• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Study on Health Risks From Refineries Panned

Posted on: Wednesday, 24 August 2005, 00:00 CDT

Aug. 23--Buried deep within the mammoth federal energy bill signed into law this month is a provision calling for a study of the health risks to people living near oil or gas refineries.

But community activists and medical experts are dismissing the study as inadequate, arguing that Congress hasn't allocated enough time or money to accomplish much.

And inconclusive results from a badly conducted study, they add, could be worse than no study at all.

Congress has given the Department of Energy six months to study "direct and significant health impacts to persons resulting from living in proximity to petrochemical and oil refinery facilities." No funds were allocated.

"I don't see what they hope to accomplish in that time period. I could see them taking six months to just get organized to do something," said Jonathan Ward, a toxicologist with the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

"I would be concerned that a hastily done study would not come up with any definitive results and then would be used as an excuse to draw the conclusion that there is no effect," Ward added.

The sentiment is shared by Corpus Christi resident Suzie Canales, an activist who campaigns against pollution in that city's refinery row.

"I think it's unrealistic to think that anything of that scale can be done in six months," she said. "And also, what does the DOE know about health?"

Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said the agency was committed to meeting the study's Feb. 9 deadline and had remanded the issue to its Office of Environment, Safety and Health.

The energy bill does direct the department to consult with the National Cancer Institute and other federal government bodies, but institute officials said the department would take the lead and that it was too early to discuss the study.

The study was included in the hotly debated 1,725-page energy bill by Houston Democrat Gene Green in response to community concerns about potentially dangerous levels of chemicals emitted by area refineries.

Green defends the tight timeline and said that because no money has been earmarked, the work will likely be delayed anyway while he tries to find funding in next year's budget. That's unless the Energy Department decides to pay for the work out of its discretionary budget.

"I don't mind extending it a little bit, but I don't want it to take three or four years," he said. "Sometimes if you put it off, it never gets done."

Three or four years, at about $1 million per year, is the time Ward believes would be needed for a definitive study.

Green envisions a study that compares cancer and illness rates from neighborhoods around refineries, possibly by ZIP codes, with neighborhoods that are not near such facilities. He said roughly $1 million and six months should be sufficient.

Canales applauds Green's efforts to bring the health issue some attention but believes that the approach he described probably won't reveal much.

"If anything, these studies by design are limited and flawed," she said. "ZIP code boundary lines are arbitrary. They can exclude a whole population that may be exposed, giving you false negatives, which is probably the case in Houston and other places where the state data showed no spike of cancer."

Craig Beskid, president of the Mickey Leland National Urban Air Toxics Research Center in Houston, said the project should go beyond statistics. Instead, he'd like research on residents' personal exposure to chemicals.

This would entail outfitting residents with individual portable monitoring devices and take at least two years, Beskid added.

John Wilson, executive director of the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention, was frank.

"Given that they didn't appropriate any money and put such a short timeline on it, it looks likely it will become a memo," he said. "It doesn't interest me much."

-----

To see more of the San Antonio Express-News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mysanantonio.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, San Antonio Express-News

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: San Antonio Express-News

More News in this Category