Houston Chronicle, April 30, 2007 PORT ARTHUR, Texas (AP) - At the Carver Terrace housing projects, only a chain-link fence and a cluster of no-trespassing signs separate brightly painted jungle gyms from the Motiva oil refinery. On warm days, the playground is filled with children playing in the shadow of the towers and pipes that spew smoke and spread a sulfurous, rotten-egg smell over this mostly poor, mostly black city of 60,000 along the Louisiana state line. For decades, Port Arthur residents have lived with the refineries and chemical plants that ring their neighborhoods and loom over their backyards. And they have tolerated the cancer, asthma, and liver and kidney disease that some blame on the pollution. But when a company won a $49 million contract to incinerate chemical waste from the destruction of the deadly nerve agent VX, Hilton Kelley and others said enough was enough. A 2003 survey by researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that residents of the Beaumont-Port Arthur area had higher rates of a variety of symptoms, particularly respiratory, ear-nose-and-throat and skin conditions, than a group from Galveston. (This story has run widely in national and international news.)