Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

things, but the gusher remains an archetypal American moment, as central to our folklore of wealth as gold rushes and tech IPOs.

Beginning on that January morning, the well called Lucas No. 1, or the Lucas Gusher, ran for nine days, spewing millions of gallons of oil onto the ground before it was brought under control. PURE OIL SPOUTING HIGH IN THE AIR—MUCH EXCITEMENT IN THE CITY ran the headline in Beaumont’s Daily Enterprise on that first day. Just how much excitement can be traced in the work of the Enterprise headline writers over the following week:

January 12: MANY OIL PROSPECTORS ARRIVED TODAY.

January 14: FEVERISH AND EXCITED…BIG THINGS PLANNED WHICH WILL BE CARRIED OUT.

January 15: EXCITEMENT STILL HIGH. EVERYBODY GRABBING FOR LAND—PRICES SKY HIGH.

Their best effort, at once breathless and circumspect, ran on January 16: CROWDS STILL COME!…VARIOUS RUMORS OF IMMENSE TRANSACTIONS BUT VERIFICATION WAS NOT OBTAINABLE.

Within months, the population of Beaumont had quintupled; the sleepy town of Port Arthur, twenty miles down the road, was on its way to becoming a petrochemical mecca—and the Texas oil boom was on.

An oil industry already existed in the United States at the time. It had been built by John D. Rockefeller and his contemporaries, following discoveries made in Pennsylvania starting in the late 1850s. But oil had nothing like the dominance it has today. The internal combustion engine barely existed, plastic was decades away, and gasoline was considered an uninteresting refinery byproduct. Kerosene, the world’s first bright, clean-burning lamp fuel, was the real game.

The Lucas Gusher produced more oil than anybody knew what to do with. Well after well was sunk into Spindletop in an orgy of drilling and speculation, and hundreds of new oil companies sprang up; you may recognize names like Texaco, Humble (now ExxonMobil), and Gulf (now Chevron). In Beaumont, the price of a barrel of oil dropped to below that of a barrel of water, so severe was the oversupply. Complicating this dilemma was the fact that this new Texas crude was ill-suited for making kerosene. Even if it had made for good kerosene, the writing was on the wall: kerosene lanterns were being replaced by electric lightbulbs.

The oil industry needed new markets. But what they eventually found—and founded—was a civilization. The dominoes began to fall almost immediately. First were the railroads: in 1901, the Santa Fe Railroad had a single oil-powered locomotive; four years after the Lucas Gusher, it was running 227 of them. Steamships in the Gulf of Mexico weren’t far behind, changing over to fuel oil and lining up to take advantage of the glut. Mechanized agriculture and manufacturing took off in Texas, now suddenly the proving ground for the oil-based economy. Before long, the pattern was being repeated around the globe. Navies of the world switched to oil as well, signaling the abrupt geopolitical centrality of petroleum to the unfolding twentieth century.

And then there was the automobile, coming of age with eerie synchrony to the oil industry’s burgeoning second wave. Several energy sources had been proposed for cars, among them electricity, but oil’s new availability sealed the deal for the internal combustion engine. And the Texas crude refined nicely into gasoline. Before, gasoline had been considered a near-waste product; now it took its place next to fuel oil as the power source of the new age. It was time to pave America, and the rest of the world.

Over the following century, finding new markets for petroleum—new uses, new products, new classes of products—would prove to be one of the things that oil companies do best. And there is a direct line from the glut of oil on Spindletop to the omnipresence of petroleum today. As any oilman or environmentalist will tell you, oil seeps into every corner of our lives—our households, our economy, our politics. It fuels or abets almost everything we do, from tourism to warfare. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. We live on oil, and by it, and its use is responsible for more than a third of global emissions of carbon dioxide, which, in an era of man-made climate change, is perhaps the most fundamental pollutant of all.

On Spindletop, though, on that January morning in 1901, all that was yet to come. Nobody knew that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be made of petroleum. And there had never been a gusher before. Nobody knew that a well could, without warning, explode into a glistening, green-black geyser. Nobody had ever danced in oil raining from the sky. When Lucas finally saw the roaring fountain that would immortalize his name, he just shouted, “What is it?”

The late afternoon is a good time to drive to Port Arthur from Houston. You’ll arrive at sundown, under a lavender sky deepening into purple, and see the distant lights and towers of a city, a wavering Manhattan spread out along the water, just where Texas decides it would rather be Louisiana.

What you see is not a city. Draw closer, and what you thought were buildings resolve into the spires and turrets of industry. They are refineries. Soon you’re surrounded. In one direction, there is water—in every other, the humming, roaring machinery of petrochemical digestion, a rusty Oz that churns through a million gallons of oil every forty minutes. It is from places like this that we receive our gasoline and jet fuel and plastic and everything else that we can’t do without. Port Arthur is a refinery town, with oil in its veins, toluene in the breeze. It is the pungent center jewel in America’s petrochemical tiara, also known as the Gulf Coast, a region that accounts for nearly half of the country’s refining capacity. The US Department of Energy notes that the region has “the highest concentration of sophisticated [refining] facilities in the world.”

Port Arthur, much like Fort McMurray, has a reputation as a shithole. But while the Albertans have managed to keep the oil sands mines at a discrete remove, Port Arthur is utterly dominated by its refineries, in ways that are impossible for even a casual observer to ignore. The downtown is literally encircled by steel forests billowing sulfurous air day and night. It smells like rotten eggs. Then there are the occasional upsets—accidents or malfunctions that sometimes result in the emergency release of fuel and other refinery goods into the atmosphere. The gases are burned off as they’re released from tubes high above the plant, and people invariably describe refinery flares as awesome events, artificial auroras that paint the sky a glowing orange.

Most important, there are the habitual emissions of volatile organic compounds, things like toluene, benzene, and other contaminants that—it has been plausibly argued—result in elevated rates of respiratory disease, birth defects, and cancer for the communities that live with them. And once in a blue moon—seriously, only very occasionally—the plants self-annihilate. They explode. In Texas City, ninety miles to the west, a 2005 refinery explosion killed 15 people and injured more than 170.

The industry here is the direct legacy of the boom sparked by the Lucas Gusher, and the plants that overshadow downtown Port Arthur are the same plants that were built to receive Spindletop’s oil, although a century’s growth has transformed them. Valero (whose refinery first opened in 1901) and Motiva (1903) now cover almost as much land as downtown Port Arthur itself, and Motiva—in the middle of an expansion when I visited—is on its way to becoming the largest refinery on the continent.

Nevertheless, you can drive down Port Arthur’s main street and fail to see another human being. With its rows of brick storefronts spread along a breezy coastal ship channel, downtown Port Arthur has the bones of a charming small city. But they are just that: the bones.

There are no grocery stores, no hardware stores—in fact I saw no surviving stores of any genre in downtown Port Arthur. There are no operating banks. Building after building sits vacant. Most are boarded up, burned out, or otherwise deserted. The industry that inhabits this city manages somehow not to sustain it.

As was traditional across America, the middle and upper classes of Port Arthur fled their city’s downtown in the 1970s and ’80s. Unlike in many other cities, though, the presence of the refineries has kept anyone with money from moving back. The result is a community that’s among the poorest and most polluted in the nation—yet surrounded by multibillion-dollar companies. It’s the perfect place to refine oil, incinerate toxic waste, and expand a petrochemical plant: a place where they’re used to it. A place already so dominated by industry that nobody who matters will care.

The neighborhood to the north and west of downtown is poor and black. There are roofs still dressed with blue FEMA-issued tarps to cover damage from hurricanes of years past. I saw one FEMA tarp that had itself been repaired with another FEMA tarp. Beyond them towered the metal thickets of the refineries.

The best place to sit down for lunch in central Port Arthur—possibly the only place—is a soul food restaurant called Kelley’s Kitchen. With its orange awning and hand-painted purple sign, it stands like an oasis among the vacant lots and boarded-up buildings. Inside, there is a single room with a painted concrete floor, a half-dozen tables, and a counter and stools in back. A young woman named Daisha served me shrimp, okra, and sausage over a pile of rice, with a pair of turkey wings and corn bread on the side.