In the Shadow of Shuttered Philadelphia Refinery, Neighbors Recall Those Lost to Decades of Pollution

The nation’s oldest and largest gasoline refinery was closed following an explosion and fireball which rocked the majority Black neighborhood of South Philadelphia.
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Hand painted posters and murals of sunflowers and skulls remembering community members lost to pollution line a chainlink fence outside the PES Refinery.
A fenceline memorial at the PES refinery during a June 22 Philly Thrive protest. Credit: Sharon Kellyย ยฉย 2020.

The Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery was โ€” until last year โ€” the largest and oldest gasoline refinery on the East Coast. The week it was sold began with a community rally that also served as a makeshift memorial service.

On Monday, June 22, as Black Lives Matter protests continued nationwide, members of Philly Thrive, a local grassroots group, arrived outside the perimeter of the refinery complex in South Philadelphia. They posted โ€œin memoriamโ€ placards bearing the names of deceased Philadelphians along the facilityโ€™s chainlink borders, handwritten fenceline memorials for departed members of the refinery’s fenceline community. Speakers that day recalled less the fiery explosion that tore through the plant one year earlier and more the long-term harms caused by decades of fossil fuel production in the majority Black neighborhood.

Later that week, on June 26, Hilco Redevelopment Partners closed on the sale of thisย sprawling 1,400 acre refinery complex in the heart of one of the nationโ€™s largest cities. The new owners have indicated that they do not plan to reopen the refinery, instead publicly discussing ways the heavily contaminated land could be used for warehousing and oilย storage.

One year earlier, nearly to the day, a never-inspected segment of pipe inside the 153-year old PES refinery wore through and burst, according to a preliminary report by federal investigators. The breached pipeย released a mix of fossil fuel chemicals used to make gasoline as well as one of the most dangerous substances used by industry today, hydrogen fluoride. The blend ignited in a series of explosions, unleashing a fireball so large that it registered on weather satellites orbiting the Earth and some locals mistook it for the implosion of an atomย bomb.

Through a series of lucky near-misses, no one was killed that night โ€” not by the three-alarm fire, not by a bus-sized storage tank and other ruptured equipment that rained down following the blasts, nor by the ground-clinging cloud of chemicals that seeped out into the refinery, but that never spread past its fences. If not for split-second decisions by refinery workers who drained hydrogen fluoride from the unit that ruptured, the chemical could have spread for miles and killed more than a million people, all withinย minutes.

PES Refinery view
The mothballed PES refinery, seen from the Passyunk Avenue bridge on June 22. Credit: Sharon Kellyย ยฉ 2020.

Roughly 20,000 people live within one mile of Philadelphia Energy Solutions, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data shows. The majority of those living inside that radius are Black and a third of households have incomes below $15,000 a year. Expand that circle outwards to three miles of PES, and you’ll find the homes of over 350,000 people, sixty percent of whom are people ofย color.

For those gathered at the June 22 rally and memorial, the now-inoperable refineryโ€™s hazards remained all too vivid. For Sylvia Bennet, it lives on in her granddaughterโ€™s respiratory problems, for Kilynn Johnson in her own multiple cancer diagnoses, and in the memories of those who passedย away.

โ€œPeople, generations have died in South Philadelphia because of that oil refinery,โ€ said Carol Hemingway, membership coordinator for Philly Thrive. โ€œThe buck stops now. We will not allow another company to come in here and do what theyย did.โ€

Connecting theย Dots

The PES refinery was built long before the nationโ€™s cornerstone environmental laws were written โ€” and it consistently flouted the rules once they were on the books. The refinery was โ€œthe largest single source of air pollution in Philadelphia,โ€ NPR‘s State Impact reported in 2019, โ€œand has never been in compliance with the Clean Airย Act.โ€

In 2012, the plant spewed over three-quarters of a million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air surrounding the plant, a 2014 EPAย fact sheet notes, adding that was a reduction from the plantโ€™s 809,945 lbs of pollution the year prior. For comparison, the next largest polluter in South Philadelphiaย reported 9,599 pounds of air pollutantsย released in 2012. More than 9 percentย of the total reported toxic releases in South Philadelphia that year were just one chemical:ย benzene.

Cancer survivor Kilynn Johnson described the connections she saw between her health and the PES refinery.
Cancer survivor Kilynn Johnson described the connections she saw between her health and the PES refinery. Credit: Sharon Kellyย ยฉ 2020.

Benzene is perhaps best known as a powerful carcinogen โ€” but it can cause other impacts, including impacts for childrenโ€™s health. Despite a relative lack of scientific research in the area, โ€œemerging studies show that benzene exposure can cause deleterious health effects in children,โ€ one 2018 peer-reviewed paper on benzene and childrenโ€™s health found. Neurological symptoms were among the most frequently reported symptoms among a group of children exposed to benzene by a 2010 incident at a BP refinery in Texas, the researchersย noted.

Benzene problems at PES persisted even after the refinery stopped processing fossil fuels, a 2020 report by the Environmental Integrity Project found โ€” earning PES the reportโ€™s top slot in a list of benzene polluters nationwide. โ€œThe refinery with the highest benzene levels at the end of the third quarter of 2019 was the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery in Pennsylvania, whose annual average net concentration was over five times the EPA standard,โ€ the reportย found.

โ€œOh my god,โ€ Bob Sonawane, a former EPA official told NBC News after reviewing benzene data. โ€œThe numbers that you’re saying are very, very high, like some things happening in China, India, and many otherย places.โ€

Philly Thrive’s Carol Hemingway, age 70, first began opposing the refinery when she began connecting the dots between that pollution and the impacts she saw in herย community.

โ€œAs a social worker, I had clients that had kids with disabilities and Iโ€™m saying to my colleagues, โ€˜why do so many kids in South Philly have disabilities, learning disabilities?โ€™โ€ Hemingway said in an interview with DeSmog. โ€œIt took 15 years to connect the dots. The more I got into this, the more I read about it, the more I saw as a community activist, I could not beย still.โ€

โ€œYou cannot have social justice without environmental justice,โ€ Hemingwayย said.

Carol Hemingway looks on as Avery Broughton, 18, and other South Philadelphia youth participate in the June 22 rally.
Carol Hemingway, left, looks on as 18-year-old Avery Broughton, center-left, and other South Philadelphia youth participate in the June 22 rally. Credit: Sharon Kellyย ยฉ 2020.

Decontamination After aย Century ofย Spills

The refinery’s recentย sale marked a major milestone in the transition away from refining in South Philadelphia. Though itโ€™s not yet fully clear what its new owner plans for its recent purchase, Hilco executives have emphasized the ways that the siteโ€™s railroad and maritime infrastructure and its proximity to the Philadelphia International Airport could be valuable to prospectiveย tenants.

โ€œHRP, the real estate redevelopment unit of liquidation firm Hilco Global, says it will take several years to demolish and begin rebuilding the site, parts of which are seriously polluted from more than a century of fuel processing,โ€ the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. โ€œHilco executives anticipate it eventually will be occupied by different companies that are less susceptible to the boom-and-bust cycle of a single oilย refinery.โ€

Hilco has made moves to ensure that the site can still be used to store fossil fuels. In June, as negotiations over the buying price intensified, the company said it had learned that a pipeline easement had expired and that it had sprinted to negotiate new approvals, ensuring that the refineryโ€™s tank farms would still have routes to transport fossil fuels in and out forย storage.

At the same time, the legacy contamination on the site will need to be cleanedย up.

Mass-mailings about the cleanup circulated to the refineryโ€™s neighbors name Evergreen Resources Group, LLC as the company responsible for remediatingย the pollution left behind by decades of the refineryโ€™sย operations.

The parent company of Evergreen Resources Group is Energy Transfer โ€” the same company behind pipeline construction projects including the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), Mariner East, and Revolution (which exploded less than a week after it was firstย used).

Already, there are major battles shaping up over efforts to clean up the land under the refinery, which is saturated with fossil fuels after more than a century of spills, dumping, and leaks. Groundwater below the plant is contaminated asย well.

Philly Thrive’s Sylvia Bennett speaks about the PES refinery and her family’s experiences at the June 22 protest. Credit: Sharon Kelly ยฉ 2020.

In 2012, Energy Transfer announced its $5.3 billion acquisition of Sunoco, Inc., which had operated the PES refinery until 2012 and which had assumed the cleanup liabilities for the refinery site. โ€œThe fund for remediation of all of Sunocoโ€™s legacy sites was valued at $207 million at the end of 2017,โ€ the Inquirer reported inย January.

In September 2018, the University of Pennsylvaniaโ€™s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy faulted Energy Transferโ€™s remediation process at PES for failing to involve the surrounding community and non-compliance with the public notice requirements of a state law commonly referred to as Actย 2.

Act 2 is part of Pennsylvaniaโ€™s โ€œland recyclingโ€ program, which aims to encourage voluntary cleanup of polluted sites. It offers participants relief from future liability once cleanup standards are met. A key part of that program requires documentation of the extent of contamination โ€” a process that is still ongoing at the PES refineryย site.

Itโ€™s not clear that existing information about the contamination is complete. โ€œAll the work that has been going on in the last 30 years has been under conditions of an operating refinery,โ€ David Brown, a Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) official,ย toldย Philadelphiaย public media organization WHYY last year. โ€œThat has meant that there have been some areas that have not beenย investigated.

As part of the process, state officials must sign off on Energy Transferโ€™s findings. โ€œIt is important to remember that once PA DEP approves the final report, the chance to leverage [Energy Transferโ€™s] remediation effort will largely be closed, unless new contamination is discovered, exposure assumptions change, or fraud is suspected,โ€ the 2018 University of Pennsylvania report notes.

Then thereโ€™s the process of dismantling the refinery itself, which requires careful cleaning during disassembly to ensure that hydrocarbons arenโ€™t released, and which may require the removal of asbestos and other highly hazardousย materials.

‘They were all beingย erased’

The kinds of harms that those chemicals are capable of are all too familiar to some members of Philly Thrive.

โ€œI was born and raised over there in the Grays Ferry community,โ€ Philly Thrive member Sonya Sanders said in an interview. โ€œMy grandmother was raised here too, she told me all about theย refinery.โ€

โ€œI watched my neighbors die. Cancer, all of them,โ€ said Sanders. โ€œAround the corner, down the street. They were all beingย erased.โ€

โ€œA lot of us are what you call poor people and we donโ€™t have the resources, the money to fight. This big company? We donโ€™t have the money for that. Not even together,โ€ she said. โ€œSo it was more so, โ€˜shut up, live your life, deal withย it.โ€™โ€

Sanders described the routine she and her family developed in response to the odors that would seep outwards from the aging refinery. โ€œFamily drill was, you put the blankets down,โ€ she said, describing how her family sought to keep outdoor air from entering her home. โ€œWhen we smelled the smell, it was like, โ€˜go get the blankets, go put the stuff down, make sure the windows areย shut.โ€™โ€

A Philly Thrive marcher passes by the PES refinery.
A Philly Thrive marcher passes by the PES refinery. Credit: Sharon Kellyย ยฉ 2020.

Sanders said that she’d moved for a while out of the neighborhood. When she returned, she was struck by the odors seeping from the refineryย complex.

Then, five years later, her husband Ray was diagnosed with cancer, sheย said.

โ€œThe smell is so bad it smells like itโ€™s your stove. And him having cancer, it didnโ€™t help,โ€ she said. โ€œWe had no resources, money to move. I wanted to get up and run. My son wanted to leave. We didnโ€™t have the money. Ray wasnโ€™t working no more. Iโ€™m not working, Iโ€™mย caretaking.โ€

Ray died of cancer nine months after the refinery blast, she continued. โ€œThey gave him five years to live, he was in remission about two times,โ€ she said. โ€œI buried Ray three months ago. That was myย life.โ€

โ€œThese last couple months I couldnโ€™t even be there, because they wouldnโ€™t let me in the hospital because of the COVID. So, we were robbed even of our last months,โ€ Sandersย said.

โ€œItโ€™s just hard for me to think about โ€” if we didnโ€™t move back down here, if they took us serious, if money didnโ€™t mean so much. If my life meant something to somebody,โ€ she said. โ€œIt means something to me. But could it mean something toย them?โ€

Philly Thrive members marched across the PES refinery site in South Philadelphia.
Philly Thrive members marched across the PES refinery site in South Philadelphia. Credit: Sharon Kellyย ยฉ 2020.
ย 
Main image: A fenceline memorial at the PES refinery during a June 22 Philly Thrive protest. Credit: Sharon Kellyย ยฉย 2020.
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Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent at The Capitol Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other print and online publications.

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