There was a lot more than spring in the air in Texas City on April Fool’s Day 1998. 

Sterling Chemical’s closest neighbor, 71-year-old Annie Small, was standing in her yard across the street from the plant when she was hit with a noxious cloud of chemical vapors that included benzene, ethyl benzene, polyethyl benzene and hydrochloric acid.  

“It seemed like it went up my nostrils and up into my head,” Small said the next day. “I didn’t know anything until a few minutes later. When I did come to, I had to crawl in the house.” Small said she vomited continuously until the ambulance arrived.³⁶ 

After a styrene plastics unit pipe blew a leak, Sterling sounded an emergency alarm that sent 40,000 neighbors scurrying for cover.  Placed on emergency alert, Texas City officials ordered citizens to seek indoor shelter and to switch off air conditioners until the leak was contained. The local medical center treated 100 people for respiratory and other ailments that day and transferred six individuals—including Small—to a Galveston hospital. 

Annie Small and her neighbors already knew the drill. Four years earlier, a fugitive Sterling cloud containing 3,000 pounds of ammonia knocked Small unconscious in her yard and sent her to the hospital in an ambulance. Area hospitals treated 750 people in the aftermath of that disaster.  

Because Sterling had delayed reporting this accident, emergency-response officials first learned of it from citizens who reported that their homes were filling up with unknown vapors. “We didn’t get response lead time,’’ said then-Texas City Mayor Chuck Doyle. “That’s not the way it should work,’’ he complained, saying the delay robbed city officials of valuable time that could have been used to warn neighbors.³⁷ 

Due to recurring Sterling emissions, Small says she experiences frequent headaches, nausea and stinging eyes and must often forego air conditioning because it draws sickening chemical odors from the plant. Multiple chemical exposures have left her unable to use common household cleaners without getting sick, she says. While doctors have urged her to move, she says she cannot afford to because the plant’s noxious odors have seriously undermined the price she can get for her home.³⁸  

Sterling’s Texas City operation reported more than 1 million pounds of toxic air releases in 1996, including the known and probable carcinogens benzene, acetaldehyde and acrylonitrile. One fourth of Sterling air releases were “fugitive” gases that escape close to the ground, where they have greater potential to fan out through the neighborhood. Within a one-mile radius of the plant, 88 percent of Sterling’s neighbors are minorities; one out of every two residents is African American.