmental pollution," Jarrell says. "These refineries are getting away with silent mass murder."

NOTE: We sent members of the I'm From Rolling Stone cast into the field to document America's eco-disasters. The result is a series of four reports from around the country. See a full-index of their work and tell us what you think here.