The Houston environmental magnet school that's an environmental catastrophe

Avatar http://texasobserver.org Posted by admin 559 days ago

Climb into Juan Parras' rickety Jeep Cherokee, and he'll show you around the neighborhood. He calls it his “toxic tour.” Parras lives in Houston’s East End, the poorer, predominantly minority side of town that borders the Houston Ship Channel. A former union rep, he now heads an environmental nonprofit in the East End called Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (TEJAS) that wants the roughly 30 refineries and chemical plants in the East End to reduce their emissions. Clad in a green vest and cap, Parras steers the Jeep through a maze of back streets and overpasses to the environmental hot spots that worry him the most: two federal Superfund sites—one with chemicals still leaking from barrels; the bayous flooded with trash; an elementary school three blocks from the steaming Valero Energy Corp. refinery the kids call “the cloud maker”; and of course, the acrid-smelling Ship Channel, where supertankers sidle next to refineries and factories. “All the things nobody wants in their neighborhood, we got here,” Parras says as we drive past a house bracketed on three sides by freight rail lines. The tour’s final stop is the site that angers him most of all—Cesar Chavez High School.


Location: Houston, Texas

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