On Monday November 18th, Tim, Allison, and I visited Ms. Cecelia at the Young Neighborhood library and talked to her about the CES site a couple blocks away. After our conversation, we poked around the site itself—peeking through the fences, taking photos, getting a feel for the neighborhood adjacent to the site.
The CES site itself is relatively nondescript. Large bushes grow from the cracks of the abandoned parking lot which Google Maps assures me was paved and filled with trucks in 2011. The entrance was chained off, so we couldn’t really get a look inside, but from the outside it just looked like a neglected plot ready for some developer to build a row of condos.
What Ms. Cecelia had told me an hour before didn’t match what I was seeing—how could this empty site overrun with unkept foliage manifest as cancer in the throat of a dear friend? I knew this to be true, but the only indication of this might have been the fence. There were no DANGER signs or red/orange/yellow colors to alert viewers to anything unusual. If anything, the plain chain-linked fence looked like a fun thing to climb and explore around with similarly mischievous friends. I can’t help but feel there is a tactic in making the CES site ignorable—the more it blends in, the less worry/anxiety stirred up by its presence, the more we can cast those in search of environmental justice as overreactive, the less we can attribute responsibility to any one entity in particular.
In our conversation with Ms. Cecelia, she told us how the CES site began as a chemical recycling facility that eventually went bankrupt. An EPA response sheet tells me that the site released “cresolic/phenolic odors” into the area and accompany spillage. Then Ms. Cecelia described how some members in the community began dumping different chemicals and objects into the site, transforming it into a dumping ground in the early 2000s. The signs in the area seem to reflect this aspect of her telling. Instead of warning people about the residual chemicals that are in facility, the signs in the area emphasize the exorbitant fines for dumping (“Stop Trashing Houston!” “Violators will be Prosecuted”).
The signs point to a narrative that the community is responsible for originating and perpetuating the toxic situation they find themselves in rather than the chemical recycling plant gone wrong. While “No Dumping” signs might help residents in the current day, I wonder if anything more should be done to point out the inherent toxicity or if danger signs might just heighten anxiety about a situation that cannot be solved any time soon. My hope is that in drawing attention to toxic sites like CES, we can motivate residents to advocate for themselves and push for change. However, I realize that this might just normalize toxic places and reduce community motivation to push for change, so I’m curious about environmental justice discussion about best practices for marking these sites.