A Tale of Two Toxic Cities

When I first visited this small neighborhood two years ago, many of the residents told me they felt they had borne an unusually high burden of disease for years. Lydia Gerard, whose husband had just been diagnosed with kidney cancer, was suffering from an autoimmune disorder that gave her rashes, welts, and stomach troubles. Trollious Harris had a rare autoimmune condition that took her mobility and caused her to stomach to stop working. And, at 54, Kellie Tabb had an irregular heartbeat and lung cancer, like several other nonsmokers in the neighborhood.

David Sanders, whose house looks out on the neoprene factory, suffered from seizures and breathing problems. Both Sanders’s parents had died of cancer, as did one of his sisters, his aunt, and his uncle. His first cousin Marcia, who lived next door, had recently developed sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that has been linked to air pollution. The condition caused Marcia to lose her sight before she died in her early 40s.

“We all have all lost people,” Mary Hampton told me. Hampton lives less than a quarter mile from the neoprene factory, and just over 3 miles from the plant that emits ethylene oxide. Her daughter-in-law, son-in-law, and two sisters-in-law died of cancer in recent years.

Although in Willowbrook the EPA has worked alongside local and state officials to address the dangerous levels of ethylene oxide, the agency has done little or nothing in St. John, where people continue to breathe in the highest levels of carcinogens in the country.

“Nothing has really changed,” Hampton told me recently.

Asked for comment on this story, a communications manager for Evonik Corporation referred The Intercept to a September press release from the American Chemistry Council, an industry group to which the company belongs. The statement explained the group’s belief that the risk value set by IRIS was too low and “significantly flawed.” The press release included a link to the ACC’s request to the EPA for a correction of the IRIS assessment.

Dangerous Disparities

Even for the 59 communities (see table above) that have officially dangerous levels of the very same pollutant — ethylene oxide — Willowbrook’s treatment is unusual. The EPA has paid far less attention to the eight less affluent, less white communities in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, Puerto Rico, and West Virginia where the risk of cancer from ethylene oxide is even greater. The average median income in these eight polluted areas is roughly $50,000, compared with $92,000 in Willowbrook. While the EPA created a webpage to address residents’ concerns about ethylene oxide in Willowbrook and another to address pollution in Lake County, Illinois, which ranks 42nd in the nation in terms of cancer risk from ethylene oxide, the agency didn’t make webpages about the ethylene oxide problem in any of these other places.

Nor did it send high-ranking agency officials — or, in most cases, any officials at all — to address local concerns in public meetings. In many of the places with the highest risk of cancer from air pollution, residents are not even aware they’re being exposed to the carcinogen.

St. Charles, Louisiana, a half-hour from St. John, hasn’t received its own webpage or a visit from EPA staff, even though ethylene oxide from a plant owned by Dow’s Union Carbide presents the highest risk of cancer from the chemical in the country. In St. Charles, the cancer risk from ethylene oxide is 710 per million people, according to the EPA’s air toxics report, almost three times the risk faced in the areas of Illinois most polluted by ethylene oxide.

While the EPA played a key role in getting air monitoring around the Sterigenics plant and helping the company install pollution control equipment, the people in these eight other communities got no help from the EPA in ensuring that the facilities responsible for the pollution would reduce their emissions.

“No one has required anyone to even consider putting on control technologies here,” said Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant who has been keeping some Louisiana residents abreast of the developments around ethylene oxide. “In Illinois, EPA had ATSDR look at the risk and do air monitoring. But here in Louisiana, where we have the highest risk for ethylene oxide, they didn’t do any of that.”

The EPA did not respond to questions about the discrepancies between the agency’s responses to air pollution problems in various parts of the country.

The people of St. John also learned about their air pollution problem because of IRIS. In their case, the revelation stemmed from a 2010 assessment that deemed chloroprene to be much more dangerous than previously thought. The assessment found that the gas that had been released into their community since 1969 increased rates of leukemia, lung cancer, kidney cancer, and liver cancer.

The safety threshold calculated in the 2010 IRIS evaluation made it clear that the plant, then owned by DuPont, was emitting chloroprene at dangerous levels — and had been for decades. (DuPont sold the plant to a Japanese company called Denka in 2015.) But no one from the agency mentioned the dangerous new levels of the carcinogen to people living near the factory when the assessment was published. Nor did anyone alert residents to their risk — which was the highest in the country — right after the National Air Toxics Assessment came out in December 2015.

In a written response to questions for this article, a spokesperson from Denka criticized the safety level for chloroprene calculated by IRIS as “based on incomplete and flawed data” and disputed the characterization of its emissions as dangerous: “Scientific research shows Denka Performance Elastomer’s operations do not pose any additional health risks to the surrounding community.”

Denka’s spokesperson also cited research to back up that claim, noting in particular that “a published peer-reviewed study that tracked more than 15,000 workers in Neoprene plants across the world, including 1,400 from the [St. John] LaPlace facility, found no increased incidence of cancer deaths among them since the 1940s.” That study was paid for by the International Institute of Synthetic Rubber Producers, an industry group that includes DuPont as a member. Independent studies have shown that exposure to the chloroprene increased the risk of leukemia, kidney cancer, liver cancer, colon cancer, and liver cancer.

Unlike in Willowbrook, where the EPA apprised local officials of the risk the very same day the NATA report was published and within a week was presenting residents with information about the risks they faced, in the most affected census tract in St. John, people didn’t learn about their risk from chloroprene until eight months after the 2015 national report was published.

In St. John, there were no visits from high-ranking federal officials eager to answer residents’ questions. Nor did the ATSDR write or present the people of St. John with a report explaining the dangers they faced from the plant near their homes, or how to mitigate them.

Robert Taylor’s daughter, Raven Taylor, at home on Jan. 6, 2018. She is homebound due to an extremely rare autoimmune condition.Image: Julie Dermansky

The director of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development wrote to the agency’s regional office about the problem in May 2016, five months after the publication of the NATA report. But residents of St. John only learned about the problem in July, after a small handful of locals attended a meeting with a representative of the EPA’s regional office and parish leaders. The meeting wasn’t publicized, according to Robert Taylor, who was present. Only three to five community members attended, Taylor said, and those who wanted to ask questions had to submit them in writing. The EPA did set up a webpage with information about chloroprene in St. John.

As in Willowbrook, people in St. John were terrified and angry to learn about the dangers of the chemical they had been breathing for decades. Both communities were extremely worried about their children, who are particularly vulnerable to air pollution. And, as in Willowbrook, the Louisiana community very quickly formed a residents’ group, Concerned Citizens of St. John, to protect themselves from the pollution.

Fearmongers or Change-Makers?

But the community groups have met with very different responses. In Illinois, outrage over ethylene oxide has relatively quickly led to action. In August, days after the news about Sterigenics broke, state lawmakers introduced legislation that would make it impossible for facilities to release ethylene oxide above the safety threshold set by IRIS. By November, another state bill had been filed that would make the use of ethylene oxide illegal by 2021.

In Washington, D.C., Sens. Duckworth and Durbin have led the charge against the chemical. In November, the senators, along with congressional representatives from Illinois, introduced two bills addressing the pollution crisis. One would require the EPA to change emission standards for the chemical and notify the public within 30 days if that standard is violated. The other, the Ethylene Oxide Is Toxic Act, would institute several protections, including a requirement that the EPA notify Congress, state and local public health departments, and affected communities when air pollution reaches a dangerous level.

And just over a week ago, less than six months after they first learned of the pollution, Willowbrook residents finally triumphed over their local polluter and brought an end to the release of the carcinogenic gas. A February 15 order from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency suspended operations at the Sterigenics facility, halting the use of ethylene oxide “until measures are in place to prevent emissions of ethylene oxide that contribute to ambient levels of ethylene oxide which present a public health hazard to residents and off-site workers in the Willowbrook community.” The order, which was issued with the approval of Gov. J. B. Pritzker, used a little-known provision of Illinois law that gives the state the authority to “seal” facilities that create an immediate danger to public health.

Sterigenics called the closure “indefensible” in a statement that went on to describe the state’s closure of its plant as endangering health. “Unilaterally preventing a business that is operating in compliance with all state permits and regulations from carrying out its vital function sets a dangerous precedent. The Illinois EPA’s decision will place the health and lives of thousands of patients who rely on the critical medical products sterilized at Willowbrook at risk.” On February 18, Sterigenics sued the IEPA, arguing that the state was wrong to close the plant because it was operating according to its permits. (On February 20, a judge refused to lift the shutdown order.)

The news of the closure reached the members of Stop Sterigenics in the early evening. By the time they met in front of the plant to celebrate, it was already dark and only 19 degrees. After marveling over the police order taped to the factory door, Kaeseberg cranked “Hit the Road, Jack” on her phone, and she and her fellow activists danced in the freezing night. Afterward, dozens of residents and local lawmakers from both sides of the aisle gathered to toast their victory.

While lawmakers and residents were celebrating in Willowbrook, Louisiana lawmakers have yet to introduce either federal or state legislation addressing the air pollution crisis or address it publicly at all. And instead of sparking legislative action, the squeaky wheels of St. John have met with indifference and sometimes hostility from their government representatives.

Only one member of the group’s congressional delegation has responded to Concerned Citizens of St. John. “We sought help from our U.S. congressman, who sent a representative to one of our meetings,” said Robert Taylor, one of the group’s founders. “He sat in the meeting, said nothing, and got up and left. We never heard from him again,” Taylor added. “And we’ve never heard anything from either of our senators.”

Taylor’s group did get a visit from New Jersey senator and presidential hopeful Cory Booker, who stopped by St. John as part of a tour of some of the most polluted parts of Louisiana. Rather than treating his visit as a call to arms, one of the local papers, The Advocate, ran an editorial chastising Booker for criticizing the polluters without considering “the jobs and growth that the petrochemical corridor provides for the state.”

When one elected official — a local school board member named Patrick Sanders — attended the group’s meeting in January, Taylor publicly heralded him just for showing up. “It takes courage on the part of any politician to come and speak to us,” Taylor told Sanders as he sat among a few dozen of his neighbors gathered in a local church.

When I first visited met Taylor in 2017, he had just begun trying to call attention to local air pollution after his wife and daughter became gravely ill. While we spoke, his wife, Zenobia, who has multiple sclerosis and breathing difficulties, lay motionless on the family’s couch. His 48-year-old daughter, Raven, who has an extremely rare autoimmune condition, was bed-bound. Unable to digest food, Raven had recently been forced to abandon her nursing career. She had already had her uterus removed and a gastric pacemaker installed.

“It’s too much,” Taylor had said, by way of explaining how he, a 78-year-old musician who had spent his decades observing the problems around him, became someone who arranged community meetings, made posters, and stood in the streets carrying them.

In a state where chemical companies account for a significant portion of the economy, Taylor knew the group would be treading on sensitive ground. Lest they be branded as anti-business, he and other members have been careful to avoid asking for the Denka plant to be shuttered. Instead, the activists have requested only that the company bring its emissions down to 0.2 micrograms of chloroprene per cubic meter of air, the maximum level the IRIS report deemed safe.

“We just want to stop being poisoned,” Taylor said.

Still, Concerned Citizens of St. John has been tarred as troublemakers. “We’ve been ostracized, outcast,” said Taylor. After the group raised concerns about chloroprene at a 2016 meeting with Chuck Carr Brown, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality, Brown criticized them for “fearmongering.” When asked about the criticism, a spokesperson for Brown said that he was not talking about the advocacy group when he used the term “fearmongering.”

On Feb. 6, 2019, David Sanders stands in front of his home, which is across the street from the fence of the Denka facility.Image: Julie Dermansky

Over the past few years, as the group’s cries for help have become increasingly desperate, Taylor has become even more outspoken about why he thinks their concerns have gone unheeded — and why DuPont first located the factory in St. John. “They looked at this community and did like they normally do,” said Taylor. “If we find a place where it’s just going to be Negroes, we can set up business there, we can set up shop there, because nobody cares about them.”

Meanwhile, the toxic emissions in St. John continue. Although the local activists have held rallies, picketed in front of local schools wearing T-shirts emblazoned with 0.2 to remind passersby of the safety threshold for chloroprene, and worried aloud over the fate of their children at virtually every one of the bi-monthly meetings they’ve held over the past two years, they still haven’t manage to convince authorities to bring the carcinogens in their air down to a safe level.

Denka has said it is unable to lower its chloroprene emissions to EPA’s safety limit. Instead, in 2017, the company installed pollution controls that it said would bring its emissions down by 85 percent. In a statement, the company said that it spent over $35 million on “several major emissions reduction projects,” and that, as a result, the company “will very nearly meet its 85 percent reduction estimate once calculations have been completed.”

There has been a slight reduction of chloroprene emissions since last summer, when the most recent report came out. But air monitoring from November showed that emissions still hit levels that are hundreds of times above what’s safe, according to the EPA’s 2010 assessment. In October, students at East St. John High School were exposed to more than 152 times the threshold set by the IRIS report — more than the highest levels recorded at that spot before the pollution control equipment was installed. And at the local elementary school, Fifth Ward Elementary, just two blocks from the factory, almost 500 young children are still being exposed to the carcinogen. The highest readings released in October were slightly down from the heights they reached in 2016, but they were still as much as 289 times the EPA’s limit. In December, the levels were lower but still reached more than 124 times the safety limit.

In Willowbrook, until last week’s order from the Illinois EPA, children were still being exposed to carcinogens, too. Four schools and a daycare center are within a mile of the Sterigenics plant. In mid-January, EPA monitoring measured ethylene oxide in air outside of the local middle school and high school at more than 200 times the safety limit in the IRIS report. A few days later, the levels had dropped at the schools, but were higher than ever at several other points in town. And independent testing done by a company hired by the village of Willowbrook found the chemical at dangerous levels at various spots inside several schools, including the library of Gower Middle School, where the ethylene oxide was measured at 163 times the safety threshold.

The emissions have been infuriating to Lauren Kaeseberg, who grew up in the Willowbrook area and moved back a few years ago. Kaeseberg attended high school less than half a mile from the plant during its peak year of emissions, 1998, when the Sterigenics facility sent more than 30,000 pounds of the chemical through its stacks. Kaeseberg believes those emissions are the reason that so many of the people she knows were struck by cancer, including classmates and her mother, who died in 2010 at age 59.

“Cancers have plagued our community. Growing up we thought that was normal,” said Kaeseberg. “I feel so angry that I sat there unknowingly breathing in that crap.” Having children of her own in a local school and daycare in the area moved Kaeseberg to no longer be a passive victim of Sterigenics. So in addition to working with Stop Sterigenics, she is now running for her local school board and, if she wins, plans to advocate for the board to monitor ethylene oxide levels in schools.

At best, even when the U.S. government takes action, regulating air pollution can take years. On the federal level, IRIS is supposed to play a critical role in keeping Americans safe. By law, the values calculated in its chemical assessments are meant to help set national standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants and for cleanups at Superfund sites as well as enforceable levels under the Safe Drinking Water Act and Clear Air Act. States can also use the assessments to set safety levels, which in turn are used in permits for facilities that emit these chemicals.

But decades can go by before published studies make their way into IRIS assessments. Twenty-five years elapsed between the most recent chloroprene assessment and the government’s previous report on the chemical. For ethylene oxide, the process took even longer.

The Denka facility in Reserve, La., on March 29, 2018.Image: Julie Dermansky

Even more time can pass before states use those IRIS numbers to set regulations — if they ever do. Meanwhile, states set permits for industrial facilities based on outdated science. In the cases of both the Denka plant in St. John and the Sterigenics facility in Willowbrook, emissions that were well above the safety limits calculated by the EPA were nevertheless below the legal levels set by states in their permits.

Three Bad Chemicals

And yet the biggest hurdle for polluted communities isn’t necessarily the slow-churning bureaucratic system that allows regulation to lag so far behind government science, leaving chemicals in a gray area of the law, but the companies that take advantage of that uncertainty. Chemical manufacturers have long bristled at regulation and employed scientists and lawyers to fend it off. IRIS, the only division of the EPA that independently assesses the toxicity of industrial chemicals, has been a favorite target of chemical companies for years.

Today the regulatory process is increasingly paralyzed by this corporate pushback, making it even harder for people contending with air pollution.

Three main chemicals are responsible for more than 90 percent of the cancer risk from air pollution in the 109 census tracts that have an officially elevated risk, according to an analysis by The Intercept: ethylene oxide, chloroprene, and formaldehyde, a chemical used in building materials, glue, and fabrics that has been linked to cancers. If these three pollutants were eliminated, only one census tract in the U.S. would have a cancer risk from air pollution above 100 per million. In both St. John and Willowbrook, the cancer risk for air pollution would be well under 20 per million.

Yet the EPA hasn’t moved to ban or put national restrictions in place for any of these pollutants. For each, the chemical industry has repeatedly attempted to cast doubt on the government science — interventions that have worked to slow or halt the process of regulating the chemicals in communities rich and poor.

In the case of the chloroprene assessment, Denka has employed a consultant named Kenneth Mundt to undermine science that has already undergone decades of scrutiny. For example the National Toxicology Program’s Report on Carcinogens described chloroprene as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” back in 2000, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 1999. Yet Mundt, who was originally hired by DuPont, claimed that the 2010 IRIS assessment of the chemical was flawed. In the past two years, Denka twice requested that IRIS increase its safety threshold and change its classification of chloroprene as a “probable” human carcinogen.

Denka and Mundt had help from the Republican-led House Science Committee, which invited Mundt to be the main witness at a 2017 hearing on IRIS. The Congressmen described the EPA’s work on the chemical as “overreach” and spoke of eliminating IRIS.

IRIS denied the company’s first request to change the risk value of chloroprene. Tina Bahadori, director of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment, which includes IRIS, told The Intercept in 2017 that the government scientists had turned down Denka’s request for reconsideration. “It was our firm response that you can’t change the science just because you don’t like the answers,” said Bahadori.

But last year industry consultants submitted another request for the chloroprene assessment to be reconsidered. Denka gave the EPA even more information this month, according to an agency spokesperson. Though it may ultimately reject the company’s suggestions, IRIS is once again considering them.

The chemical industry is waging a similar campaign to exonerate ethylene oxide. In September, the American Chemistry Council requested that the EPA correct the assessment of that chemical, too, insisting it was “substantially flawed” and asking the agency to not just change the evaluation but also the values calculated in the National Air Toxics report. Dow, which operates the Union Carbide plant in St. Charles, the biggest emitter of ethylene oxide in the country, has also disputed the assessment. In its suit against IEPA, Sterigenics also disputed the “accuracy and validity” of the IRIS assessment of ethylene oxide.

And in late December, the EPA issued a highly unusual request for public comment on the use of the risk value IRIS calculated for ethylene oxide in an unrelated document. In a letter to acting EPA Administrator Wheeler, Duckworth said she was alarmed that hidden inside a 103-page document “was a troubling information request that appears to be a transparent invitation for the public — including chemical industries — to weaken EPA’s forthcoming rules intended to protect Illinoisans and Americans throughout the nation from elevated levels of cancer risk resulting from exposure to ethylene oxide.”

“I’ve never seen this before,” said Emma Cheuse, a staff attorney at Earthjustice who has been working on protections from ethylene oxide. “It’s shocking that EPA would attempt to question or ignore the most current scientific assessment.”

The EPA responded to an inquiry about the request for public comment with an emailed statement saying that the agency intends to evaluate and address facility-wide risks due to ethylene oxide in future rule-making.

Meanwhile, an IRIS assessment of formaldehyde has been near completion for years but has yet to be released. In 2015, that scientific report was being reviewed and prepared for public comment, according to an IRIS document from that year. But formaldehyde was absent from the division’s most recent agenda, published in December.