Lawmakers reject plea from Cancer Alley residents for fence line air monitoring
20th June 2023 · 0 Comments
By Claire Sullivan
Contributing Writer
(lailluminator.com) — In a three-month period, St. James Parish resident Myrtle Felton lost three relatives to cancer and another to respiratory illness. She blames the heavy industrial presence in her community.
“We as a people are dying rapidly, and I personally believe within my heart that we are dying from cancer because of the pollution that we have to breathe 24/7,” Felton told a Louisiana Senate committee in April. “There’s not a day I come out of my house that I breathe fresh air.”
She was testifying in favor of Senate Bill 35 by Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, that would have required the state’s more than 450 industrial plants to install air monitors at their fence lines and report that data publicly. It would have cost each facility $18,000, Fields said at a hearing in May.
But, like the three previous years Fields had brought the proposal, it failed. Sen. Joe Bouie, D-New Orleans, brought a similar bill to require fence line air monitoring in 2019, when he was a representative, that also failed.
This year, Fields’ bill cleared an early hurdle in the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality before getting stuck in the Senate Committee on Finance. The bill was brought to the finance committee because it had a fiscal note, but the costs would’ve been covered by the fee paid by the facilities.
“I just think people have a right to know what they’re breathing,” Fields said in May during the Senate Finance committee.
Felton lives in the 85-mile petrochemical corridor that stretches along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. It has earned the nickname Cancer Alley because of the high rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses reported by the area’s predominately Black residents.
Exposure to petrochemical pollution is expected to cause 85 cancer cases a year in Louisiana, according to a 2022 peer-reviewed study by the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. The clinic found in 2021 that poor communities in Louisiana with high air pollution have high cancer rates.
Cancer Alley has been recognized by the federal government and the United Nations.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and Civil Rights wrote in an October 2022 letter that “based on the data EPA has reviewed thus far, Black residents of the Industrial Corridor Parishes continue to bear disproportionate elevated risks of developing cancer from exposure to current levels of toxic air pollution.”
U.N. human rights experts said in 2021 “this form of environmental racism poses serious and disproportionate threats to the enjoyment of several human rights of (the area’s) largely African American residents.”
Those residing among the plants have grappled with the health effects of industry for years.
Gail LeBoeuf is another resident from St. James Parish who testified in support of the bill in April. Like Felton, she has had many loved ones with cancer and chronic illnesses. LeBoeuf herself has liver cancer, she told the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality.
She recalled two people she knew who found out they had stage 4 cancer and died just months later.
“Why does it have to be stage 4 when Senate Bill 35 could have been in place and had the community alerted?” she asked lawmakers.
But residents’ concerns have often fallen on deaf ears.
“For far too long, our communities have been sounding the alarm about toxic, cancer-causing pollutants emitted daily from petrochemical industries and other facilities that have been making us sick,” said Barbara Washington, another St. James Parish resident, at the April hearing. “There are no monitors that measure levels of toxic air pollution in any St. James Parish neighborhood.”
Washington’s community was “poisoned” by the sulfuric acid mist and hydrogen sulfide emitted over six years by the Nucor Steel plant, she said. Residents have experienced chronic coughs, burning eyes, respiratory problems and headaches they believe are tied to chemicals used at the facility, she said.
Washington said she, too, has lost loved ones to cancer: multiple cousins, her sister and her best friend. The Thursday before she testified, her neighbor died, she said, and her uncle is currently battling prostate cancer.
The problems are worsened by the fact that residents don’t always know what they’re breathing.
“When we go to the doctor, we cannot even explain what is going on,” Washington said.
Shamell Lavigne, chief operating officer of Rise St. James, a community organization fighting petrochemical pollution, made a simple plea to lawmakers at the April meeting.
“Please prioritize our lives over the costs to the plants,” Lavigne said.
The bill survived that hearing, but it met its end in the Senate Finance committee two weeks later, where it was temporarily deferred and never brought back.
Sen. Gregory Tarver Sr., D-Shreveport, who made the motion to defer the bill, asked Fields, “This is a tax on business, isn’t it?”
“If you’re in the business of emitting certain chemicals into the atmosphere, then, yes, you will be taxed,” Fields said.
Committee chairman Sen. Bodi White, R-Central, said he was worried smaller plants would move to Texas if they had to pay the fee. “I don’t know that I can put the cost on industry,” he said.
“A sick man can’t work well, and a dead man can’t work at all,” Fields said.
White wasn’t convinced.
“We have enough problems without running industry out,” White said. “I’m not saying your bill runs it out, but it doesn’t make us any friendlier.”
Greg Bowser, president and CEO of the Louisiana Chemical Association, which represents the interests of 66 chemical manufacturing companies, told the Senate Environmental Quality Committee in April the bill would be costly and questioned its efficacy.
“To just basically collect a bunch of data and dump it into the public and say, ‘Here you go, you decide what it means.’ I think it’s gonna mean different things to different people,” said Bowser, who has called the existence of Cancer Alley “fictional.”
He also referenced new rules proposed by the EPA around air monitoring and said he was concerned the requirements could be different than what was laid out in the bill. “The monitoring is gonna happen,” he said.
The rules proposed by the EPA could require around 200 chemical plants in Louisiana to monitor hazardous emissions at their fence lines and make the data available to the public.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced the proposal in April outside the Denka Performance Elastomer plant in St. John the Baptist Parish.
It was his second visit to the area, and he said he often reflects on his first in 2021.
“I distinctly remember standing on the grounds of a school that was a stone’s throw away from a facility that manufactured toxic chemicals,” Regan said. “The children who attend that school, study at that school, eat lunch at that school every single day look just like my son, Matthew.”
And in those communities, he said, “nearly every person that I spoke with knew someone who suffered from an illness that they believed was connected to the pollution in the air they breathe.”
This article originally published in the June 19, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
