The Indiana town suffering under the shadow of a BP refinery: ‘They’ve had way too many accidents’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/18/whiting-indiana-bp-refinery

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Whiting residents worried after facility, which has had multiple problems, shut down temporarily after rain

It was the biggest news story around the midwest as the Labor Day weekend approached earlier this month: the unexpected surging price of fuel at the gas station.

But for residents of Whiting, Indiana, petroleum has been presenting an altogether bigger problem.

A severe thunderstorm moved through north-west Indiana on 19 August, dropping 6in of rain on Whiting, a largely industrial town, flooding streets and temporarily closing schools.

The flooding also shut down the BP Whiting Refinery, the largest fuel refinery in the midwest, with a capacity to process around 400,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

Residents living around the facility quickly reported oil and gas fumes in their flooded basements, with some reporting feeling dizzy and nauseous. The local conditions, BP admitted, were “severe” with wailing sirens at the facility adding to the climate of fear for residents.

“They had a real problem; they had to shut down. Who knows what happened,” says Carolyn Marsh, the administrator of the BP & Whiting Watch Facebook page, who lives within walking distance of the refinery.

“The sludge they had to clean out of their system had to go through the water filtration plant [situated on the shore of Lake Michigan]. Who knows what they poured into Lake Michigan.”

With the Trump administration dismantling emissions and other regulations for large polluting corporations in July, people living in close proximity to petroleum processing facilities are facing ever greater threats as climate crisis – fueled by burning the same fossil fuels produced by BP and others – promises to deliver increasingly severe storms and weather events.

In a summer of relentless rain across parts of the midwest, scientists say heavy, short-lived storm events that can damage key infrastructure are likely to become a more common feature of life in a part of US thought to be relatively safe from the effects of climate crisis.

In July, the Chicagoland region that encompasses Whiting recorded a ‘one-in-500-year’ flooding event that saw 5in of rain fall in 90 minutes in one area.

According to the World Weather Attribution, climate crisis made storms and weather events that struck the midwest and south last April, killing dozens of people, 9% more intense.

A reconnaissance inspection of the BP Whiting refinery conducted by the Indiana department of environmental management on 21 August found that “flood waters left significant oil on the ground”.

The following day, the state of Indiana issued BP with a noncompliance notification report having found a “visible hydrocarbon sheen was observed … along 50 feet of [Lake Michigan] shoreline for a period of approximately 3 hours”. A lightning strike from the same storm also temporarily stopped the refinery’s dissolved nitrification floatation process, which reduced its ability to treat wastewater.

A BP representative told the Guardian: “The Whiting refinery has detailed plans in place to manage severe weather conditions. We will incorporate learnings from the August rain event as we continue to improve the resiliency of our refinery operations during severe weather.”

BP declined to respond to a query asking if the company plans to enact infrastructural upgrades to better protect against future extreme weather events such as floods and storms.

Aside from the 19 August flooding causing oil to run into public waterways, BP was also forced to flare large amounts of fuel at the Whiting facility, resulting in huge volumes of damaging CO2, methane and other dangerous gases being released into the atmosphere.

Like many of its kind, the Whiting facility has been plagued by issues.

In 2008, BP initiated a $4.2bn project at the Whiting refinery to upgrade its infrastructure to process cheaper heavy crude from the Canadian oil sands.

But in 2019, the Sierra Club successfully sued BP for violating deadly particle air pollution limits at the Whiting refinery that saw the fossil fuel company pay out $2.75m. BP’s annual revenue stands at $194.63bn.

In August 2022, a fire caused the facility to shut down for a week and a half, resulting in a spike in fuel prices for millions of gas consumers around the region. In February 2024, the refinery was shut down again, due to a power outage, while last December, an underground gas pipeline leak was reported which required emergency crews at the scene and prompted a furious response from residents.

“We woke up the day after Christmas and it smelled terrible. People were getting sick. There was no word from BP for days,” says Lisa Vallee of Just Transition Northwest Indiana, an environmental nonprofit, who lives in Whiting.

“People were really, really upset. We went to our city council, and they said: ‘BP is not telling us anything either.’”

Over the course of decades, BP has been responsible for some of the worst environmental catastrophes on the planet. In 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill caused the deaths of 11 people and the release of 3.2m to 4.9m barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico across an area the size of Florida over five months. It was the largest environmental disaster in US history and saw BP pay $4bn in criminal charges and a $20.8bn settlement fee. However, the latter generated a $15bn tax deduction for the oil giant.

Oil refineries are particularly susceptible to storms and flooding, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose 2015 report also noted that “many of the companies that operate refineries are not disclosing these risks adequately to shareholders and local communities”.

And yet, polling suggests climate change is not a concern for Republican voters, with just 12% of those surveyed in one poll last year saying climate crisis should be a top priority for the president and Congress.

But fossil fuel conglomerates are not acting to protect communities around their facilities, say environmentalists.

“We just cannot trust them,” says Vallee, whose basement flooded for the first time during the 19 August storm. “It’s a really old facility, and that is very frightening.”

The Sierra Club settlement saw $500,000 given to the Student Conservation Program non-profit to plant trees around the refinery and in other parts of the community. However, one of the non-profit’s corporate partners is BP.

Meanwhile, the refinery continues to loom large for residents of Whiting.

“We’re concerned that it’s going to blow up,” says Marsh. “They’ve had way too many accidents over the last few years.