Conscious Choice: Move over, Erin Brockovich

December 2005

Move over, Erin Brockovich

By Eileen Favorite & Marla Donato

Tricia Krause is taking the scenic route through Orland Park along La Grange Road that cuts through miles of forest preserves. While stopped at a traffic light, she calls a friend to ask her to please put the pitchers of soda pop on the tables during tonight’s meeting. She hangs up and then dials the number of the doctor of her son, Matthew, where she leaves a polite message on the answering machine, asking for the results of a bone scan that are due that day. Clicking the phone shut, she passes a pond crowded with snowy egrets, then points out the window at a 2-foot-high orange pipe shaped like a candy cane.

“There’s another Premcor pipeline!” she says.

The bright orange pipes running along the drainage ditch remind Krause that even though she’s moved her family 10 miles away from the Premcor refinery in Blue Island, the pipeline has followed her to her new home on a quiet street in Orland Park.

During her three pregnancies, Krause lived in Crestwood, just a few miles from the plant at 131st Street and Kedzie Avenue. She didn’t think much of that until her youngest daughter, Brianne, was born with a brain tumor. Matthew, the eldest, had whooping cough and spinal meningitis as an infant. At 3, he was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. Now at the age of 15, he’s experiencing extreme back pain, and he recently spent eight hours at Advocate Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn. Krause is convinced there is a link between emissions from the Premcor Refining Group plant and her children’s illnesses.

She’s spent at least five years trying to prove it.

Since calling her first “Town Hall Meeting” in the south suburbs nearly a year ago, her cause has gained momentum. Other residents have been turning up at the meetings wondering about, or downright blaming, Premcor for health problems suffered by their family members. Many of the ill are children who have been diagnosed with cancer.

“There are so many families that have been affected by this. I want to help as many of them as I can,” Krause says as she merges onto I-57.

New Owners

The Blue Island plant, which ceased operations as a refinery in 2001, was the subject of numerous federal and state environmental lawsuits and is under a court-ordered cleanup. The residents have banded together to determine the type and extent of former plant emissions and other pollution. They are especially suspicious of benzene, a common byproduct of crude oil production that is a known carcinogen and has been linked to leukemia and aplastic anemia.

Premcor officials would not respond to requests for comments. In September 2005, San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corporation closed the transaction to purchase Premcor. In response to the environmental violations and the residents’ health allegations, Mary Rose Brown, Valero’s senior vice president of corporate communications, said in an email interview: “Since the refinery was closed when we purchased Premcor, we have no knowledge of its operations… We never owned or operated this refinery but we are cleaning up the site since acquiring it.”

Doctors and Tests

Krause seems remarkably calm as she discusses Matthew’s test results.

“I just don’t think it’s cancer,” she says. “One doctor said there was no cancer in his blood, and he doesn’t have a distended stomach. Not that I don’t get nervous, but … I’ve been down this road before. It could be scar tissue from previous spinal taps.”

She turns on the turn signal and points out the window again. “See! More pipes!”

This is the fourth town meeting Krause has organized to discuss her suspected link between the refinery and health problems, maybe even a cancer cluster. But linking the cancer cases in the region to the plant is difficult.

According to Dr. Rosemary Sokas, of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago, “Cancer clusters are notoriously difficult to evaluate, partly because all biologic events, including cancer, can occur randomly and groups may happen. It is especially difficult to reconstruct accurate historical exposure estimates.”

Krause remains undaunted despite a study by the Illinois Department of Public Health stating that the incidence of cancer in the region was not beyond the norm.

She points out that when an oncologist told her that her son’s immune system had been suppressed in the fetal state, she asked if Premcor’s pollutants could be responsible, and her doctor said there could be a link. After she discovered no family history of leukemia or brain tumors, she mobilized.

Krause gathered data while going door-to-door fundraising for the Leukemia Foundation. She organized fashion shows and surveyed attendees. She read obituaries.

She assembled a map covered with colored push pins to denote cancer cases in the southwest suburbs: yellow for cancer, blue for brain tumors, pink for aplastic anemia, and black for people who have died from these cancers. At her first town meeting in January, Krause presented the results of her one-woman grassroots epidemiological study, and soon attracted the attention of WBBM-TV Ch. 2, WLS-TV Ch. 7, and the Chicago Tribune.

At the January meeting, Matthew Dunn, chief of environmental enforcement for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, told residents that Premcor was conducting a court-ordered study to determine what possible toxins might be present in the soil. He blamed the age of the plant for the lengthy time it was taking to do the “subsurface and groundwater exam.”

Status reports on the study are available at the Blue Island Public Library, 2433 York St. Dunn said the attorney general’s office did not have a problem with allowing the plant to investigate itself because “a reputable firm,” URS Corp. of Milwaukee, Wis., was hired to conduct the study, which is still underway.

Mentor to Cancer Survivors

As she drives to her fourth “Town Hall meeting,” Krause shakes her head as she passes by the scene of a traffic accident and another driver lays on the horn.

“I don’t know why people get so rude and hostile when there’s an accident,” she says. This is classic Krause: She just doesn’t understand deliberate disregard for others’ welfare on any level.

“I care about everybody,” she says. I don’t want other families to go through what ours did.”

She’s on the way to Monee to pick up Emily Inman, a 15-year-old survivor of the rare blood disorder aplastic anemia and former Blue Island resident. Emily met Krause through Camp Quality, a summer camp in Frankfurt for kids with cancer. Matthew attends the camp every summer.

Emily emerges from her new home on a street of spindly maples, which is nothing like Blue Island, where she grew up playing in a tributary of the Calumet-Sag Channel, where shimmering oil spills seemed to her as numerous as the mosquitoes. Emily wears spiked white sandals and a blue cotton sweater. Earlier today, she was inducted into the National Honor Society. When asked what she wants to study in college, she answers without hesitation: “I want to be a pediatric oncologist and go to either Loyola Medical School or Harvard.”

Krause took Emily under her wing after Emily’s mother died five years ago, three months after Emily emerged from a coma, and long before Emily went into remission in 2003. Though she has a baby face with smooth skin and round cheeks, Emily is poised and self-possessed. As she powders her nose, she explains aplastic anemia and her treatment with the scientific acumen of a budding med student. Then she giggles, after discovering wedged between the seats a photo of Krause dating back to the ’80s.

“Is that you, Trish?”

“I totally changed my look after my divorce!” Krause says laughing.

The photo shows a brunette with shoulder-length hair and blue eyelids. Now, Tricia’s hair is streaked blonde and hangs to her elbows, a little darker at the roots. She wears faded jeans and a tailored jean jacket. Her voice, which is soft and pretty, belies the tenacity of her convictions. At 40, her pretty face shows the strain of watching two of her three children suffer debilitating ailments, the dissolution of her marriage, and a growing stack of unpaid medical bills.

“My life’s been hell,” she says with a remarkable lack of bitterness. But just get her talking about Premcor, and you’ll see the bulldog glimmer in her honey-brown eyes as she rattles over a litany of complaints against the company.

“I never stop thinking about this. I must have sometimes called the state between 2002 and 2003 three times a day: the attorney general, the Illinois EPA. They know there’s a problem. But they don’t do anything. They test well water in places for nitrates from fertilizers, but they don’t check for volatile organic compounds like lead and mercury.”

She grips the steering wheel. “What are they really doing? Do they not have the resources? Do they not care?”

Legal Actions Against Premcor

Government officials and regulatory agencies have taken actions against the company, which had been refining oil at the Blue Island site since the mid-1920s.

Premcor was formerly known as Clark Refining and Marketing, Inc. In August 2000, one of Clark’s environmental managers was indicted with numerous counts charging that a “a multi-year scheme to conceal … the fact that the wastewater Clark discharged to the … sewer system (from the Blue Island refinery) was routinely in violation of the Clean Water Act,” according to the EPA’s website.

During the winter of 2001-2002 one Clark executive pleaded guilty to the charges, a second was found guilty and the company agreed to pay a $2 million fine. The environmental monitoring firm charged in the case also pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and paid a $50,000 fine.

In 2002 the company agreed to clean up the plant in a $6.25 million settlement with state and federal officials.

But the cleanup is not happening fast enough for some residents who are uneasy about refined products that are still stored at a terminal on the site. Many are mindful of a January 2004 press release from Madigan’s office that stated: “Premcor provided maps to the state showing that at least 100,000 gallons of petroleum are in the water table near product storage tank farms, administrative offices, transfer pipelines and truck loading docks. Additionally, groundwater samples taken in 2001 by Premcor indicate levels of lead, chloride, sulfate, benzene and ethylbenzene that exceed the water quality requirements of the Illinois Environmental Protection Act.”

The future use of the site remains uncertain.

“Our focus is currently on cleaning up the site,” said Brown, of Valero. “Once the site is cleaned up, Valero is open to redevelopment options. We have had only preliminary discussions regarding the community’s desires for the site long-term.”

Home Office

Krause pulls into her garage to check on her children before the meeting. The front of the house is well-groomed. Krause checks her messages, relieved that there isn’t one from the doctor. “If they’d found something on his scan, they would have called right away.”

Snickers, a caramel-colored German shepherd/collie mix, is in the kitchen. Krause bought Snickers after Brianne’s brain surgery, to cheer her up. “Brianne was out of school for two months. Snickers made her smile.”

Nearby is the desk where until recently there were 2-foot-high stacks of papers. Now they are in the hands of the attorneys, she says. She pushes the edge of the computer station desk to demonstrate how it wobbles.

“My friend gave me this desk. For a while, I couldn’t afford a high-speed connection, so I didn’t get very far. I had to go to the public library. Now, I’m working on this case 40, 60 hours a week. I can’t grow my clothing business. But to me this work is more meaningful.”

Krause began a children’s clothing line years ago so she could work from home while her kids were ill.

“I don’t know if people really get what my life is like — running to doctors, calling my seamstress, scheduling meetings, conducting email correspondence. Even on Friday and Saturday nights, when my kids are with their dad, I’m on the Internet doing research. It’s hard to be everything. I need some security. I worry a lot about groceries, to be honest. I can only refinance my house when I get rid of $9,000 in doctor’s bills.”

She pulls out her map. About a year ago, 340 push pins dotted the map; today, there are more than 600.

Town Hall Meeting

The map is one of the focal points at the meeting that night at Beggar’s Pizza at 127th and Kedzie in Blue Island, which attracts about 30 people, including attorneys.

Shawn Collins, an environmental law attorney and founder of The Collins Law Firm, Naperville, Ill., addresses the crowd.

“We’ve never met anybody as dedicated as Trish Krause is,” he says, pointing to her map. “Whether those pins can be legally attributed to the plant, we can’t tell you yet.”

He lays out precisely what the firm needs to establish: what chemicals left the plant and how, what detrimental effects those chemicals could have; where they went and in what concentrations; and what illnesses are linkable in a court of law. He explains that there must be rigorous proof through scientific documents and medical studies.

“We’ve met a lot of folks like you,” he tells the crowd. “When you realize the carelessness and recklessness and contempt these companies have for the human beings living around the plant … Probably the worst I’ve ever seen is Premcor. They bounced an enormous amount of highly toxic chemicals into your environment. I believe they have to explain themselves and they have to be punished for this.”

Collins then goes around the room, asking people to talk about their situations. One man said he lived six miles from Premcor when a grapefruit-sized tumor was found in his late 2-year-old son’s head. A former Premcor employee with lung cancer says: “I never smoked. … A lot of stuff going on at Premcor could have caused cancer.”

A young girl from Beverly tells how she was diagnosed with aplastic anemia when she was in the 8th grade. Her mother relates that four children within a six-block radius have aplastic anemia or leukemia. Another woman, who worked in Blue Island when she was pregnant, said her daughter was diagnosed at 9 months with neuroblastoma. Her dad worked at Premcor and had emphysema and seizures. She, her son, and her brother all have spinal degenerative disease. One man who lived one mile from plant from age 9 to 22 had a lyposarcoma in his chest the size of volleyball. A woman stands up and says: “My husband lived on the same street as you. He had the same diagnosis — lyposarcoma. It’s a one-in-a-million type cancer.”

Emily Inman, the teenager with aplastic anemia who Krause had driven to the meeting, tells how she would run to her grandmother’s house by walking on the frozen tributary from the Cal-Sag Channel. One day, the ice broke beneath her. She was immersed entirely in the water. “And,” Emily adds, “my friend tried to raise goats in his yard. All 10 of them died after drinking the creek water.”

Explosions

Then there are the stories about the plant explosions. The latest round was in 2000 and dusted the area in blue powder, shutting down schools and offices. “I worked at the park district,” a man says. “There was blue dust over everything.” A woman stands up. “My sister and I were out of town when the explosion happened. When we came home, there was dust all over everything because we left the windows open. A year later, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma stage 2. We lived four blocks from refinery.”

Norm Berger, a partner with Varga, Berger, Ledsky, Hayes & Casey, Chicago, cautions residents that they are not facing an easy battle.

“We’re fighting big companies with lots of money, unlimited resources,” he says. “We can’t take a case if there is no scientific evidence. Science is way behind reality. Scientists have not spent enough time studying what chemicals do to people. Most scientists work for big companies, not trying to bring them down. There are almost no studies on the effects of chemicals on fetuses and children. A child is not a small adult. It’s a much more sensitive organism.”

Berger says that during the past decade when Premcor manufactured products from crude oil (refining 80,000 barrels per day), tons of pollutants went into the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But one obstacle to proving the case is a lack of accurate records.

A man in the back of the room stands up. Earlier, he spoke of how his son went to school in Blue Island in 1987 before he died of leukemia, three months after being diagnosed. “How does a working-class guy afford a lawyer like you?” His wife, sitting beside him, who hasn’t spoken all night, nods her head.

“We work on a contingency basis,” Collins said. “You don’t have to put anything up front. If you make money, we make money. We don’t want to nurture false hope. It’s not easy to be a plaintiff in these kinds of cases. They’ll fight and ask difficult questions. You need to know that it’s tough.”

Berger explains the kinds of tough questions the firm will ask potential plaintiffs but finishes by saying: “We want to drag these guys out into the sunlight and make them pay for what they’ve done.”

The crowd applauds. Krause invites everyone to take home leftovers and hands out containers.

The addition of Premcor’s refineries gave Valero 3.3 million barrels per day of refinery throughput capacity, making it North America’s largest refining company.

Eileen Favorite lives in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago. Marla Donato is editor of Conscious Choice magazine, where other staffers also contributed to this article.

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