On Monday, May 11, 2026, Fenceline Watch formally submitted a public comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to stop planned revisions of the Risk Management Program. A regulation under the Clean Air Act for facilities that handle the most hazardous substances and chemicals. Read the full comment.

TEXAS TRIBUNE

“It’s not just an immediate impact, but a multigenerational toxic harm that we experience because of emissions like benzene and all of these other petrochemicals,” Srivastava said.

CAPITAL & MAIN

“Our communities in Houston have a very unique exposure rate simply because of the density of infrastructure that is co-located in our communities,” he said. “It’s not a question of if (the facilities) are going to explode or leak or flare, but a question simply when.”

Fenceline Watch joined Texas Campaign for the Environment and other organizations to create community-based counter-programming during the 2026 CERAWeek and World Petrochemical conferences.

EPA Region 6 hasn't held a community outreach call since January 2025. Fenceline Watch & 44 other orgs sent a meeting request to update communities on what they've been doing in our region.

THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

“It’s our lives that are at stake,” Arellano said. “It’s our families that will suffer at the end of the day, and it’s our youth that will get stolen in order to supply soldiers for this war.”

THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

"What's going on at CERAWeek in the George R. Brown Convention Center right now is a bunch of CEOs, a bunch of multinational corporations making plans to put facilities in our backyards that we won't find out about until years from now, when they're coming to seek a permit. They think that they have the right to our air, the right to our water, the right to our bodies,"

MOTHERING EARTH PODCAST

Fenceline Watch Founder and Director, Yvette Arellano, and Policy Director, Shiv Srivastava, speak on the toxic harm our community faces daily, and the conditions that exist to protect the companies responsible for the pollutants.

NORTHEAST NEWS

Community leaders, health experts, and residents gathered at the San Jacinto Community Center in Highlands last Thursday to confront the findings of a recent Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) cancer study, which revealed significantly elevated rates of leukemia, lung and bronchus cancer, lymphoma, and cervical cancer across a massive area of East Harris County. The panel, organized as a follow-up to Public Health Watch’s October 2025 investigation, brought together advocates and experts to demand greater transparency and immediate action. There was only one problem—the invited guests, Texas Department of State Health Services, was a no-show.

THE COOL DOWN

"From toxic extraction in the Permian Basin to poisonous production along the Houston Ship Channel, the cost is irreversible damage to our children's health — low birth weights and reproductive and developmental harm — spanning generations,"

Looking for Valentine’s Day date ideas? Check out these books by Black authors that explore themes of environmental justice, health equity, & systemic racism. Most are available at the Houston Public Library.

PUBLIC HEALTH WATCH

“Let’s establish some baselines. 

Texas is responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions than Saudi Arabia or the global maritime industry. Its oil, gas and petrochemical operations discharge tens of millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into the air each year, comprising almost one-fifth of such releases in the United States.”

HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Regarding “Houston Chronicle: John Cornyn: Houston needs the Coastal Texas Project,” (Dec. 05): Senator John Cornyn is pushing lawmakers to fund the $34 billion Coastal Texas Project, commonly known as the Ike Dike, to “build a coastal storm barrier to protect at-risk petrochemical infrastructure and the Texas Gulf Coast.” But it's this same industry that makes disasters like storms and hurricanes worse. Instead of requiring the petrochemical industry to pay to protect their own plants — and protect the people who have lived here long before industry moved in — Sen. Cornyn offers up our tax dollars.

BLACK APPALACHIAN COALITION

Plastic pollution disproportionately impacts communities of color due to the historical and ongoing placement of polluting facilities like incinerators and landfills in our neighborhoods, leading to higher rates of cancer, asthma, and other health issues.

Today, Fenceline Watch, alongside more than 85 communities living on the frontline of chemical disasters, indigenous communities, elected officials, and environmental advocates, have signed a letter urging Congress to fully fund the U.S. Chemical Hazard and Safety Investigation Board as the agency faces potential elimination. 

PACKAGING INSIGHTS

NGOs and community groups have launched a new lawsuit against Ineos’s plastics facility in Antwerp, Belgium, and warn of fracking health issues, accelerated carbon emissions, and early deaths from pollution. We speak to Ineos and environmental charity ClientEarth to hear more about this latest lawsuit. 

Project One, which is currently under construction, is an ethane cracker representing the largest investment in the European chemical sector in over 25 years. The plant will produce ethylene, a key chemical building block for industries such as packaging, automotive, building materials, and medical devices. 

HOUSTON CHRONICLE

When the Chemical Safety Board revealed how Jose Wilfredo Perez Jr. died last year trying to flee a toxic plume of hydrogen sulfide wafting through Pemex’s Deer Park oil refinery, the federal agency offered Houstonians their first detailed look at the tragedy. 

CSB investigators discovered that Perez, a 28-year-old contractor, and a colleague hadn’t carried respirators while completing less-toxic work in a unit about 250 feet downwind of the chemical release. The pair started running only once they heard alarms, which did not sound right after the release began. 

Perez was later found on the ground, “fatally injured from hydrogen sulfide poisoning,” the federal oversight agency said in a March 2025 update.

MONGABAY

Yvette Arellano had a nosebleed twice during the 10-day-long Global Plastic Treaty negotiations in Geneva in August this year. “This is frequent. Apart from eczema and hormonal imbalance. I can’t have children unless I put massive resources into it,” said Arellano, a Mexican-American who stays in Texas’ Houston city in the United States of America. “In fact, it was over my skin condition that I would have a conversation with my neighbours and get to know they were suffering too,” she said.

Thousands of miles away, on the western coast of India, a casual survey in mid-2024 found that in Lakhigam village near Dahej in Gujarat’s Bharuch district respiratory illness, skin and hearing issues were common and at least 50 cases of cancer were found in a population of 5000. “This is thanks to the open-air conveyor belt that transports coal. The village remains coated in soot, and because of the noise and foul smell, it is impossible to sleep without shutting doors,” said Kamlesh Madhiwala, an advocate and president of the Samast Bharuch Jilla Machimar Samaj, an association fighting for fishers’ rights.

MONGABAY

Representatives from 184 countries recently gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, to tackle the growing plastic crisis. The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting (INC 5.2) went into overtime but failed to produce an agreement.

Two main issues were supposed to be resolved by this, the last scheduled round of negotiations: whether the treaty should include a cap on the production of new plastic and how to address concerns about chemicals in plastic.

THE TEXAS TRIBUNE

Even today, more than five years later, residents still talk about the fire. The chemical facility burned for three days, leaked toxic runoff into the waterways, forced schools and businesses to close and prompted a shelter-in-place order for everyone in Deer Park — a city just southeast of Houston in Texas’ crowded petrochemical corridor.

Eventually, after a thick layer of pollution covered the area for days, residents learned that a tank at the Intercontinental Terminals Co. had erupted in flames and that employees had been unable to contain it. Following the event, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, an independent and nonregulatory federal agency, opened an investigation, finding that a lack of proper safeguards, among other issues, was to blame.