Long before Austin's municipal airport took over the defunct Bergstrom Air Force Base in Southeast Austin in 1999, Amanda Carrillo's family had called the neighborhood just to the west home for generations.

The three-bedroom house where Carrillo, 40, lives now with her four kids in the 3200 block of McCall Lane, off of U.S. 183 — only several hundred feet from the fences of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport — is her childhood home.

"This has always been our home," Carrillo said. "And I want it to stay in the family. I want to leave (the home) to my kids one day." 

But Carrillo now fears a jetliner fuel tank farm set to be built within walking distance from her home, on the western edge of the airport property, along the east side of U.S. 183 between McCall Lane and Metropolis Drive, could threaten those plans and her family's quality of life.

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The above-ground fuel depot, which will have two tanks storing 1.5 million gallons each of jet fuel, is part of the airport's ongoing development and expansion. Construction of the tanks will begin in the spring and is set to be completed within two years.

The airport, managed by the city of Austin, said residents were notified of the project in 2017 and 2018 through mailings, community meetings and signs placed in the area. Most recently, on April 2, a notice of the site plan for the tank farm by the city's Development Services Department was sent to property owners and residents with Austin utility account addresses within 500 feet of the development.

But at least a half-dozen people who live and work in the area told the American-Statesman they were never notified or given a chance to voice their concerns about plans to build a jet fuel depot so close to their homes and businesses.

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Airport officials said they chose the location on the airport's western edge for fuel storage because it will not affect the airport's long-term development plans, which include a new concourse with more than 10 gates. 

"Yes, we know where the residents are," said Shane Harbinson, deputy chief of planning and development at the airport, during a Nov. 10 community meeting with concerned residents. "We knew that we have a buffer zone and development will be occurring all along there. ... And that's the best location for the tank farm, yes."

In October, Carrillo received a letter alerting neighbors on McCall Lane about plans for the fuel tank farm. But the letter wasn't from the airport, it was from Howard Yancy, president of the MetCenter business park — whose clients include the American-Statesman — on Metropolis Drive near the planned tank farm site. Yancy is protesting the tank farm's proposed location.

After receiving Yancy's alert, Carrillo decided to go door to door and asked her neighbors — some who were elderly and Spanish-speakers — whether they were aware of the jet fuel tank development. She asked them to sign a petition to protest its construction.

Carrillo gathered about 32 signatures from residents on her street and the Colorado Crossings subdivision, located within a mile of the project. The signatures were delivered to Austin City Council members Oct. 25.

After two community meetings with airport and city officials, Carrillo and other residents are asking them to release more information about the long-term effects and risks of living close to the jet fuel, and about its potential risks to their health and the environment.

These concerns by Carrillo and area residents drove District 2 Council Member Vanessa Fuentes to craft a resolution directing airport staff to reopen the tank farm site selection process. The resolution calls for an environmental study at the pending tank site. The findings would be presented to neighbors in an "accessible community engagement process" within 60 days of the study, Fuentes said. 

"For some of us, this is the only place where we can afford to live. We can't afford to move away and, for that to be around here, that's a danger," Carrillo said. "I feel like we're being taken advantage of. We don't know what could happen. I'm a single mom, and this is all I have."

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The Austin-Bergstrom airport's 2040 master plan for development and expansion assumes the travel hub will serve more than 31 million passengers a year by 2037 on its 4,242 acres. That's nearly triple the number of travelers the airport was originally designed to serve when it was built in 1999.

The jet fuel tank farm is part of the first phase of the master plan. As the number of travelers in Austin grows, the demand for jet fuel from airlines continues to increase, airport spokesperson Sam Haynes said.

Currently, the airport has one site with two tanks on Spirit of Texas Drive with a two- to three-day fuel supply, which is lower than the industry average of a five- to seven-day supply.

"Currently, as it stands, we're not even meeting the average demand for jet fuel supply," Haynes said. "We're kind of always in this tug-of-war between just being able to catch up to industry standards and meet the current demand that we're experiencing today, while still trying to expand to meet what we know will be future demand." 

With the expansion over the next 20 years, airport officials plan to remove the existing tank farm, and the new jet fuel tank facility will be designed to transfer fuel to the Barbara Jordan Terminal and the new concourse, Haynes said. 

The tank farm will be on airport property, but it will be owned and operated by the airlines, Harbinson said. 

The closest residential home is about 900 feet, orabout three football fields, from where the jet tank fuel farm is set to be built. The airport's current storage sits more than 3,000 feet, or more than a half-mile, from the nearest home. 

The neighbors live on the eastern end of a census tract in Southeast Austin that, according to 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data, has more than 2,400 other homes. About 57.6% of the area's population is Latino, 38.9% is white and 7.5% is Black.

Yancy received the April 2 notice but nothing before that, he said. He sent emails to City Council members about his concerns and mailed letters to nearby residents to alert them. 

He is developing a 450,000-square-foot, one-story office building project right across the highway from where the fuel tank farm would be. (The Statesman's new offices will be in another part of the MetCenter, at the intersection of Metlink Road and Metropolis Drive.) 

"This is important. You need to make sure you tell the people that it's affecting, you need to make sure they know," Yancy said. "Why would you put (the tanks) in front of a residential area? The question I have for the City Council and the airport is: Would you want a tank fuel farm built directly across the street from your house?"

Besides Yancy's letter, residents in the area deny getting any notification about the project from the city or the airport.  

Alfredo Jimenez, 71, has lived on McCall Lane for 25 years. He said he only learned about the tank farm through the letter from Yancy in October. Jimenez, who only speaks Spanish, is retired and worked at the former Bergstrom Air Force Base, he said. 

"I am not OK with them building that there," Jimenez told the Statesman. "It can be dangerous for us and for our neighborhood. What about our health?"

He signed Amanda Carrillo's petition to move the tank farm elsewhere.

"This isn't fair. There's a lot of space elsewhere, why here?" Jimenez said. "Why don't they build a grocery store, an H-E-B, for us over here instead?" 

This is not the first time Austin residents living east of Interstate 35 have had to deal with facilities and structures that could pose a threat to their health and quality of life. 

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A 1928 city master plan pushed much of Austin's industrial zoning east of what became I-35. Over time, race-based deed restrictions and zoning pushed Black and Latino residents, who lived in different neighborhoods throughout the city, to neighborhoods east of the highway. 

In 1991, PODER, which stands for People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources, was formed to elevate the voices of East Austin residents and to increase residents’ participation in business and government decisions related to economic development and environmental hazards' impact on neighborhoods. 

The Latino-led organization and the East Austin Strategy Team, a coalition of Black neighborhood associations, played a prominent role during the early 1990s in closing a tank farm on a 52-acre site in a residential neighborhood in East Austin. Six oil companies stored enough gasoline there to fuel all of Austin. The tank farm was emitting what activists and public officials considered dangerous levels of pollution into the ground, water and air. It took 15 years of remediation before the site was deemed usable again.

PODER later lobbied the city to close a power plant in the Holly Street neighborhood in 2007 and to study East Austin zoning patterns. 

Director Susana Almanza said in the 1990s the organization also fought plans to move the airport, whose former site has been redeveloped as the Mueller neighborhood northeast of downtown Austin, to its current location. Almanza said the airport's relocation only moved the issues that stem from one neighborhood living near an airport to another neighborhood. The organization most recently also raised concerns about the long-term environmental impact the airport's expansion would have on the Colorado River. 

"We knew this area was a residential area also. So back then, we were like, 'Why are you doing that? Why are you moving it? People live there, too,'" Almanza said. "And now, these residents should have been given notice. Something that said, 'This is coming and you need to review it and submit your comments.'

"Community engagement here is flawed. We saw this, too, during COVID," she said. 

That's why Carrillo felt it was so important to go door to door to make sure at least the residents on her street were aware of what was coming. 

She also asked Fuentes's office to host future meetings related to the planned jet fuel facility in person, as some people in the community might lack internet access for video conferences or to receive email and social media notifications. 

"I'm still going to reach out to some more of my neighbors. Everyone should know," Carrillo said. "They should at least know that they can voice their opinion on this if they're even aware."

Studies examining the health effects of communities living near fuel storage tanks have not yet been done. But some research has been done on occupational exposures, experts told the Statesman. 

"The risks to the health sort of boils down to the risk of exposure. And that will be all related to how the tanks are maintained over time and inspected over time," said Elizabeth Matsui, a University of Texas Dell Medical School professor of population health and pediatrics. "These jet fuels can evaporate into the air. Some components of them they can leak into groundwater, and they can also get into the soil."

Matsui is also the director of the Center for Health and Environment: Education and Research and associate director of the Health Transformation Research Institute at Dell Medical School. 

"Studies that have been done, have been done on military workers who work with jet fuel. And there's some evidence that those fuels can cause some neurological effects in kind of an occupational exposure setting," Matsui said. 

Matsui said how the fuel is stored and maintained is critical to prevent exposure to the chemicals. "Is there going to be regular testing of water, soil and air samples?" Matsui said. "If so, how often, how will they communicate with the community about those test results?"

The planned jet fuel tank farm will be safe and placed in a spill containment structure with a corrosion detection system, which will notify operators long before any spill happens, Haynes said.

During a Nov. 10 forum, Dan Eekhoff, a jet fuel consultant with Burns & McDonnell, and Austin Fire Department Chief Joel Baker also told residents the chance of an explosion would be very unlikely.

The type of fuel that would be stored, Jet A, has low volatility, meaning it is not flammable or explosive at normal temperatures, Eekhoff said. 

Every fuel facility at the airport is inspected every three months for hazardous materials and fire hazards, per federal regulations. The planned tank farm will fall under the same regulations, Haynes said.

An environmental assessment was conducted for the facility, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, and administered by the Federal Aviation Administration to document and evaluate the environmental impacts of the fuel farm expansion, Haynes said.

The FAA approved the assessment April 8, 2020. The FAA issued a "Finding of No Significant Impacts" to air quality, biological resources, climate, farmlands, flood plains, historical, architectural, archeological, cultural resources, natural resources and energy supply, among others. 

Some residents want city and airport officials to do more research on the effects of jet fuel emissions on their health and the environment and show the community the findings. 

"Even though we can't smell it or see it, it doesn't mean that it's not in the air and that we're not going to be impacted by it in the long term," said Susanna Ledesma-Woody, a resident of the Colorado Crossings subdivision, who attended the community engagement meeting Nov. 10.

Ledesma-Woody is also a Del Valle school district trustee. 

"Going forward, (airport officials) need to notify the community if something does happen. If they have a spill, or if they have a small explosion or whatever. They need to tell the community, 'This is the plan. This is how you'll be reached. This is what's going to happen,'" she said.  

Fuentes said she is working to improve the way the airport communicates with its neighbors. She said many residents are elderly or Spanish speakers and that the airport's community engagement strategies have to improve.

"These are the residents who will be the most impacted," said Fuentes, who took office in January. "Yet these are the same residents who had the least opportunity to share their concerns. Why?"

Fuentes's proposed resolution will direct the airport to conduct a better level of community outreach and engagement, specifically with residents who live near the airport on all issues related to the airport.  

She expects to present a resolution to the council Thursday. 

"The community needs to know, what is their air quality? And what is it today even before they relocate the fuel farm?" Fuentes said. "What is an acceptable level of risk? And what is the city doing when it comes to improving its air quality?"

Residents who have questions or concerns about the jet fuel tank farm can contact District 2 Council Member Vanessa Fuentes's office at 512-978-2102 or visit austintexas.gov/department/district-2-council-member.

American-Statesman reporter Natalia Contreras can be reached at 512-626-4036 or ncontreras@statesman.com. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook, @NataliaECG.