| Notes | 'The state also requires Formosa to post the reports online, but these reports appear to have been posted online only after a reporter inquired about the company’s air monitoring practices Sept. 6.\n\nPoint Comfort residents don’t like to think about the risk they take living there. Most, who either work for Formosa or have a family member who does, defend the company.\nTake Nathan Almanzar. He got a job at Formosa after he graduated from Calhoun High School and settled in Point Comfort with his wife, Dana, with their two children, ages 21 and 7, a few houses away from his father, who also works for Formosa.\n“A lot of people don’t understand what exactly those flares are doing when they see black smoke,” Nathan Almanzar said. “They see black smoke and think it’s bad for the air, but it definitely beats the alternative of if they didn’t have those flares in place and chemicals were being released to the atmosphere.”\n\nThe Almanzars recall two explosions at Formosa in the 19 years they have lived in Point Comfort.\n“One was really major, and the other was nothing, but we still evacuated and did what we needed to do,” Dana Almanzar said. “Formosa has done a good job of keeping us updated as far as now with our technology. We get text messages and phone calls regarding whatever is going on with the plant.”\nThe company also installed a communitywide alarm system that the Almanzars say is tested at noon every Wednesday, which adds to their feeling of safety.\nPoint Comfort residents also don’t link theirs or any family member’s cancer to the industry that surrounds them.\nThe cancer incidence and mortality rate in Calhoun County is not statistically significant when compared to the rest of the state and when controlled for age.\n\n“Epidemiologists by nature are very cautious and epidemiologists who work for the state of Texas are extremely cautious, so they are just not going to say anything about cause and effect. They are not proactively looking for cancer clusters,” he said.\nChris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Department of State Health Services, confirmed the agency hasn’t investigated whether a cancer cluster exists in Point Comfort nor has it ever attempted to determine the source of such a cluster elsewhere in the state.\n“We’ll often have people come to us and say, ‘Well, someone in my family had cancer and someone has cancer three doors down and the next street over,’ but it’s just the fact that there’s a lot of cancer,” Van Deusen said.\n\n\n“Epidemiologists by nature are very cautious and epidemiologists who work for the state of Texas are extremely cautious, so they are just not going to say anything about cause and effect. They are not proactively looking for cancer clusters,” he said.\n\nChris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Department of State Health Services, confirmed the agency hasn’t investigated whether a cancer cluster exists in Point Comfort nor has it ever attempted to determine the source of such a cluster elsewhere in the state.\n\n“We’ll often have people come to us and say, ‘Well, someone in my family had cancer and someone has cancer three doors down and the next street over,’ but it’s just the fact that there’s a lot of cancer,” Van Deusen said.\n\nThe future\nMore Gulf Coast communities will soon undergo the kind of transformation Point Comfort did in the 1980s.\n\nThe Environmental Integrity Project reported this month that the state has permitted 48 plastics-related expansion projects or new plants in the Houston area alone.\nPlants have already fouled the air there, said Ilan Levin, the nonprofit’s Texas director, so now is the time to create zoning and save low-income and minority residents from a future of poor health.\nAs for established communities such as Point Comfort, Levin suggested leadership stop offering tax abatements.\nBut tax abatements help the struggling city survive.\nFor example, Calhoun County purchased six fire trucks this year with the $1.5 million Formosa gave it as part of its tax abatement agreement. One went to Point Comfort.\n\nSome define company towns as those built by a company because of its need to have workers close to the resources they are extracting, while others define them as those towns where one company is the dominant employer.\n\nPoint Comfort fits either definition [of a company town], said Hardy Green, the author of “The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy.”\n\n\n - Tschuetz10'
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