These plants are “a whole lot better than they were,” Stewart said.

Pollution from Dow and other chemical plants is regulated under permits issued through the 1972 Clean Water Act. “I thought we were trying to abate pollution sources before they occur.”įifty years later, some things have improved on the Brazos. “Why must we wait until we have irreparable damage to do something?” she asked. In November 1971, Stewart was one of few citizens brave enough to speak at a meeting that the 1-year-old EPA convened to discuss water quality in Galveston Bay. Stewart joined a union-led group, the now-defunct Citizens’ Survival Committee, which advocated for a safer environment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was new, and the Clean Water Act had yet to become law.

Gradually, Stewart learned all she could about what companies dumped into the air and water in an era when Americans had little legal protection. Soon after the move, she and her daughter began having trouble breathing. But by the early 1970s, the same reefs that attracted Dow were being threatened by pollution.Īt the time, Stewart was a young mother who had recently moved to Lake Jackson, a company town built to house Dow’s workers. The company used oyster shells to extract magnesium from seawater, sending the mineral to factories building airplanes for use in World War II. The ad hoc investigators followed their log to an inlet of Galveston Bay-a tremendously productive, biodiverse habitat of oyster reefs and marshes that provides a nursery for the Gulf’s marine life.ĭow, one of the Texas Gulf Coast’s biggest industrial water polluters, according to wastewater permit data, was drawn to Freeport in 1940 by its deepwater port and abundant oyster reefs. The group was conducting a citizen science experiment to see where Dow’s wastewater traveled after entering the Brazos. Stewart and her friends-one a Dow electrician-looked down at the green water flowing by and threw in a log. It was the stretch of the Brazos where Dow, one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, releases wastewater from its massive local complex.

One January day in 1971, Sharron Stewart stood with two friends on the banks of the Brazos River in Freeport, near where the 800-mile river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. This is part of Drifting Toward Disaster, a Texas Observer series about life-changing challenges facing Texans and their rivers.

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