Corporate Pollution Case Study: The Toxic Legacy of Energy Transfer, El Paso, and Goodyear in Corpus Christi

A Poisoned Inheritance

For more than half a century, a 16-acre patch of land in an industrial corner of Corpus Christi, Texas, has held a toxic secret just beneath the surface.

What was once a convenient dumping ground for corporate industrial waste is now the Brine Service Company Superfund Site, a poisoned landscape that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has determined poses a threat to human health and the environment.

This is the story of a community’s poisoned inheritance and the multi-generational effort to force some of America’s largest corporations to finally clean up their mess.

The Corporate Playbook: Dump, Bury, and Rebrand

The story of the Brine Service site is a multi-act play of environmental irresponsibility, as detailed in a complaint filed by the United States Department of Justice. The playbook was simple but devastatingly effective.

Act I: The Dumping Ground (1950s-1960s) The Brine Service Company operated the site as a disposal facility for oil field and refinery wastes. It took hazardous materials like “tank bottoms” and “API separator sludge”—waste known to contain dangerous substances like benzene, chromium, and lead—from other industrial companies and dumped them into two massive, unlined pits on the property. The companies that allegedly arranged for this disposal are now, after decades of mergers, corporate giants known as Energy Transfer and El Paso, LLC.

Act II: The Cover-Up (1970s) By approximately 1973, the toxic pits were completely backfilled and covered over, with no visible trace of the hazardous legacy buried below. The land was then repurposed for other industrial uses, effectively hiding the problem for a new generation.

Act III: A New Layer of Pollution (2000-2014) Decades later, a portion of the site was occupied by a tire shop operated by

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. According to the government, Goodyear added another layer of contamination to the site by disposing of lead-containing wheel weights into the environment during its operations.

A Cascade of Consequences: The Real-World Impact

The consequences of these decades of corporate actions have created a lasting environmental and financial burden that is only now being fully addressed.

Environmental Degradation: A Chemical Soup

The site is a toxic blight on the landscape. Investigations have confirmed that both the soil and groundwater are contaminated with a cocktail of hazardous substances that poses a threat to the environment. The chemicals found include:

• Heavy Metals: Lead, chromium, arsenic, and mercury.
• Carcinogens: Benzene, a known human carcinogen.
• Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs): Toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene.

Worse, surface water from a drainage ditch on the site flows toward Tule Lake, creating a potential pathway for these contaminants to spread further into the local ecosystem.

Public Health & Safety: A Direct Threat

This is a direct threat to people. The EPA’s Remedial Investigation concluded that hazardous substances, particularly benzene and arsenic, are present in the South Pit area at concentrations that “pose a risk to human health”. For the workers in the surrounding industrial area and the community at large, the site represents a latent health hazard that has festered for generations.

Economic Ruin: The Taxpayer’s Bill

Because the responsible corporations failed to act, the U.S. government—and by extension, the American taxpayer—has been forced to step in. The EPA has overseen investigations and initial cleanup actions to protect the public. As of July 2023, the government has incurred approximately $568,694 in cleanup costs that have not been reimbursed by the polluters. This lawsuit is an attempt to finally send the bill to its rightful recipients.

A System Designed for This: Profit, Deregulation, and Power

This section is analysis.

The history of the Brine Service Company site is a textbook example of the logic of neoliberal capitalism, where environmental pollution is treated as an “externality”—a cost to be borne by the public and future generations, rather than by the company that creates it. For the original refineries, dumping toxic sludge into a pit was infinitely cheaper than responsible disposal, thus maximizing profits.

The decades of corporate mergers, acquisitions, and name changes that followed are a feature of a system that allows accountability to become diffused over time. By passing assets and liabilities through a complex chain of corporate successors, companies can create a legal and financial distance from their past environmental sins, making it incredibly difficult and time-consuming for regulators to force them to pay for the cleanup.

Dodging Accountability: A 70-Year Delay

The fact that the U.S. government is filing this lawsuit in the 2020s for pollution that began in the 1950s demonstrates a multi-generational failure of corporate accountability.

For over 70 years, the successor companies have successfully dodged the financial responsibility for cleaning up a mess their corporate predecessors helped create. The current lawsuit is an attempt to finally enforce the fundamental “polluter pays” principle, but it comes only after decades of delay and hundreds of thousands of dollars in public expenditure.

Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change

This case is a powerful demonstration of the importance of laws like the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as the Superfund law. CERCLA gives the government the authority to clean up the nation’s most contaminated sites and, crucially, to sue the responsible parties to recover the costs.

This legal action is a direct effort to reclaim power for the public and the environment. It sends a clear message that corporate restructuring is not a shield against environmental liability and that the polluter, no matter how many name changes it undergoes, must ultimately pay.

Conclusion: A Story of a System, Not an Exception

The Brine Service Company Superfund site is a monument to a system that has historically allowed corporations to prioritize short-term profits over long-term public health and environmental stewardship. It is a story of how easy it is to bury a toxic legacy, and how incredibly difficult it is to unearth justice decades later. This case is a stark reminder that environmental harm does not fade with time, and the fight for corporate accountability is a marathon, not a sprint.

All factual claims in this article regarding the Brine Service Company Superfund Site are derived from the First Amended Complaint filed by the United States of America in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Civil Action No. 2:23-cv-00214, on January 22, 2024.

For more information about this polluted site, please visit this EPA page.

You can click on this DOJ’s link to see that above PDF that was used to write this article: https://www.justice.gov/enrd/media/1366066/dl?inline

not that it’s super relevant to this specific story at hand, but I personally can’t write about Corpus Christi without thinking about this iconic RDCWorld1 skit feat the sandy place: