John Beard takes no pleasure in being right.
In January, he told Capital B that he feared U.S. military action in Venezuela, which ultimately gave America preferential access to the South American nation’s vast oil reserves, would lead to disaster in southeast Texas.
“The chickens have come home to roost,” Beard said over the phone, between fielding calls from his neighbors. “Our exact fears have come true.”
On March 23, an explosion at the Valero Port Arthur Refinery shook homes as far as 11 miles away and sent a thick black plume across the predominantly Black city.
Days later, people in Port Arthur were still trying to figure out how to address hairline cracks zigzagging across their windows and rooms still coated in the faint smell of burnt chemicals long after the fireball faded from the sky. Parents kept their kids indoors, and local schools were closed the day after the explosion out of precaution.
The evening blast jolted the long-polluted community awake to their role in a much larger situation, residents told Capital B. It exposed how President Donald Trump’s global oil maneuvers have turned the long-impoverished Black area into a front line of his energy war, residents and advocates said.
As U.S. airstrikes in Iran sent fuel prices soaring, the administration has leaned harder on Venezuelan crude, driving more of the dirtiest oil on the market into refineries like Valero’s Port Arthur plant, which sits within yards of Black homes, churches, and schools. The refinery operator, Valero, has been the largest receiver of Venezuelan oil since the January military action.
Valero officials said the blaze involved a heater in a diesel‑processing unit, which uses hydrogen to remove sulfur from motor fuels during production, and that the cause of the fire remains under investigation.
“The fact of the matter is, in the context of what we’re doing in Venezuela and Iran, is that in America, who is bearing the brunt of that risk? It is communities like Port Arthur,” Beard said.
Now, as residents face fresh fears about what lay in the thick smoke cloud that blanketed their city, they are asking why their neighborhood keeps absorbing the risks and toxic fallout of decisions made in Washington — and what, if anything, will change before the next disaster.
Processing Venezuela’s heavy crude, at a heavy local cost
The Port Arthur facility was built to refine the specific type of heavy crude oil found in Venezuela. The process to refine the oil is more harmful to the environment and climate than the process to refine American oil.
“So you have them processing oil that is far more polluting, far more toxic in this Black community,” said Beard, a former oil worker. “Then one of the units that processes that oil has a catastrophic explosion, which creates even more emissions and exposure of those toxins to the public.”
The refinery has about 770 employees and processes about 435,000 barrels of oil daily, making it the eighth-largest refinery in the U.S.
The day after the explosion, wholesale gasoline prices spiked by 10 cents a gallon, and diesel went up 16 cents a gallon, both due primarily to the incident at the refinery and not those in Iran, Andy Lipow, president of consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, told CNN.
The facility was offline for over three days after the explosion. The incident did not cause any major injuries among refinery workers.
Capital B reached out to the United Steelworkers, the union that represents the refinery employees, but did not receive a response by time of publication.
Port Arthur Mayor Charlotte Moses emphasized that, in officials’ view, the city dodged the worst. “There’s been an explosion, yes, but we’re OK; everybody’s OK,” she said in a Facebook livestream.
Valero officials added that air testing by its own staff, the Port Arthur Fire Department, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality “indicated no threat to the surrounding community.”
However, a state report found that the blast led to emissions above the state permitted levels, including the release of more than 21,000 pounds of chemicals. These releases can irritate eyes and lungs and make it hard to breathe.
Then, the facility also emitted thousands of pounds of sulfur dioxide, along with smaller amounts of hydrogen sulfide, in a flaring process which is meant to burn off excess gas to prevent larger explosions.
A Black city sacrificed in the name of “energy security?”
Hilton Kelley, who was born and raised in the community and is now an environmental activist, said he’s advising neighbors to seek medical care for headaches, breathing issues, and anxiety, and to keep detailed records of their symptoms and expenses in case there is an opportunity for compensation. Already, one lawsuit has been filed on behalf of residents against the facility.
Kelly and Beard said this was the largest explosion they’ve seen in over 40 years.
Jefferson County, where Port Arthur is located, is home to dozens of oil and chemical facilities that routinely emit pollutants at levels exceeding state and federal limits. The county is the only one across Texas that the state’s environmental agency has noted for simultaneously having unsafe levels of the cancer-causing chemicals benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide.
“It’s very scary for the community,” Kelley said. “Now we’re just paranoid, asking, ‘Is it going to happen again?’”
The shelter-in-place order lasted roughly 12 hours across nearby neighborhoods, as residents reported their homes shaking and a series of “mini-explosions” echoing through the night.
“We need to look at the long-term exposure from just everyday living, compounded by the emissions that came from this event,” Kelley said, noting that the smoke plume drifted far beyond the area into Mid-County communities like Nederland and Port Neches.
On Facebook, resident Sandra Smith said the rattling of her house caused her to fall. “Bruised both my knees and hurt my wrist,” she said. “It was scary.”
The explosion is the latest in a long line of industrial scares for Port Arthur’s West Side, where Black residents were forced to live during the Jim Crow era and have since watched massive oil and petrochemical complexes grow up around them.
Beard rattled off a partial history: a pipeline rupture in the 1980s that left five people dead, a series of incidents in 2007 that sickened so many people the local emergency rooms reached capacity, and more than 600 air-quality violations over a recent five-year stretch that advocates tried to challenge in court before the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, stepped in and settled with Valero for about $3 million.
“They continually do this, and yet nothing is done, and the community suffers,” Beard said.
Meanwhile, the global forces Beard warned about in January are tightening their grip on Port Arthur.
After Trump’s deal with Caracas opened the door to new imports, Valero ramped up purchases of Venezuelan heavy crude for Gulf Coast refineries and leaned on upgrades at Port Arthur — including a new coker — designed to handle more of the dense, high-sulfur oil.
At the same time, the war in Iran has incentivized American oil companies to ramp up production, causing American refining companies stocks to reach an all-time high. The volatile market has sent the average U.S. gasoline price to around $3.90 per gallon, up sharply from just weeks earlier.
Those price spikes are being felt in Port Arthur, where Beard said everyday costs have climbed even as residents shoulder the refinery’s risks. Higher gas bills at the pump and more toxic exposure at home is the clearest sign that Trump’s energy strategy is not about helping communities like his, he said.
For families living closest to the refinery, the explosion has also deepened a longer-running crisis of housing and land. Property values in Port Arthur’s 77640 ZIP code have lagged badly because of the cluster of refineries, chemical plants, and a petroleum coke facility, leaving many homeowners “stuck” with houses they can’t sell for enough to relocate, Kelley said.
The median home value in the ZIP code is $127,000; the U.S. median is $361,000. Likewise, the average resident makes just $29,000 per year, compared to the average U.S. income of $45,000.
“We cannot maintain and build a community under the shadows of these kinds of facilities that potentially blow up,” he said. “People would love to get a fair market price and leave, but the way it’s set up, they’re trapped.”
Standing in a city still rattled by the explosion and bracing for the next one, Beard said Port Arthur has become a testing ground for what communities the federal government is willing to sacrifice in the name of “energy security.”
“It’s predictable for those that want to see and understand what’s going on,” Beard said. “Too many people don’t — or won’t. But this is very, very real, just as real as that explosion was the other day.”