CORPUS CHRISTI — Mavis Branch doesn't care much for the language used to discuss the air quality in the neighborhoods along refinery row.

Terms such as "parts per billion" and "effects screening levels" kind of miss the point, as far as she's concerned.

Branch believes the issue is better illustrated by her 80-year-old father, who drapes a towel around his neck and holds it to his mouth all day long to make breathing easier, or by the letter her doctor recently penned to the local Housing and Urban Development Department. In it, he asks officials to help Branch "obtain new housing" because of "multiple medical problems" and concerns "about environmental toxic exposures from neighboring refinery."

"Sometimes it's so bad you can't even come outside," she said, sitting on the front porch of her home in the Buena Vista neighborhood, a collection of about 60 trailers on Up River Road tucked between a refinery and a tank farm. "We've got to get out of here."

Branch was not surprised when a local activist recently knocked on her door to inform her of high levels of 1,3 butadiene — a likely human carcinogen that has been linked to kidney and liver disease and lung damage — detected in her neighborhood during recent testing.

The tests, conducted by Suzie Canales of the Corpus Christi-based Citizens for Environmental Justice and Port Arthur activist Hilton Kelley, are the first in a series the two plan to conduct in Corpus Christi this winter.

They're being helped by the National Refinery Reform Campaign and using testing equipment Kelley's environmental group won last summer in a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency.

What they found during hourlong testing in Branch's trailer park were levels of 1,3 butadiene between about 25 and 42 parts per billion. That's much higher than the state's long-term recommended standard of 5 parts per billion, an annual average that is supposed to trigger health studies.

And that standard — called an effects screening level, or ESL — is among the highest in the country, being dozens and even hundreds of times the level recommended by some other states.

That could soon change. The state has contracted with Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit organization, to assess how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality calculates its ESLs for the hundreds of toxic chemicals on the list. The organization could recommend changes in August.

Michael Honeycutt, the TCEQ's chief toxicologist, said he'd like to see the level for butadiene reduced to as low as 0.1 parts per billion.

Nevertheless, state regulators say they have no evidence of a butadiene problem along refinery row — a collection of seven refineries and several chemical plants on a roughly 10-mile stretch of the city's ship channel.

Butadiene is a chemical used to manufacture synthetic rubber and is often created as a byproduct in petrochemical refining. It gives off a gas-like odor.

State air quality monitoring results from 1993 to 2003, the latest available, don't show any high levels of butadiene. Even if the ESL were reduced, annual averages rarely exceed 0.1 parts per billion for the five local air quality monitors.

That puzzles Canales and Kelley, who were able to document high levels in four areas by simply picking spots downwind of refineries.

Honeycutt said the readings in the trailer park could be a problem if they were prevalent a long time — and if they're accurate.

"We would challenge the agency to go and see for themselves with the appropriate equipment, and we would be happy to put our stuff side by side with theirs," said Denny Larson of the California-based Refinery Reform Campaign. "We don't think it's possible to operate air monitoring downwind of these type of facilities and not come up with numbers."

The equipment Kelley and Canales are using is called the Argos UV Hound (www.argos-sci.com). It costs about $35,000 and uses ultraviolet rays to detect chemical contaminants in the air. It feeds the information to a laptop computer and allows the operator to view the readings almost immediately.

CEREX President Thomas Wisniewski said he's reviewed the Corpus Christi results and vouches for their accuracy.

Canales and Kelley have asked the TCEQ to use its mobile air quality testing unit to track down the source of the butadiene they detected, but the state failed to address the request in its written response to the complaint.

TCEQ spokeswoman Adria Dawidczik said she didn't have further information on the issue.

Canales and Kelley will be out again as early as next week on their own for a second round of testing.

"Now that we have hard numbers, they can't continue to ignore this," Canales said. "People have a right to know what's in the air they are breathing."

acaputo@expressnews.net