The
town of Reserve sits in the heart of an industrial corridor
between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. For more than 30 years, it has
been known to many of its residents as “Cancer Alley”. That
designation stems from the toxic pollution that is belched out from
chemical plants along the serpentine squiggles of the lower
Mississippi River. For a long time, proof of that morbid title lay
mostly in anecdote and suspicion.
in
December 2015, on the back of a government report on toxic air. The
findings
from America’s environment agency,
the EPA, not only confirmed the existence of a profoundly higher risk
of cancer throughout the region, but it pinpointed Reserve, a
working-class town of about 10,000, at the bullseye. Although there
are more than 50 toxic chemicals that contribute to the risk here,
chloroprene, the primary component of the synthetic rubber neoprene,
is responsible for the vast majority. It is a product that has for
almost a century been used all over the world in the manufacture of
tyres, wetsuits, medical equipment and countless other products –
and the Louisiana plant is the only place in the US that produces it.
The plant owned by the Japanese company Denka, was deemed responsible
for the greatest risk of cancer of any manufacturing facility in the
US. Emissions of the chemical above 0.2 micrograms per cubic metre
(ug/m3) in the air were unsafe for humans to breathe over the course
of a lifetime. The readings were devastating. Routinely, chloroprene
emissions were dozens of times above the EPA’s guidance, suggesting
residents living close to the plant had been constantly exposed for
decades. On one day in November 2017 at a station at the fifth ward
elementary school, which sits on the plant’s fenceline, a thousand
feet from the plant chloroprene was recorded at a staggering 755
times above the EPA’s guidance. Nearly 400 young children attend
the school, breathing the air each day.
In
Louisiana, the petrochemical industry’s ties to society run deep. A
recent
industry study
found that the chemical sector generates some $80bn annually and
supports two of every seven jobs in the state. Like much of Cancer
Alley, Reserve is predominantly black and low-income. Black Americans
make up 60% of the population in the town, and the per-capita income
of $18,763 is about 40% less than the national average.In large part
that dominance owes to a historically lax regulatory environment and
weak union protections. While
the state has the power to enforce stringent regulations on the
plant, or even close it down entirely, many residents in Reserve are
unsurprised that it has taken a more lenient approach. The
Louisiana secretary of environmental quality, Chuck Carr Brown, has
not committed the firm to the safe level guidance from the EPA, a
target that, by Denka’s own admission, would be impossible for them
to make “technologically feasible”. It is clear from early on
that the state agency, was not committed to setting tighter
enforceable limits, so people at least held out hope for the federal
government. It
was the EPA after all that had identified the extent of the problem,
set the 0.2 µg/m3 standard, and begun the air monitoring. Surely
they would have the teeth to hold Denka accountable for the
pollution? However, the
EPA regional director, David Gray, announced that it was “doubtful”
the agency would ever set a legally enforceable standard for the
toxin. “The fact of the matter is there is a sole source of
chloroprene in the United States and it’s here.”
“I
still can’t believe that this one community could be asked to
suffer this much, merely for the profit of these foreign
corporations. What kind of people are they to knowingly wipe out a
whole community of people for profit?” explained Robert Taylor, a
local campaigner. “The petrochemical industry and human beings
cannot live and operate side by side,” Taylor says. “So they have
decided they’re OK with just wiping us out, especially because of
the fact that this is a poor black population. We were the
lowest-hanging fruit.”
A
phenomenon now commonly described as environmental
racism.
EPA-funded research
from 2018
found that non-white Americans and those below poverty level are more
likely than others to live near toxic pollution, and that the racial
correlation is stronger than the economic one.
“In
other words, the siting of polluting industrial facilities is both
racist and classist, but mostly racist,” says Jennifer Sass, a
senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Trump administration has already rolled
back dozens
of
environmental protections making the likelihood of more federal
intervention in Reserve slim to none. it’s much worse under Trump
than it was under any previous Republican administration which
proposed a 31% budget cut to the EPA. Denka has pushed the Trump
administration to withdraw the assessment of chloroprene as likely to
be carcinogenic. Between 2017 and 18 the Japanese company spent
$350,000 to hire lobbyists in Washington, records
show.
Calendars reveal Denka met EPA officials on three occasions during
this time. A letter from the company’s chief executive, Koki
Tabuchi, to the former EPA chief Scott Pruitt, written on June 26
2017 and later
released under the Freedom of Information Act,
reveals the company’s aggressive campaign. Denka touts the
conclusions of a toxicological assessment it commissioned itself,
which found that the safe amount of chloroprene in the air should be
156 times greater than what the EPA has determined. But
Denka doesn’t have many options besides to dispute the science.
Company officials acknowledged that the EPA’s safe air quality
levels are “technologically impossible to achieve,” and that the
current Iris calculations “threaten the very survival of Denka’s
neoprene production facility,” in a 2017 letter to the EPA.
Those
with no connection to the battle in Reserve have watched on in
horror. Dr Ron Melnick, a former government scientist who was one of
the first researchers to find chloroprene’s links to cancer, was
dismayed to hear about the rates of exposure to the chemical.
“It’s
shameful,” he says. “I wouldn’t even live in an area that the
EPA says emissions are acceptable. For sure, I wouldn’t live or
have my children in a place which exceeds the EPA limits.”
When
you think about it, nothing has ever really changed,” said Reserve
resident Mary Hampton, reflecting on how black Americans in Louisiana
have borne the brunt of commercial production here.
“First
slavery, then sharecropping, now this. It’s just a new way of doing
it,” said the 80-year-old, who has lived a few blocks from the
factory’s fenceline her whole life. Hampton traces her family’s
roots back to a slave vessel that arrived in Louisiana from Haiti.
The ship carried her great grandfather, then defined as chattel
property, to the banks of the lower Mississippi where generations of
her family labored in the sugar industry - first as slaves, then as
sharecroppers and finally as employees
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