[News] The Plant Next Door - A Louisiana Town Plagued by Pollution Shows Why Cuts to the EPA Will Be Measured in Illnesses and Deaths

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/24/a-louisiana-town-plagued-by-pollution-shows-why-cuts-to-the-epa-will-be-measured-in-illnesses-and-deaths/ 



  The Plant Next Door
  <https://theintercept.com/2017/03/24/a-louisiana-town-plagued-by-pollution-shows-why-cuts-to-the-epa-will-be-measured-in-illnesses-and-deaths/>


    A Louisiana Town Plagued by Pollution Shows Why Cuts to the EPA Will
    Be Measured in Illnesses and Deaths
    <https://theintercept.com/2017/03/24/a-louisiana-town-plagued-by-pollution-shows-why-cuts-to-the-epa-will-be-measured-in-illnesses-and-deaths/>

Sharon Lerner - March 24 2017

W_hen the Environmental_ Protection Agency informed people in St. John 
the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, last July that the local neoprene plant 
was emitting a chemical that gave them the highest risk of cancer from 
air pollution in the country, the information was received not just with 
horror and sadness but also with a certain sense of validation.

For years, many of the people living on this little square of land 
between the train tracks and the Mississippi River levee have felt they 
suffered more than their share of illnesses. Troyla Keller has a rash 
and asthma that abate every time she leaves the neighborhood and worsen 
when she returns. Augustine Nicholson Dorris had breast cancer and 
seizures. And David Sanders has trouble breathing, a tumor on his 
thyroid, and neurological problems. “It took a lot away from me,” said 
Sanders, whose speech is slurred, when I visited the area a half-hour 
west of New Orleans in February. Several people spoke of shuttling their 
children and grandchildren to the nearby ER for asthma treatments. And 
many residents also frequent the neighborhood’s two busy dialysis 
centers. A third is under construction.

“Everybody felt there was too much sickness,” said Robert Taylor, 76, 
whose wife had breast cancer and is now struggling with multiple 
sclerosis. Taylor’s daughter Raven suffers from gastroparesis, a 
relatively rare autoimmune disorder that has left the 48-year-old unable 
to digest food and bedridden, after an attempt to treat the condition 
surgically led to a staph infection. But there were plenty of other 
unusual conditions, too. Trollious Harris, who has spent most of her 
life a few blocks from the Taylors, suffers from myasthenia gravis, 
another autoimmune condition, which has caused her muscles to weaken. 
Kellie Tabb has a rapid heartbeat and recently met two other people in 
the area who have the same condition.

“Everybody has had someone that has died of cancer,” said Taylor’s 
daughter Tish as she stood in the doorway of the family’s home on East 
26th Street. To an outsider like me, the neighborhood looked festive, 
with kids playing on neatly mown lawns and Mardi Gras beads adorning 
many of the doors. But when Tish, who is 53 and has lived on the block 
since she was 4, looked at the nearby houses, she saw the people who had 
fallen ill. “Mr. Henry died of cancer, and he had two sons who were 
diagnosed with it, too. And Miss Sissy, who lives down the block toward 
the river, she had pancreatic cancer and died this month. Ms. Diane died 
of cancer, too,” Tish said, ticking off the casualties on her fingers.

“Something is clearly not right with this area,” said Lydia Gerard, 
whose husband developed kidney cancer at age 64 that recently 
metastasized and spread to his chest. Gerard herself suffers from sudden 
bouts of diarrhea and anemia as well as vitiligo and other autoimmune 
problems. Her lips and eyes often swell inexplicably and she has itchy 
welts on her arms and legs that get better when she goes to work 30 
miles away — and come back with a vengeance when she returns home. While 
I was interviewing Gerard and her husband in their two-story home, I 
also broke out in hives.

Besides being a likely human carcinogen, chloroprene, the gas the plant 
has been releasing into this community for 48 years, is known to weaken 
immune systems and cause headaches, heart palpitations, anemia, stomach 
problems, impaired kidney function, and rashes. So the EPA’s news, bad 
as it was, provided a form of relief. After all these years, a 
government agency was helping to explain the residents’ strange 
predicament. The people living next to the plant might be sick, but at 
least they weren’t crazy.

T_he air pollution_ crisis in St. John the Baptist may be the best 
illustration of why we need the EPA — and how the imminent slashing of 
the federal agency’s budget will be measurable in illnesses and deaths. 
Since 2002, the EPA has periodically published a report estimating the 
expected number of cancers per million people in every census tract 
based on airborne emissions from industry. For most of the country, the 
expected number of cancers due to this pollution is somewhere between 
zero and one. The national average is .968.

But for the people living in the census tract within St. John the 
Baptist that is home to the Taylors, Kellers, Sanders, and Gerards, the 
risk is dramatically higher. According to the EPA’s most recent National 
Air Toxics Assessment 
<https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics-assessment/2011-nata-assessment-results>, 
which was published in December 2015, the lifetime risk of cancer from 
air pollution in this area, which is less than 2 square miles, is a 
staggering 777 per million people, by far the highest in the country and 
more than 800 times the national average. Other census tracts near the 
plant had risks that were more than 200, 300, and 400 times higher.

No one I spoke to in this patch of the parish seemed surprised by the 
idea that the synthetic rubber plant just over the chain link fence from 
their houses might have a role in the community’s health problems. 
DuPont opened the factory on a former sugar plantation called Belle 
Point in 1964, and its smokestacks have been pumping out chloroprene 
over this mostly African-American neighborhood since 1969. Many of the 
people living here can trace their roots back to slavery, when their 
ancestors worked on nearby plantations, and some of their homes are 
former slaves’ quarters. And now the giant property next door looms over 
their lives in other ways. Most can see the stacks from their windows. 
And the residents I spoke with said that at times, odors wafted from the 
factory that smelled “pungent and rotten,” “almost like a singed 
plastic” — or, as Mary Hampton put it simply, “like poison.”

Hampton said she gets sinus attacks when the chemicals are at their 
smelliest — and she is not alone. Although there has been no formal 
study of health effects in the area, Wilma Subra, a consultant who has 
been working with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to help the 
residents of St. John the Baptist respond to the news about chloroprene, 
recently surveyed 150 people who live near the plant about their 
symptoms after what she calls “odor events.” Eighteen reported having 
sinus problems, 31 reported burning eyes, 25 reported headaches, and 14 
stomachaches. Others reported diarrhea, difficulty breathing, and rashes.

Lois Frank, who is 65 and has lived within a few blocks of the plant 
since it opened, said that at first, the intense smells threw many 
people in the neighborhood into a panic. “My mother would call the plant 
and say, ‘You must have a leak,’ and they’d send somebody in the truck. 
And then they would always tell us, ‘We don’t smell anything,’” Frank 
remembered recently. “After a while, people got tired so they just 
stopped calling. What’s the point in calling if they ain’t going to do 
nothing about it?”

Almost 50 years later, the fumes remain, along with the sense of being 
powerless to stop them. On a mild evening a few months ago, when Robert 
Taylor arrived home from a trip to New Orleans, the smell was “so bad, 
you couldn’t even walk, you had to run inside.” He called 911 to report 
it. When a fire official arrived a few minutes later, his response was 
validating, if not helpful. “He got out of his vehicle and he said, ‘Oh 
my God, do they really expect you people to live in this? You understand 
you got a problem here?’” Taylor recalled. The problem the fire official 
was referring to wasn’t the smell, according to Taylor. “He said, ‘You 
know this is one of the biggest taxpayers in the parish!’”

Until recently, Lois Frank thought of the smelly cloud from her powerful 
neighbor as just a nuisance. “We knew we were getting emissions,” said 
Frank. Her husband, who died of leukemia at age 52, was one of four 
people in her immediate family to get cancer. “We just didn’t know how 
bad it was. We didn’t know about the chloroprene.”

A _little-known division_ of the EPA called the Integrated Risk 
Information System helped quantify exactly how bad chloroprene is. IRIS 
evaluates the toxicity of chemicals and in 2010 concluded that the 
colorless chemical that is the building block of neoprene, one of 28 the 
plant releases into the air, was a likely human carcinogen. The 
classification was based in part on research showing that the rats and 
mice exposed to the stuff developed cancers of the thyroid gland, lung, 
kidney, liver, mammary gland, and fore-stomach. The 2010 report 
<https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/iris/iris_documents/documents/toxreviews/1021tr.pdf> 
referred to studies showing that chloroprene increased the risk of 
cancers in people, too. Studies of four different human populations 
around the world showed that exposure to the chemical increased the risk 
of liver cancer, in one case by more than 700 percent. Other studies 
IRIS reviewed showed a link to lung cancer. In one study of Russian shoe 
factory workers exposed between 1960 and 1976, chloroprene increased 
rates of leukemia and kidney cancer as well as liver cancer. The study 
also showed chloroprene elevated the risk of colon cancer and deaths 
from a combination of all cancers.

It took too long for the EPA to get the research on chloroprene to the 
people who needed it most. Although the agency published its air toxics 
data, which included a map 
<https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics-assessment/2011-nata-map> that 
clearly showed the risk in St. John the Baptist in December 2015, it 
wasn’t until the following May that John Vandenberg, director of the 
EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment, wrote 
<https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-06/documents/memo-iris-chloroprene052516.pdf> 
to the regional office to point out the elevated cancer risk in the 
parish, which houses the U.S.’s only neoprene-manufacturing plant and is 
the major source of chloroprene emissions in the country.

Vandenberg’s letter, which identified chloroprene as “likely to be 
carcinogenic to humans,” revealed how slowly the critical information 
made its way through government. The National Toxicology Program’s 
Report on Carcinogens described chloroprene as “reasonably anticipated 
to be a human carcinogen” in 2005, as the letter noted, and the 
International Agency for Research on Cancer had classified chloroprene 
as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 1999, 17 years before the letter 
was sent.

Still, the dangers chloroprene poses to particular communities would 
likely not have been quantified at all if not for IRIS, which has been a 
frequent target of industry in the years it has assessed the toxicity of 
chemicals. And the knowledge of these health effects wouldn’t have been 
combined with data on the release of hazardous chemicals to calculate 
the localized risks of cancer from air pollution if not for another 
branch of the federal agency: the EPA’s Air Toxics Assessment Group. 
That information made it from the obscure report to the people of St. 
John the Baptist Parish thanks to yet another division of the agency, 
the regional office, which met with a local environmental organization, 
the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, in June and has since helped 
arrange for air monitoring around the plant.

T_he EPA was_ created in 1970 in large part to right the power imbalance 
between industry and residents of polluted communities like St. John the 
Baptist. Richard Nixon was president at the time and appointed William 
Ruckelshaus, or “the enforcer,” as he came to be called, to lead the 
agency. Among Ruckelhaus’s victories was getting companies to comply 
with the newly passed law to curtail air pollution, the Clean Air Act. 
Ruckelshaus even managed to get Union Carbide, then a powerful chemical 
company, to reduce emissions at its plant in Marietta, Georgia, after 
the company initially threatened to fire workers if it was forced to 
comply with the EPA’s new pollution emissions schedule.

Forty-seven years later, our current scandal-ridden Republican president 
is handling environmental enforcement differently. Donald Trump, who 
threatened to eliminate the EPA entirely during his campaign, has 
instead installed as its administrator former Oklahoma Attorney General 
Scott Pruitt, who built his career trying to undermine the agency. 
“Polluting Pruitt,” as some call him, has already begun making cuts that 
will eviscerate the EPA’s ability to protect Americans from dangerous 
industrial pollution.

The EPA declined to answer questions about specific cuts, but the new 
administration is likely to shrink or eliminate every branch of the 
agency that helped convey the risks of chloroprene to the people of St. 
John the Baptist. Leaked versions of the agency’s budget show that the 
administration plans to zero out funding for local air pollution 
monitoring. And cuts are expected 
<https://insideepa.com/daily-news/omb-requires-epa-develop-plan-eliminating-two-regional-offices> 
to the regional offices.

Trump’s proposed budget also cuts most funding for the Office of 
Environmental Justice, which was devoted to protecting communities like 
the one in St. John the Baptist, according to Mustafa Ali, one of the 
founding members of that office. I spoke with Ali the morning he 
resigned from the agency he served for 25 years, most recently as the 
senior adviser for environmental justice and community revitalization. 
He told me he chose to leave because he has “a different set of values 
and priorities” from the new administration and that low-income 
communities and communities of color contend with disproportionate 
environmental pollution because, “lots of times, people don’t put as 
much value on their lives.”

IRIS, the only division of the agency that independently assesses the 
toxicity of industrial chemicals, is almost certain to fall victim to 
the cuts as well. The proposed budget 
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/2018_blueprint.pdf> calls 
for $2.6 billion in cuts to the EPA, including $233 million from the 
Office of Research in Development, which includes IRIS. Republicans on 
the House Science Committee had already made it clear at a hearing in 
February 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/02/05/republicans-want-to-make-the-epa-great-again-by-gutting-health-regulations/> 
that elimination of IRIS was one of their three priorities for the EPA. 
And the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the think tank run by Myron 
Ebell, who headed Trump’s EPA transition team, identified IRIS as “top 
on the list 
<https://cei.org/blog/congress-should-target-unaccountable-epa-programs>” 
of environmental programs to cut.

“I’m sure it’s a key thing they want to get rid of, IRIS, because of how 
influential it is,” one EPA staff member told me. “If they kill that, 
they kill the ability to regulate. The whole world looks at an IRIS 
evaluation. It really does draw the line in the sand and tells people 
where the risk is. Once that’s defined, you can go back to the water 
concentration and the air concentration and show that you have to do 
something. Without IRIS, you might be able to measure something in the 
air or water, but you won’t have any proof that it’s a problem.”

Republicans have also targeted funding for both the International Agency 
for Research on Cancer 
<http://www.politico.eu/article/trump-international-agency-for-research-on-cancer-christopher-wild/> and 
the National Institute for Environmental Health 
<https://www.propublica.org/article/as-trump-slashes-epa-worry-over-the-fate-of-an-agency-doing-similar-work>, 
which publishes the National Report on Carcinogens, the two other 
governmental bodies that recognized the cancer risk of chloroprene years 
ago. Together with IRIS, these two programs provide the only significant 
counterweight to industry’s own research. As we’ve seen 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/01/14/dow-chemical-wants-farmers-to-keep-using-a-pesticide-linked-to-autism-and-adhd/> 
many times before 
<https://theintercept.com/2015/11/03/epa-used-monsanto-funded-research/>, 
that science is often biased by companies’ interest in maintaining the 
profitability of their products.

D_uPont’s long history_ of keeping troubling scientific research about 
its products secret underscores the need for independent scientists to 
evaluate chemicals — and make those findings public. Indeed, while the 
people of St. John the Baptist didn’t know which chemical they were 
inhaling, let alone the dangers it posed, DuPont was well aware that 
chloroprene presented health risks even before the company started 
neoprene production at the plant in St. John the Baptist in 1969.

DuPont introduced neoprene — a flexible substance that would go on to be 
used to make everything from gaskets and hoses to mouse pads, 
fly-fishing waders, and wetsuits — in 1931. As it did with PFOA 
<https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/>, a chemical used to 
make Teflon, the company carefully studied the effects of chloroprene. 
As far back as 1938, DuPont scientists conducted experiments with the 
chemical used to make the new synthetic rubber, and by 1941, they 
expressed concerns about its safety.

That year, John Foulger, who was then head of DuPont’s in-house 
toxicology unit, Haskell Laboratory, issued a report called “Toxicity of 
Chlorabutadiene,” which is another name for chloroprene. The report 
<https://theintercept.com/document/2017/03/23/toxicity-of-chlorabutadiene/>, 
which DuPont submitted to the EPA in 1992, more than 50 years after it 
was written (and which I accessed through the EPA’s website), detailed a 
list of complaints made by DuPont workers exposed to the chemical that 
is eerily similar to the list of problems now plaguing the people of St. 
John the Baptist: dizziness, headaches, nausea, heart palpitations, 
diarrhea, and rapid pulse.

Foulger, who labeled the report “personal and confidential” in 1941, 
also summarized Haskell studies showing that dogs exposed to chloroprene 
developed the same type of problems the neoprene workers had. Foulger 
recommended re-examining workers who experienced abnormal pulse or blood 
pressure after being exposed to chloroprene within a few days and if the 
symptoms continued, then lowering their exposure “to avoid the 
production of definite tissue damage.”

DuPont scientists also exposed guinea pigs to chloroprene and according 
to the 1941 report found that when there was more than 50 parts per 
million of the chemical in the air, “there may occur circulatory 
abnormality.” Prolonged exposure, Foulger noted, “may produce serious 
circulator abnormality, and even lead to collapse.”

Even back then, the scientists worried about how ongoing exposure to 
chloroprene might affect people. “It has been our general experience 
with other compounds producing this same type of circulatory abnormality 
that the longer the man is exposed to concentrations of toxic chemical 
capable of producing circulator abnormality, the less rapidly does he 
recover when removed from exposure,” Foulger wrote 76 years ago.

Despite the concerns, DuPont began making neoprene in an industrial 
neighborhood called Rubbertown in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1941, and 
began production at its St. John the Baptist plant in 1969. Two years 
later, Haskell scientists performed another chloroprene experiment, 
exposing 10 rats to chloroprene gas. Several of the animals developed 
head tremors and “incoordination of legs” and three of the animals died 
after the exposure, according to a 1971 document 
<https://theintercept.com/document/2017/03/24/1971-haskell-laboratory-report/> that 
DuPont sent to the EPA in 1992.

The company appears to have alerted at least one other part of the 
government to the risks. In 1974, John Zapp, who was then the director 
of Haskell Labs, sent a letter to the acting director of the National 
Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, expressing concern over the 
potential carcinogenicity of chloroprene. At that point, there was 
already ample evidence to suggest the chemical was a health hazard. “The 
primary responses to chloroprene appear to be central nervous system 
depression and significant injury to lungs, liver, and kidneys,” stated 
a bulletin the CDC published in January 1975. The bulletin referenced 
the Russian study that showed elevated rates of lung and skin cancer 
among workers exposed to the chemical and noted that animals exposed to 
chloroprene had a decreased number of white blood cells, which play a 
central role in immune function.

But this information never made it to the people in St. John the 
Baptist, who by then were already smelling the emissions from the plant. 
By 1988, according to internal DuPont documents obtained by The 
Intercept, the company was concerned enough about the dangers of 
chloroprene to set its own limit for round-the-clock exposure at 0.5 
parts per million (ppm). Exposure above that limit would “not 
necessarily result in any adverse affects,” according to a 1994

document 
<https://theintercept.com/document/2017/03/24/dupont-acceptable-exposure-limits-list> 


marked “for DuPont use only.” In 1988, the company also set an 
“acceptable exposure limit” for workers exposed to the chemical for 12 
hours: 10 ppm. By 1999, the company had lowered that limit to 2 ppm, 
presumably based on new discoveries it had made about the health effects 
of chloroprene.

By 2002, people living near Rubbertown 
<https://www.rubbertownfilm.com/>, Kentucky, where the DuPont neoprene 
facility was one of more than a dozen chemical plants, had begun to 
complain about cancer and other health problems. That year, DuPont 
scientists embarked on their own study of workers at the company’s 
neoprene plants in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Ireland. While researchers 
around the world had found that chloroprene exposure elevated the risks 
of various cancers, the DuPont study 
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/17007827/>, which was funded 
by the International Institute of Synthetic Rubber Producers and 
published in 2006, found almost no evidence that it increased the risk 
of developing cancer. That year, the company cited the study in an 
effort to get scientific groups to reclassify 
<http://www.rubbernews.com/article/20060807/ISSUE/308079975/dupont-aims-to-get-chloroprene-delisted> 
chloroprene so it was no longer a potential human carcinogen, according 
to Rubber & Plastics News.

Under pressure from workers and environmental groups in Kentucky, DuPont 
closed its Rubbertown plant in 2008. The year before, the United 
Steelworkers, who had called attention to the health risks of 
chloroprene, wrote 
<https://www.icis.com/resources/news/2007/09/03/9058871/dupont-louisiana-neoprene-unit-may-pose-danger/> 
to Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco to warn that consolidating neoprene 
production at the St. John the Baptist plant would cause “added 
pollution and a higher risk of cancer.”

Nevertheless, DuPont did consolidate its neoprene operation at the 
Louisiana plant, where it made the chemical until November 2015. Then, 
six weeks before the EPA published the National Air Toxics Assessment 
<https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics-assessment/2011-nata-assessment-results> 
— which combined emissions data with the health information in the IRIS 
report to calculate that the risk of cancer from air pollution near the 
plant was hundreds of times higher than in other parts of the country — 
DuPont announced the sale of the neoprene division of the plant to a 
Japanese company called Denka Performance Elastomers. Under new 
ownership, the production and emissions continued.

Although DuPont sold the division, it could still potentially be liable 
for the 46 years in which it produced neoprene at the plant. And at 
least as far back as 2009, it had enlisted a science-for-hire consulting 
company, now known as Ramboll Environ, to represent its interests on 
chloroprene. Ramboll Environ, which has also represented 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/low-tar-cigarettes/481116/> 
Phillip Morris, met with the EPA in August 
<https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/iris2/events.cfm> 2016 to challenge the 
agency’s finding that chloroprene is a likely carcinogen.

Although the EPA did not change its classification of the chemical, 
DuPont continues to maintain that its plant posed no risk to the 
community in St. John the Baptist. In response to a list of questions 
regarding the plant and the company’s knowledge of the dangers of 
chloroprene, DuPont provided the following statement:

    While DuPont operated the Pontchartrain site, we protected our
    workers from chloroprene exposure applying standards that were up to
    125 times more stringent than U.S. Occupational Health and Safety
    Administration (OSHA) standards. DuPont also took great care to
    protect the health and safety of community-area residents operating
    under an air permit issued by the Louisiana Department of
    Environmental Quality (LDEQ), which established chloroprene emission
    limits and met the Louisiana Toxic Air Pollutant Ambient Air
    Standard for chloroprene/./ We believe there was no community risk
    associated with chloroprene.

In response to a list of questions about its awareness of the risks 
associated with chloroprene, Denka Performance Elastomers consistently 
challenged the EPA’s assessment. “EPA’s 2010 Toxicity Review of 
Chloroprene characterizes chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen. The 
epidemiological studies do not support that conclusion, and St. John the 
Baptist Parish, where the DPE facility is located, has one of the lower 
cancer incidence rates in Louisiana,” a company spokesperson wrote in a 
statement, adding: “The epidemiological data does not demonstrate a 
credible link between human exposure to chloroprene and the incidence of 
cancers in chloroprene workers, who are exposed to much higher 
concentrations of chloroprene than members of the community.”

Denka also stated that it was not aware of the forthcoming EPA air 
toxics assessment until several days after it acquired the neoprene 
division of the plant on November 1, 2015.

Denka emphasized that its operations are in compliance with its air 
permits, which is true. When the company purchased the facility in 2015, 
it came with a permit that allows Denka to emit 403,580 pounds of 
chloroprene per year, which is more than 100,00 pounds above what it 
actually emits. But the permit was first issued in 1994, well before the 
EPA recognized the chemical as a likely human carcinogen.

T_he EPA generally_ strives to keep the risk of cancer from air 
pollution to less than one for every million people. But a May 2016 memo 
<https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-06/documents/memo-prelim-risk-based-concentrations050516.pdf> 
about chloroprene from Kelly Rimer of the agency’s Air Toxics Assessment 
Group acknowledged that such a low rate isn’t always obtainable and 
offered instead as the “upper limit of acceptability” a risk of 100 in a 
million. To stay below that higher level, chloroprene emissions would 
have to be kept to no more than .2 micrograms per cubic meter.

While Denka indicated it would try 
<http://www.lobservateur.com/2017/01/11/state-denka-sign-and-share-laplace-chloroprene-emissions-plan/> 
to reduce its chloroprene emissions by 85 percent, the company has not 
committed to meeting any particular level.

Though the numbers from IRIS are officially “risk estimates” and not 
enforceable limits, the EPA can use them to create binding rules and 
regulations. But that process, which takes years under the best of 
circumstances, is very unlikely to move forward while Trump is in office.

States can also use the IRIS numbers to set their own rules. But that 
seems unlikely in Louisiana. Chuck Carr Brown, the head of Louisiana’s 
Department of Environmental Quality, told me that the .2 micrograms 
level is “just a guidance.” Instead of aiming to keep emissions below 
the recommended level, Brown said he is working with Denka to improve 
leak detection and repair and install various technologies that, he 
said, should reduce the level of chloroprene emissions by the end of 2017.

Although the EPA document 
<https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/iris2/chemicalLanding.cfm?substance_nmbr=1021> 
that set the level indicates that its confidence in its calculations is 
“medium/high,” Brown, a former industry consultant, also said that 
“nobody is standing behind that number” and that “there are folks that 
are challenging IRIS.” When I asked which folks Brown was referring to, 
he didn’t respond. At a December meeting with residents of St. John the 
Baptist Parish, Brown suggested there was no cause for “fearmongering 
<http://www.lobservateur.com/2016/12/14/chloroprene-emissions-concern-man-state-official-addresses-fear-mongering-cancer-questions/>.”

Brown pointed to the state’s cancer registry, which he told me “doesn’t 
show any elevated levels of cancer at all in any group of people.” It is 
true that the Louisiana Tumor Registry 
<http://sph.lsuhsc.edu/louisiana-tumor-registry/data-usestatistics/statistics/> 
fails to show an elevated rate of all cancers in the parish as a whole, 
compared to the rest of the state, which has the fourth highest 
<http://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/2016-annual-report/measure/CancerDeaths/state/LA> 
rate of cancer deaths in the country (only Mississippi, Kentucky, and 
West Virginia have higher rates). But it’s impossible to tell from that 
data whether there is any increase in liver cancer, which is the type of 
cancer most clearly linked to chloroprene. The tumor registry doesn’t 
report cancers at all if there are fewer than 16 cases or deaths, 
according to Lauren S. Maniscalco, the registry’s liaison. The registry 
withholds data for smaller areas to protect the confidentiality of 
patients, Maniscalco said.

Reporting data at the parish or county level, however, instead of the 
zip code or census tract, makes it virtually impossible to see hotspots 
within the county. Because liver cancer is rare — there are only 7.6 
cases for every 100,000 people in the U.S. — you would expect to find 
about three cancers in the entire parish. According to county level data 
from the CDC and National Cancer Institute 
<https://statecancerprofiles.cancer.gov/incidencerates/index.php?stateFIPS=22&cancer=035&race=00&sex=0&age=001&type=incd&sortVariableName=rate&sortOrder=default>, 
St. John the Baptist Parish has three or fewer cases of liver cancer. 
But even one case in the small census tract next to the factory, which 
has just 1,966 residents, would represent a rate more than six times 
what’s expected.

“Parish-level data is not going to tell you anything about locale-based 
health problems,” said Barbara Allen, a sociologist who has studied 
<https://www.amazon.com/Uneasy-Alchemy-Louisianas-Industrial-Environments/dp/0262012030> the 
Louisiana Tumor Registry, which has been sued by at least one researcher 
for its refusal to share data. The registry was also paid by the 
Louisiana Chemical Association to produce a study of links between 
industry and cancer in 1989. “By collecting the data and only releasing 
it at the parish level, the tumor registry and other interested parties 
know that there is no way to show a correlation between living near 
industry and disease,” Allen said.

While the hard cancer statistics are either inconclusive or disputed, no 
one has even attempted to tally the autoimmune diseases or other 
problems that have been reported both in the scientific literature on 
chloroprene and in the neighborhood. But thanks to spherical metal air 
monitors that have been hanging at six points near the neoprene factory 
since May, the level of the chemical in the air is becoming increasingly 
clear.

When we spoke, Brown told me that the improvements at the plant had 
already brought about a significant reduction in emissions. “I won’t 
take a victory lap too soon, but the numbers are looking good,” Brown 
said. But monitoring data 
<https://www.epa.gov/la/denka-air-monitoring-summary-sheet-2> on the EPA 
website show that there is still plenty of chloroprene in the air by the 
plant.

In November, a monitor by the intersection of Acorn Street and Highway 
44, which runs alongside the river, was 765 times higher than the level 
the EPA calculated would have a 100-in-a-million cancer risk from air 
pollution. By the clinic, where many residents go for treatment, the 
level was more than 330 times higher. And on a Saturday in January, the 
level of the likely carcinogen in the air by the Fifth Ward Elementary 
School was 370 times above what the EPA described as the upper limit of 
acceptability. That is more than 37,000 times higher than the level of 
chloroprene the EPA calculated would bring the risk of cancer down to 
one in a million.

W_hether the pollution_ is hundreds or thousands of times what it should 
be, the knowledge that children are being exposed to elevated levels of 
a likely carcinogen would be enough to spark widespread outrage and 
immediate action in many places around the United States. But not in 
this part of Louisiana.

In October, Robert Taylor, along with his neighbors living near the 
plant, founded a group called Concerned Citizens of St. John the 
Baptist. Taylor, a retired general contractor and bass player, remembers 
drinking from “colored” water fountains and playing in bars where he had 
to walk through a separate entrance because “that’s where we made our 
living.” After the factory a few blocks away began making neoprene, he 
watched stoically as his nature-loving son mourned the plants and 
insects that seemed to retreat from the neighborhood. Even when the 
Taylors “lost outdoor air,” because the odors made it too unpleasant to 
be outside, he was resolute. “It was just subtle and gradual,” Taylor 
said, “like they were turning up the temperature a few degrees at a time.”

But the recent news that the chemical his family has been inhaling for 
so many years might have contributed to their illnesses has changed 
something in Taylor. “It’s too much,” he told me, while his wife rested 
on the couch next to us. In recent weeks, Taylor has been organizing 
meetings with Wilma Subra, the technical consultant who has worked with 
the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, discussing how they might be 
able to get the chemical out of their air.

But the local parish council and the school board have yet to address 
the issue. And in an area where churches guide much of public life, few 
religious leaders have spoken openly about the pollution problem. Steve 
Perrilloux, who leads the congregation at the Riverlands Christian 
Center in the parish and grew up two blocks from the plant, invited 15 
pastors to a meeting in January to discuss supporting the community 
there, but since the meeting, only one has stepped forward to help.

“They’re looking at dollars and cents and not recognizing that they have 
to stand for righteousness rather than an economic benefit,” Perrilloux 
said of the other pastors. “Sometimes people don’t want to get on the 
wrong side of the political leaders.”

Many people fear being seen as a threat to the chemical industry, which 
is one of the biggest local employers. Two hundred and fifty people work 
at the plant, though few members of the African-American community 
living right next door have managed to get any of the coveted jobs 
there. The two I heard of, Bryant Perrilloux and Nathan Duhe, also 
happened to die premature deaths from cancer. Duhe, who was an operator 
at the plant for more than two decades, died in his early 60s. And 
Perrilloux, a distant cousin of the pastor who began doing janitorial 
work at the plant after school when he was 17, died of stomach cancer 
when he was just 18.

Still, many local residents defend the plant. Pastor Perrilloux has 
already heard from people who see him as attacking a valued source of 
local income. “One even raised his voice and he even cursed at me,” he said.

I got a taste of how local authorities treat potential threats to 
industry when I took a walk along the Mississippi River on a Sunday 
morning while reporting this story. Setting out on a public walkway not 
far from the neoprene plant, I came to a mammoth industrial facility 
that runs along both sides of the road parallel to the river. Minutes 
after I used my phone to snap a photo of the tangled pipes that snaked 
above my head, a security vehicle and two sheriff’s cars arrived. A 
uniformed officer emerged from one and told me he would report me “to 
Homeland Security.” After I gave the officers my name and drove away, 
one of the cars followed me and pulled me over with sirens blaring, 
accusing me of using the wrong blinker and calling for backup.

Others who challenge the industry face worse hostility. In the more than 
two decades that she’s been providing technical assistance to residents 
of polluted areas in the South, Wilma Subra has had her office broken 
into more than 20 times. Someone even shot at the office once. Subra, 
who also helped the community living near the neoprene plant in 
Rubbertown, now does her work behind bulletproof glass.

T_he people living_ alongside the plant in St. John the Baptist Parish 
will be relying on Subra and one other person who is protected from the 
vagaries of the local economy as they move forward. John Cummings, a 
dapper 80-year-old trial lawyer who owns 6,000 acres in the parish, 
recently brought together a number of attorneys to “address the 
situation” near the plant, as he told me when we spoke amid the live oak 
trees on the Whitney Plantation <http://whitneyplantation.com/>. 
Cummings, who transformed the old sugar plantation into the state’s only 
museum of slavery and is clearly outraged by the pollution, described 
himself as “a bad guy to ignore.”

It’s easy to see how a person who has made and spent many millions in 
the area would expect people to listen to him. Robert Taylor and the 
others living near the neoprene plant have no such expectations. They’re 
used to being ignored.

For years, their fears about the plant hung over the neighborhood like 
the toxic gas. But the residents’ collective sense that they were being 
harmed wasn’t enough to get a response. It took the work of several 
divisions of the EPA over the course of many years to prove that people 
were in danger. And that was under administrations that at least 
nominally supported the agency’s mission.

Under the best of circumstances, the agency designed to protect public 
health can give communities like the one in St. John the Baptist a shot 
at vanquishing the pollutants that affect their health. Without it, they 
might not even have that.


-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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