‘Ain’t none of them left… everybody’s dead on the street’

A tragic look at how a railyard sickened a Houston neighborhood.

A train yard in Houston, Texas. Credit: Carol M. Highsmith Archive / Library of Congress

In the car yesterday I caught a gut-wrenching interview on the radio, and I wanted to share it with you. 

Leisa Glenn, 65, was on NPR’s 1A talking about the decades she spent living in Houston’s Fifth Ward, inadvertently destroying her body day by day drinking tap water contaminated with a toxic chemical from a Union-Pacific railyard in her neighborhood. 

Here’s how Siri Chilukuri, the reporter who masterfully wrote the original feature on the Fifth Ward’s woes that inspired the radio segment, explained the basics on Grist:

Buried beneath the Fifth Ward and its neighboring community, Kashmere Gardens, is an expansive toxic plume of creosote derived from coal tar. Historically, creosote has been used in the United States to preserve wood such as railroad ties and utility poles; it has also been linked to health issues such as lung irritation, stomach pain, rashes, liver and kidney problems, and even cancer, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the Environmental Protection Agency. 

“I have a lot of issues with my stomach. I have taken a lot of medications, and I’ve had a lot of colonoscopies. Very rarely I’m able to talk to someone like I’m talking to you today because I cough so much, continuously,” Glenn said immediately after calling into the show. 

When you hear activists on NPR, they sometimes speak in the kind of academic jargon popular among the nonprofit set who take on progressive causes as a formal profession. It makes me cringe. This was the opposite.