EPA study: blacks more likely
to live in toxic neighborhoods
David Pace
CHICAGO — An Associated Press analysis of a little-known government
research project shows that black Americans are 79 percent more
likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution
is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.
Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution scores also
tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than
those elsewhere in the country, AP found.
“Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not
exclusively, suffer disproportionately,” said Carol Browner,
who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton
administration when the scoring system was developed. “If
you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located,
they’re not in the upper middle class neighborhoods.”
With help from government scientists, AP mapped the risk scores
for every neighborhood counted by the Census Bureau in 2000. The
scores were then used to compare risks between neighborhoods and
to study the racial and economic status of those who breathe America’s
most unhealthy air.
President Clinton ordered the government in 1993 to ensure equality
in protecting Americans from pollution, but more than a decade later,
factory emissions still disproportionately place minorities and
the poor at risk, AP found.
In 19 states, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to
live in neighborhoods where air pollution seems to pose the greatest
health danger, the analysis showed.
More than half the blacks in Kansas and nearly half of Missouri’s
black population, for example, live in the 10 percent of their states’
neighborhoods with the highest risk scores. Similarly, more than
four out of every 10 blacks in Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin
live in high-risk neighborhoods.
And while Hispanics and Asians aren’t overrepresented in high-risk
neighborhoods nationally, in certain states they are. In Michigan,
for example, 8.3 percent of the people living in high-risk areas
are Hispanic, though Hispanics make up 3.3 percent of the statewide
population.
All told, there are 12 states where Hispanics are more than twice
as likely as non-Hispanics to live in neighborhoods with the highest
risk scores. There are seven states where Asians are more than twice
as likely as whites to live in the most polluted areas.
The average income in the highest risk neighborhoods was $18,806
when the Census last measured it, more than $3,000 less than the
nationwide average.
One of every six people in the high-risk areas lived in poverty,
compared with one of eight elsewhere, AP found.
Unemployment was nearly 20 percent higher than the national average
in the neighborhoods with the highest risk scores, and residents
there were far less likely to have college degrees.
Research over the past two decades has shown that short-term exposure
to common air pollution worsens existing lung and heart disease
and is linked to diseases like asthma, bronchitis and cancer. Long-term
exposure increases the risks.
The Bush administration, which has tried to ease some Clean Air
Act regulations, says its mission isn’t to alleviate pollution
among specific racial or income groups but rather to protect everyone
facing the highest risk.
“We’re going to get at those folks to make sure that
they are going to be breathing clean air, and that’s regardless
of their race, creed or color,” said Deputy EPA Administrator
Marcus Peacock.
Peacock said industrial air pollution has declined significantly
in the past 30 years as regulations and technology have improved.
Since 1990, according to EPA, total annual emissions of 188 regulated
toxins have declined by 36 percent.
Still, Peacock acknowledged, “there are risks, and I would
assume some unacceptable risks, posed by industrial air pollution
in some parts of the country.”
Government scientists and contractors spent millions of dollars
creating the health risk measures. They’re based on air emission
reports from industry, ratings of each chemical’s potential
health dangers, the paths pollution takes as it spreads through
neighborhoods, and the number of people of different ages and genders
living near plants.
The AP used EPA risk scores from 2000 so they would match the Census
data and because it takes years for the government to get corrected
emissions data. Some risks may have changed since then as factories
opened or closed or their emissions changed. The risk scores aren’t
meant to calculate a citizen’s precise odds of getting sick
but rather to help compare communities and identify those in need
of further attention.
The scores also don’t include risks from other types of air
pollution, such as automobile exhaust.
Kevin Brown’s most feared opponent on the sandlot or basketball
court while he was growing up wasn’t another kid. It was the
polluted air he breathed.
“I would look outside and I would see him just leaning on
a tree or leaning over a pole, gasping, gasping, trying to get some
breath so he could go back to playing,” recalls his mother,
Lana Brown.
Kevin suffered from asthma. His mother is convinced the factory
air that covered their neighborhood triggered the son’s attacks
that sent them rushing to the emergency room week after week, his
panic filling the car.
“I can’t breathe! I have no air, I’m going to
die!”
The air in the neighborhood where Kevin played is among the least
healthy in the country, according to research that assigns risk
scores for industrial air pollution in every square kilometer of
the United States.
Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where Kevin spent most of his
childhood staying with his grandmother and going to school, is in
a virtually all-black neighborhood where more than half the people
live in poverty. The two-story project is nestled among the south
Chicago steel mills, which for decades turned the night skies orange
with pollution.
Most of those steel mills are now closed, victims of imports. But
the area still retains enough industry to rank among the nation’s
neighborhoods with the highest health risks.
Just across the Little Calumet River from Altgeld, the ISG Riverdale
steel plant annually releases into the air tens of thousands of
pounds of heavy metals like manganese, zinc, lead and nickel. Dave
Allen, a spokesman for Mittal Steel, which acquired the factory
this year, said his company is committed to improvements.
“The environment is a matter of focus and pride for us and
we hope to be good operators,” he said.
Mrs. Brown said the asthma attacks that hit Kevin, now 29, were
most serious and frequent during the time he stayed in Altgeld Gardens.
“He may now get an attack maybe once a year, if that often,
where he has to go to a hospital,” she said. “He was
having them at one point quite frequently, at least two to three
times a month.”
Mrs. Brown was interviewed at the home she purchased seven years
ago on a tree-lined street neighborhood south of the plant, where
the health risk from industrial pollution is one-fifth the level
in Altgeld Gardens.
She said she never considered pollution the culprit in her son’s
asthma, even after she left the neighborhood. It was only after
she moved back into her mother’s home for several years that
she began to realize how widespread breathing problems were in Altgeld
Gardens. Two children who lived next door had asthma, and one used
a breathing machine as many as three times a day, she said.
“You see things happening and then you say let me start investigating,”
she said. “I found out a lot of people either had bronchitis
or some kind of respiratory problem. Someone in each household seemed
to have a respiratory problem.”
In Louisville, Ky., Renee Murphy blames smokestack emissions in
the “Rubbertown” industrial strip near her home for
the asthma attacks that trouble her five children. Her neighborhood,
which is 96 percent black, ranks among the nation’s highest
in risk from factory pollution.
“It’s hard to watch your children gasp for breath,”
she said.
The Murphy family lives just a few blocks from Zeon Chemicals, which
released more than 25,000 pounds of a chemical called acrylonitrile
into the air during 2000. The chemical is suspected of causing cancer,
and the government has determined it is much more toxic to children
than adults.
Tom Herman, corporate environmental manager at Zeon, said the plant
is reducing its emissions and is talking with area residents concerned
about air quality to show that “there are real people working
here concerned for them as well as our own health.”
Malcolm Wright, 43, operates power washing equipment in Camden,
N.J., where several neighborhoods also rank among the worst nationally.
He said he developed asthma after moving to the city in his early
30s, and he blames the city’s air pollution for attacks that
sent him to the hospital four times last year.
Air pollution “works with many other factors, genetics and
environment, to heighten one’s risk of developing asthma and
chronic lung disease, and if you have it, it will make it worse,”
said Dr. John Brofman, director of respiratory intensive care at
MacNeal Hospital in the suburban Chicago town of Berwyn.
“Evidence suggests that not only do people get hospitalized
but they die at higher rates in areas with significant air pollution,”
he said.
Repeated studies during the 1980s and 1990s found that blacks and
poor people were far more likely than whites to live near hazardous
waste disposal sites, polluting power plants or industrial parks.
The disparities were blamed on a lack of political clout by minorities
to influence land use decisions in their neighborhoods.
The studies brought charges of racism. Clinton responded in 1993
by issuing an “environmental justice” order requiring
federal agencies to ensure that minorities and poor people aren’t
exposed to more pollution and other environmental dangers than other
Americans.
Recent reports suggest little has changed:
• The Government Accountability Office concluded earlier this
year that EPA devoted little attention to environmental equality
when it developed three major rules to implement the Clean Air Act
between 2000 and 2004.
• The EPA’s inspector general reported last year that
the agency hadn’t implemented Clinton’s order nor “consistently
integrated environmental justice into its day-to-day operations.”
The watchdog said EPA had not identified minority and low income
groups nor developed any criteria to determine if those groups were
bearing more than their share of health risks from environmental
hazards.
• The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded two years
ago after an investigation that “federal agencies still have
neither fully incorporated environmental justice into their core
missions nor established accountability and performance outcomes
for programs and activities.”
EPA Assistant Administrator Granta Nakayama disputed those reports,
saying the agency has been choosing its enforcement initiatives
to maximize the impact on minority and poor communities.
Environmental experts say most pollution inequities result from
historical land use decisions and local development policies. Also,
regulators too often focus on one plant or one pollutant without
regard to the cumulative impact, they say.
Short of government action, citizens in high-risk neighborhoods
have little legal recourse. They can file lawsuits under the 1964
Civil Rights Act but must prove intentional discrimination, a difficult
burden.
And while some federal agencies have rules that ban environmental
practices that result in discrimination, the Supreme Court has said
private citizens can’t file lawsuits to enforce those rules.
Citizen complaints to EPA have had little effect. From 1993 through
last summer, the agency received 164 complaints alleging civil rights
violations in environmental decisions and accepted 47 for investigation.
Twenty-eight of the 47 later were dismissed; 19 are pending.
“There is no level playing field,” said Robert Bullard,
director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta
University. “Any time our society says that a powerful chemical
company has the same right as a low income family that’s living
next door, that playing field is not level, is not fair.”
(Associated Press)
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Pollution in the U.S.
The Associated Press
analyzed the health risk posed by industrial air pollution using
data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Census
Bureau.
EPA uses toxic chemical air releases reported by factories to
calculate a health risk score for each square kilometer of the
United States. The scores can be used to compare risks from
long-term exposure to factory pollution from one area to another.
The scores are based on:
• The amount of toxic pollution released by each factory.
• The path the pollution takes as it spreads through the
air.
• The level of danger to humans posed by each different
chemical released.
• The number of males and females of different ages who
live in the exposure paths.
The scores aren’t meant to measure the actual risks of
getting sick or the actual exposure to toxic chemicals. Instead,
they are designed to help screen for polluted areas that may
need additional study of potential health problems, EPA said.
The AP mapped the health risk scores to the census blocks used
during the 2000 population count, using a method developed in
consultation with EPA. The news service then compared racial
and socio-economic makeup with risk scores in the top 5 percent
to the population elsewhere.
Similar analyses were done in each state, comparing the 10 percent
of neighborhoods with the highest risk scores to the rest in
the state.
To match the 2000 Census data, the AP used health risk scores
calculated from industrial air pollution reports that companies
filed for EPA’s 2000 Toxic Release Inventory. It often
takes several years for EPA to learn of and correct inaccurate
reports from factories, and the 2000 data were more complete
than data from more recent reports that were still being corrected.
The AP adjusted the 2000 health risk scores in Census blocks
around some plants that filed incorrect air release reports
in 2000, after plant officials provided corrected data.
Counties that had the highest potential health
risk from industrial air pollution in 2000, according to an
AP analysis of government records. The health risk varies from
year to year based on the level of factory emissions, the opening
of new plants and the closing of older plants.
1. Washington County, Ohio
2. Wood County, W.Va.
3. Muscatine County, Iowa
4. Leflore County, Miss.
5. Cowlitz County, Wash.
6. Henry County, Ind.
7. Tooele County, Utah
8. Scott County, Iowa
9. Gila County, Ariz.
10. Whiteside County, Ill.
Factories whose emissions created the most potential health
risk for residents in surrounding communities in 2000, according
to an AP analysis of government records:
1. Eramet Marietta Inc., Marietta, Ohio
2. Titan Wheel Corp., Walcott, Iowa
(closed in 2003)
3. Eastman Kodak Co., Rochester, N.Y.
4. American Minerals Inc., El Paso, Texas
5. F.W. Winter Inc., Camden, N.J.
6. Meridian Rail Corp., Cicero, Ill.
7. Carpenter Tech. Corp., Reading, Pa.
8. Longview Aluminum LLC, Longview, Wash. (closed in 2001)
9. DDE Louisville, Louisville, Ky.
10. Lincoln Electric Co., Cleveland |
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