About two years ago, residents of Chicago’s Southeast Side saw piles of black dust in their neighborhood growing taller and taller. The piles, stored along the Calumet River, reached six stories high – 60 feet tall – and when the wind blew they would send clouds of black dust through residential streets.

When local resident Anthony Martinez posted a photo of the massive black dust cloud on Facebook in the summer of 2013, people outside the neighborhood finally began to take notice.

The piles are petroleum coke, or petcoke, a waste product from refining oil. Several facilities along the Calumet River – including a family-owned business called Beemsterboer Slag Corp. and one called KCBX Terminals – had been storing petcoke and coal in piles along the river for years. But the piles had obviously started growing much taller lately. That’s because the BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana just across the border from Illinois recently completed a nearly $4 billion expansion to process more oil from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Tar sands oil is much thicker and dirtier than standard oil, so it produces more petcoke. Petcoke can also be burned to produce energy, though it is extremely dirty and can’t be done much in the U.S. without violating environmental laws.

So the petcoke is exported to countries including China and Brazil. The Calumet River is a perfect location to store it, since it connects to the Illinois River and then to the Mississippi River, and also to Lake Michigan, so it can be shipped out on barges to the Gulf of Mexico or the Great Lakes system which eventually leads out to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Southeast Side is where steel mills were formerly located, providing more than 20,000 jobs and a vibrant local economy. The mills closed in the 1980s and 1990s and the local economy collapsed. Many people left, but many also stayed – mostly Mexican American families and also the descendants of European immigrants with history working in the mills.

One of the locals leading the fight to protect and improve the Southeast Side is Olga Bautista, a young mother who grew up in the area. She was active in the immigrants’ rights movement sparking the massive marches of 2006 and 2007, and other social justice struggles. She became a leader of a coalition working to ban petcoke from the Southeast Side, and now she is running for City Council in the Feb. 24 elections, trying to win a seat that has long been held by powerful allies of the Chicago Democratic Machine.

Bautista and other residents say their neighborhoods are being treated as a “dumping ground” and waste storage that would never be allowed in richer neighborhoods closer to downtown. Local groups including the Southeast Environmental Task Force have fought hard to try to improve the quality of life and to bring in clean jobs and keep out sources of more pollution. For example, an asphalt plant has recently opened there, a massive food waste compost plant has been discussed and a shadowy New York investment firm has been pushing to build a power plant that would gasify coal – or petroleum coke – for energy.

A study contracted by the city showed that petcoke is much more likely to cause dust than other materials stored in bulk – coal, slag and Mesaba ore. Homes on the Southeast Side are visibly coated in a grimy black dust; when someone runs their hand over a wall or window, they come away with a palm covered in black. Fine dust – known as PM 10 and PM 2.5, for grains less than 2.5 or 10 micrometers in size – is linked to serious lung and heart disease and other health ailments.

“Having petcoke in a high density community exposes people to a waste that is easily windblown and when inhaled causes irreparable damage to the lungs,” said Henry Henderson, director of the Midwest program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been fighting petcoke in Chicago. “This should not be in dense residential communities.”

The photo of clouds of black petcoke dust blowing near parks, homes and schools helped residents voice their outrage to city and state leaders. Starting in the fall of 2014, local Ald. John Pope, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Gov. Pat Quinn and Mayor Rahm Emanuel all made tough statements about cracking down on the petcoke. The Attorney General’s office filed complaints against Beemsterboer causing it to ultimately shut down, because its facility lacked the necessary permits. Pope proposed an ordinance that would remove petcoke from the area. Emanuel and Ed Burke, the City Council’s most powerful member, also originally supported the call for a ban.

But there were powerful forces behind the petcoke. The main company storing it, KCBX Terminals, is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, owned by brothers David and Charles Koch, extremely wealthy right-wing business owners and activists famous for using their money and connections to influence politics. KCBX had recently bought another petcoke storage facility along the river, and residents feared they planned to keep expanding as more and more tar sand oil was refined at BP Whiting and other oil refineries in the region. Since the Koch brothers are such big players in the petcoke industry, many people have taken to calling it “petKoch.”

Ald. Pope withdrew his push for a strong ordinance banning petcoke in Chicago. Instead he backed a more moderate ordinance, infuriating many local residents. Mayor Emanuel and city officials said that Chicago could not ban petcoke since then Koch Industries would surely file a lawsuit, causing a costly legal battle that the city might lose. Local residents pointed to Detroit, where city and state officials had forced petcoke to be moved completely out. If Detroit – famous for economic decay and desperation – could rid itself of petcoke, how could a shining, prosperous city like Chicago continue storing the dirty material, they asked.

Eventually City Council passed an ordinance telling the public health department to make rules regulating the storage of petcoke. Those rules, which took effect last summer, imposed a number of restrictions, including limiting the height of petcoke piles to 30 feet, requiring that they all be enclosed within two years and that conveyors carrying petcoke be enclosed, prohibiting the companies from expanding their footprint on the ground and other measures to decrease dust blowing off the piles. Local leaders said the rules were better than nothing, but they were not satisfied, fearing there would still be petcoke pollution and ways for the companies to avoid the rules.

These concerns were quickly confirmed as KCBX requested a number of exceptions to the rules. The company said that following some of the rules would be impossible and would prevent them from meeting their customers’ demands. In early December, the city denied two of the company’s requests – including to make the piles 45 feet high — and approved a few other requests.

On Dec. 16, KCBX announced its plans for enclosing the piles, releasing a short animated video and colorful drawings to the media. The company also announced its schedule for building the enclosure. They would start construction in fall 2015, they said, and finish by fall 2017. The city rules demand that the piles be enclosed by June 2016. So the company was basically announcing they would be more than a year late in enclosing the piles.

Bautista and other local residents were furious, saying it was an injustice to make residents suffer more health problems and live with petcoke dust coating their walls and cars for all that time. City officials were also angry. On Dec. 17, Public Health Commissioner Bechara Choucair sent a scathing letter to KCBX’s president noting that the company had never even filed a request for an extension to the time limit for enclosure, and saying, “Prior to your announcement, KCBX had applied for no permits and shared no formal plans or architectural drawings for this facility, despite the fact that the clock on your two-year timeline for building the facility started running more than six months ago…your recently announced plans and timeline unwisely assume that the additional time will be granted.”

Bautista said the company’s behavior proves that city officials are basically unwilling or unable to really control the petcoke as long as it remains in Chicago. That’s why she and other residents are still calling for a ban on petcoke, or for starters a moratorium while more studies are done on the issue. The Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke has frequent meetings and makes ongoing volunteer efforts to inform and organize residents. They have been joined by National Nurses United, a labor union representing nurses in Chicago. Some of the nurses work on the Southeast Side or grew up or live here. They say they are sick of seeing people suffering high rates of respiratory illness and other ailments that they think are related to the long history of pollution, including now the petcoke.

“Nurses take this from a very personal perspective,” said National Nurses United Organizer Sheila Garland, during a tour of the Southeast Side last spring. “We deal with patients one on one, we see it in our hospital beds, in our clinics. When young people are dying of pulmonary issues, this is very real to us.”

Nurses and local residents involved in the fight against petcoke joined the massive People’s Climate March in September where people from across the country marched to New York City. Petcoke is a prime example of how something that causes climate change – the extraction and burning of tar sands oil from Alberta – also has serious impacts on local communities.

Petcoke continues to be a Chicago political issue. Along with Bautista another leader of the movement to ban petcoke, Rich Martinez Jr., is also trying to defeat longtime Ald. Pope, who residents think has not done enough on the petcoke issue. They are also confronting Mayor Emanuel, who often portrays himself as a champion of environmental issues. Emanuel has made statements saying that petcoke is not wanted in Chicago and that the health department rules are meant to make it so unattractive for companies to store petcoke that they will leave. But critics question whether he really means it, and as Emanuel faces low popularity rates going into the February election they ask whether he will take more meaningful action against KCBX.

KCBX maintains that its efforts to control dust are adequate to protect residents. Company officials point out that they have invested more than $10 million in dust control measures including water cannons that constantly spray down the piles. They’ve also paved roads on the site and built a wheel wash for trucks leaving the facility, to avoid dragging petcoke through the streets. They also note that the enclosure construction will create 150 union jobs, and there are about 40 permanent jobs on the site.

But Bautista and other residents say those measures aren’t good enough.

Even with the city rules, trains and barges that take petcoke to and from KCBX are uncovered and petcoke can easily blow into the air and into the river. Residents say they’ve also seen an increase in truck traffic which causes danger, pollution and annoyance for local residents as the trucks wind through residential streets. Bautista recently took a photo of a truck which she says was carrying petcoke flipped over on its side in the neighborhood. Residents also say they’ve seen an increase in barges in the Calumet River piled with petcoke, many of them sitting moored in groups of 10 or more for long stretches of time.

On the day that KCBX announced its enclosure plans, Bautista was half a mile away in her campaign office, suffering from the flu but determined to keep organizing nonetheless. A map of the 10th Ward was on the wall, a paper White Castle cup filled with grainy petcoke inside a cabinet. The table was piled high with papers related to her positions on petcoke and other local issues affecting the neighborhood, including the planned massive Lakeside Development on the former site of the U.S. Steel mill to the east. The site has been vacant for two decades since the mill closed, but an extension of Lake Shore Drive was built through it last year and now construction of hundreds of upscale housing units may proceed.

Many residents of Southeast Side neighborhoods like The Bush and Slag Valley are angry that Lakeside Development is getting millions in taxpayer subsidies and scheduled for new shopping centers, a marina and other amenities, while their neighborhoods just get dirty industry and waste like the petcoke piles. Lakeside Development and the existing neighborhoods are adjacent, but they feel like they are being treated as two separate worlds.

“It’s an ongoing devaluation of the lives of people on the Southeast Side,” said Bautista, referring to the city plans for both Lakeside Development and petcoke storage.

Southeast Side residents have proposed various plans for clean energy development, parks with trails and nature centers, art galleries, educational institutions and other positive developments for the Southeast Side. There is already a growing arts scene and despite the economic challenges, there are many thriving local businesses. Residents say city and state officials need to take these plans and efforts seriously and make them a priority.

“We need a green economic corridor, a sustainable one with jobs that doesn’t just perpetuate climate change,” said Bautista. How city officials proceed on petcoke, Lakeside Development and related issues will be indicative of how they view the Southeast Side residents, generations of hard-working immigrants and their descendants who decided to stay and commit themselves to their communities even after the steel mills left.

Bautista points to a struggle several years ago to prevent the Chicago Police Department from building a shooting range in the Southeast Side. Residents successfully blocked the plans, largely because it was found that a protected bald eagle was nesting on the site.

“That was stopped because of an eagle that was endangered,” said Bautista. “But we’re human beings, and we’re endangered too.”

Original article: http://www.thegatenewspaper.com/2015/01/the-great-petkoch-battle-of-the-southeast-side/#sthash.Tqyu7nCn.ZunhyXMs.dpuf