by ProPublica, Childrens Health Defense:
Black residents in southeastern Louisiana bear a disproportionate cancer risk from industrial air pollution, with children at one predominantly Black elementary school having been exposed to a dangerous carcinogen at levels 11 times what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers acceptable.
Louisiana must examine how polluters imperil the health of Black residents, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in a letter it sent on Oct. 12 to state regulators in response to civil rights complaints about air pollution in the region known as Cancer Alley.
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Black residents in southeastern Louisiana bear a disproportionate cancer risk from industrial air pollution, the agency found, with children at one predominantly Black elementary school having been exposed to a dangerous carcinogen at levels 11 times what the EPA considers acceptable.
ProPublica reported last year that the EPA does a poor job of regulating the combined risk from multiple sources of industrial air pollution.
In parts of Cancer Alley, ProPublica estimated lifetime cancer risk is up to 47 times what the EPA deems acceptable.
The EPA letter urged Louisiana’s environmental and health agencies to analyze cumulative impacts for residents near a synthetic rubber plant owned by Denka Performance Elastomer in St. John the Baptist Parish and a proposed Formosa plastics facility in St. James Parish.
Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert who advises communities in the area, said ProPublica’s reporting “confirmed the importance of cumulative risk and made it a focus that could not be ignored.”
“What’s remarkable is that EPA, for the first time in a long time, is speaking the truth around environmental racism and willing to put civil rights enforcement tools out there,” said Monique Harden, assistant director of law and public policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.
Federal civil rights protections predate the EPA, but they haven’t been enforced, she said:
“There’s nothing new to any of this except that we have leadership at the EPA” that “wants to do something about it.”
The EPA urged state regulators to move students out of St. John the Baptist Parish’s Fifth Ward Elementary School, where air monitoring found high levels of chloroprene, a potent carcinogen.
The letter, which summarizes the agency’s initial findings, cites years of data, studies and state policies to show how Black residents are disproportionately harmed by air pollution and how those disparities are baked into the region’s history.
It explains how between the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) and the Louisiana Department of Health, state officials have dismissed residents’ concerns about air quality, underplayed the dangers of chloroprene, conducted flawed health studies and mischaracterized air monitoring data.
“We take these concerns very seriously and are committed to health equity — which is why we are fully cooperating with the EPA’s investigation into Denka,” the state health department said in a statement.
In an email, an LDEQ spokesperson said the agency is “committed to working with EPA” and remains “confident that we are implementing our air permitting program in a manner that is fully consistent with” federal and state laws.
Local activists have fought for environmental protections for decades.
Robert Taylor, executive director of Concerned Citizens of St. John, said he founded his organization after attending a 2016 EPA meeting that revealed chloroprene concentrations at the school. “I went from fear to anger to shock,” he said, that “the government was allowing people to do this.”
The public school is about 1,500 feet from the Denka facility, which produces neoprene, a form of synthetic rubber used to manufacture wetsuits.
DuPont began making neoprene at the site in 1969 and sold the neoprene operation to Denka in 2015. It is the nation’s only industrial site that emits chloroprene.
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