In the summer of 2022, heavy rainfall damaged a water treatment plant in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, precipitating a high-profile public health crisis. The Republican Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency, as thousands of residents were told to boil their water before drinking it. For some, the pressure in their taps was so low that they couldn’t flush their toilets and were forced to rely on bottled water for weeks. 

Many of the city’s 150,000 residents were wary that their local government could get clean water running through their pipes again. State officials had a history of undermining efforts to repair Jackson’s beleaguered infrastructure, and the city council, for its part, didn’t have the money to make the fixes on its own. So when the federal government stepped in that fall, allocating funding and appointing an engineer to manage the city’s water system, there was reason to believe change may finally be near. 

But as the months wore on, hope turned to frustration. The federally appointed engineer, Ted Henifin, began taking steps to run the city’s water system through a private company, despite Mayor Chokwe Lumumba’s objections. Advocates’ repeated requests for data and other information about Jackson’s drinking water went unanswered, according to a local activist, Makani Themba, and despite Henifin’s assurances before a federal judge that the water was safe to drink, brown liquid still poured out of some taps. Faced with these conditions, a group of advocates sent the Environmental Protection Agency a letter last July asking to be involved in the overhaul of the city’s water system. 

“Jackson residents have weathered many storms, literally and figuratively, over the last several years,” they wrote in the letter. “We have a right and responsibility to be fully engaged in the redevelopment of our water and sewer system.” The letter was followed by an emergency petition to the EPA containing similar requests for transparency and involvement. 

Earlier this month, a federal judge granted the advocates their request, making two community organizations, the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and the People’s Advocacy Group, parties to an EPA lawsuit against the city of Jackson for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. A seat at the table of the legal proceedings, the advocates hope, will allow the city’s residents to have a say in rebuilding their infrastructure and also ward off privatization.

The saga in Jackson reflects a wider problem affecting public utilities across the country, with cash-strapped local governments turning to corporations to make badly needed repairs to water treatment plants, distribution pipes, and storage systems, a course that often limits transparency and boxes locals out of the decision-making. 

“This isn’t a uniquely Jackson problem,” said Brooke Floyd, co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly at the People’s Advocacy Institute. “We need ways for all these cities that need infrastructure repairs to get clean water to their communities.”

The roots of Jackson’s water crisis lie in decades of disinvestment and neglect. Like many other midsize cities around the country, such as Pittsburgh and St. Louis, Jackson declined after white, middle-class residents relocated to the suburbs, taking tax dollars away from infrastructure in increasing need of repair. Between 1980 and 2020, Jackson’s population dropped by around 25 percent. Today, the city is more than 80 percent Black, up from 50 percent in the 1980s. A quarter of Jackson’s residents live below the poverty line, with most households earning less than $40,000 a year, compared with $49,000 for the state overall.

Over the decades, antagonism between the Republican state government and the Democratic and Black-led local government created additional obstacles to updating Jackson’s water and sewage infrastructure. A Title VI civil rights complaint that the NAACP filed with the EPA in September 2022 accused Governor Reeves and the state legislature of “systematically depriving Jackson the funds that it needs to operate and maintain its water facilities in a safe and reliable manner.” The biggest problem, the NAACP argued, was that the state had rejected the city’s proposal for a 1 percent sales tax to pay for infrastructure updates and by directing funds from the EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund away from the capital city. 

“Despite Jackson’s status as the most populous city in Mississippi, state agencies awarded federal funds” from the EPA program three times in the past 25 years, the complaint read. “Meanwhile, the state has funneled funds to majority-white areas in Mississippi despite their less acute needs.”

In the absence of adequate resources from the state and local government, Jacksonians have learned to fend for themselves, Floyd told Grist. At the height of the water crisis in 2022, federal dollars helped fund the distribution of bottled water to thousands of residents, but when the money dried up, people organized to secure drinking water for households still reckoning with smelly, off-color fluid running from their taps. When Henifin began posting boil-water notices on a smartphone app that some found hard to use, one resident set up a separate community text service. Floyd said that for some residents, these problems are still ongoing today. 

“There’s this sense of, we have to provide for each other because no one is coming,” Floyd said. “We know that the state is not going to help us.”

Henifin has told a federal judge that he’s made a number of moves to improve Jackson’s water quality. The private company that he set up, JXN Water, has hired contractors to update the main water plant’s corrosion control and conducted testing for lead and bacteria like E. coli. But residents and advocates point out that while the water coming out of the system might be clean, the city hosts more than 150 miles of decrepit pipes that can leach toxic chemicals into the water supply. Advocates want the city to replace them and conduct testing in neighborhoods instead of just near the treatment facility, changes that the city has federal money to make. In December 2022, the federal government allocated $600 million to Jackson for repairs to its water system.

But the worry is that this money will be spent on other things. Henifin is the one who handles the federal funds. By court order, he has the authority to enter into contracts, make payments, and change the rates and fees charged to consumers. 

Themba, the local activist, said that Henifin has not responded to residents’ demands for additional testing and access to monitoring data that already exists. Because JXN Water is a private company, it’s not subject to public disclosure laws requiring this information to be shared with the public. (Henifin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.) 

Themba points to Pittsburgh as an example of a place where residents fought privatization of their water system and secured a more democratic public utility. In 2012, faced with a lack of state and federal funding, the city turned over its water system to Veolia, an international waste- and water-management giant based in France. Over the following years, the publicly traded company elected for cost-cutting measures that caused lead to enter the water supply of tens of thousands of residents. A local campaign ensued, and advocates eventually won a commitment from the city government to return the water system to city control and give the  public a voice in the system’s management.

“What we’ve learned from all over the country is that privatization doesn’t work for the community,” Themba said. “We want what works.”

The court order that designated Henifin as Jackson’s water manager in 2022 does not outline what will happen once his four-year contract expires in 2026. Last month, the Mississippi Senate passed a bill that would put Jackson’s water in the hands of the state after Henifin steps down, a move that the manager recently said he supports and that Jackson’s mayor strongly opposes. That bill soon failed in the House without a vote. Now that they are part of the lawsuit, advocates hope they’ll have a chance to influence the outcome, before it’s too late. 

“Jackson residents have felt left out of the equation for so long,” Floyd said. “If we lose this, that’s a big deal.”

In early March, a small group of Democratic senators from the Rust Belt sent President Joe Biden an urgent letter. They began by extolling the benefits of two of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, calling them “historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure” that will ring in a brighter future for American manufacturing. But there was something, they cautioned, that threatened to hamper this progress: the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned regulations for integrated iron and steel mills, proposed last July and nearing a court-ordered deadline.

“We are concerned that the EPA’s proposed integrated steel rules will do what foreign competitors have thus far been unable to do: deter and diminish continued American investment in improving our steel industry,” wrote the five senators, among them Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. They claimed the regulations would cost companies billions, enough to force widespread layoffs, despite the EPA’s estimate of $7.1 million in costs for the two companies, US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, that own all 10 of the country’s steel mills.

Shortly after the senators sent off the letter, the EPA unveiled its final rule, the first time the agency has ever attempted to cut emissions from leaks and equipment malfunctions at steel mills. The EPA expects the new regulations will cut particle pollution by 473 tons every year. But the final rule is weaker than the one it proposed in 2023. Whereas the agency had originally planned to slash steel mills’ toxic emissions by 79 tons per year, a 15 percent decrease overall, the final version is expected to cut emissions by 64 tons each year. The EPA also dropped a proposed limit on the thickness of the smoke emanating from mills’ doors and roof vents. 

Jim Pew, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who has litigated multiple lawsuits against the agency for its failure to curb steel mill pollution, told Grist that the regulations will have “real benefits” for the people living in the shadows of the country’s most polluting steel mills, but lamented the safeguards that were removed. 

“It’s a small step in the right direction,” he said, noting that the EPA had furnished the final rule with a standard to regulate a type of incinerator used by some highly polluting mills. “The steel companies mounted a real disinformation campaign about the cost of the rule that I think put pressure on EPA to take out some provisions that would have been beneficial.”

The new rule gives the country’s steel companies two years to update their facilities with the requisite emission reduction equipment and workplace standards. In an email, an EPA spokesperson said the agency had “carefully considered the stakeholder feedback and made data-driven modifications in the final rule that provide needed flexibility, while also providing health protections for surrounding communities.”

The senators’ letter represents a rare occasion of congressional involvement in the EPA’s rulemaking process, a yearslong endeavor that requires extensive data collection and engineering expertise. The agency’s air pollution regulations, while undergirded by science and riddled with industrial jargon, have major consequences for communities that host the country’s industrial infrastructure, determining the quantities of toxic chemicals that companies can emit—and that residents can inhale.  

Steel production is a highly polluting enterprise involving heating coal above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a product known as coke, which is then combined with iron ore in a blast furnace and melted down into liquid steel. The broiling heat releases a slew of toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, as well as fine particulate matter that can accumulate in the lungs after prolonged exposure. Numerous studies have linked pollution from steel mills to impaired heart and lung function.

Ninety percent of the steel industry’s emissions originate from four mills that dot the rim of Lake Michigan near the border between Illinois and Indiana. Once bustling hubs for manufacturing, towns like Gary, Indiana, sank into decline over the latter half of the 20th century when manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. Today, the steel mills that emit black smoke into the air of the area’s overwhelmingly low-income and Black communities are holdouts from this era, symbols of a prosperous past that politicians on both sides of the aisle seem eager to protect. 

The first effort by members of Congress to convince the EPA to change its course came last December. A group of eight senators, including Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as well as Republicans Mike Braun and Todd Young of Indiana, sent a letter to the EPA’s administrator, Michael Regan, arguing that the agency’s proposed regulations would harm national security by making the domestic steel industry—the “world’s cleanest major producer of steel”—uncompetitive.

“We support reducing harmful air pollution,” they wrote. “We also support rules that are durable, realistic,” and based on the view that the federal government should “improve public health while protecting good-paying jobs and supporting industries essential to our national and economic security. These rules fail to meet those standards.” The senators did not specify which provisions in the proposed rule would have these effects. The letter in March from Manchin and the other Democrats brought even stronger warnings. “If these rules are promulgated as proposed, Cleveland-Cliffs and US Steel may be left with no choice but to prematurely shutter mills, resulting in job losses and irreparable harm to their local communities,” the senators argued.

In its final rule, the EPA estimated that the total costs to the steel industry would total $7.1 million, an amount that would cover the installation of air monitors to measure chromium pollution around the perimeter of facilities and the implementation of new workplace practices to reduce leaks from previously unregulated emission sources. But in a press release supporting the senators’ claim of costs running into the billions, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves argued that the rule would “put at risk good-paying, middle-class union jobs in the steel industry.” In 2023, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs reported sales of $18 billion and $21 billion, respectively.

Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, said concerns that the new rules will wreak havoc across the industry are unfounded. “The cost claims were so shocking to us, because EPA routinely overstates the cost of its rules,” Pew said, citing a study in 2020 from the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. “They’re saying that not only did EPA understate the cost of these rules, but that it understated them by orders of magnitude.”

After taking note of the senators’ efforts to gut the steel mill regulations, Bruce Buckheit, the former director of the EPA’s air enforcement division, decided to send Regan a letter on behalf of Earthjustice in February. He dissected the contents of the new rule, arguing that its impacts would be “straightforward” and meet the minimum pollution reductions required by the federal Clean Air Act. “I’ve seen nothing in the rulemaking record for these proposals that supports the cost claims in the senators’ letter,” he wrote. The total capital expenditures, he concluded, would be minuscule compared with U.S. Steel’s and Cleveland-Cliffs’ revenues.

“I believe it is important to push back against such overblown industry claims, lest that narrative drive public opinion and agency policy,” Buckheit wrote.

People living near plants that use ethylene oxide to sterilize medical equipment have for years pressured regulators to crack down on their toxic emissions. Residents in communities from Laredo, Texas, to Willowbrook, Illinois, have tried to shut these facilities down, challenged them in court, and fought for air-sampling studies to measure their exposure to the carcinogen. 

The Environmental Protection Agency has finally taken notice.

Yesterday the agency finalized new regulations that will require dozens of medical sterilization companies to adopt procedures and technologies that it claims will reduce emissions of the toxic chemical by 90 percent. The rule will take effect within two to three years, a longer timeline than advocates of the change hoped for. Still, regulators and community advocates alike hailed the change.

“We have followed the science and listened to communities to fulfill our responsibility to safeguard public health from this pollution—including the health of children, who are particularly vulnerable to carcinogens early in life,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan in a press release.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, more than 50 percent of the nation’s medical equipment is sterilized using ethylene oxide. The nondescript buildings where this fumigation occurs came under scrutiny in 2016, after the EPA revised its risk assessment of the chemical, finding it 30 percent more toxic to adults and 60 percent more toxic to children than previously known. Over the years, studies have linked exposure to the chemical to cancers of the lungs, breasts, and lymph nodes.

The medical sterilization industry has recently warned that too stringent regulations risk disrupting the supply of medical equipment.

“The industry supports updated standards while ensuring the technology patients rely on around the clock is sterile and well supplied,” wrote the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a trade group, in a February press release.

After the agency published a 2019 analysis indicating unusually high levels of cancer risk near sterilizers, people around the country rallied against the facilities in their communities, with a Chicago suburb even managing to shut one down. Federal data indicate that more than 96 of these businesses operate in 32 states and Puerto Rico and are concentrated near Latino communities. 

Marvin Brown, an attorney at Earthjustice who advocated for stronger oversight of toxic emissions from commercial sterilizers, applauded the new rule, noting that EPA regulations were last revised in 1994, long before the agency was aware of the true risk of ethylene oxide.

“Overall, it’s definitely a victory for our clients in terms of getting EPA to finally revise and increase regulations on an industry that’s really been operating with a lack of controls for the past 30 years,” he told Grist in an interview.

The rule will rely upon several measures to achieve an estimated 90 percent reduction in toxic emissions. It requires companies to install air monitors inside their facilities to continuously track the level of ethylene oxide and report their results to the EPA on a quarterly basis. Brown considers these continuous monitoring systems important, because they capture pollutants escaping through leaks and cracks in the sterilization chambers, providing a more comprehensive assessment of the facility’s emissions.

The rule also requires both large and small sterilizers to install “permanent total enclosures,” which creates negative pressure in a building, preventing air from escaping. Instead of being released into the atmosphere and putting nearby residents at risk, any emissions are routed to a device that burns them.

But for all its benefits, Brown said, the new regulation leaves out several important protections residents and advocates fought for. The EPA pushed back the rule’s implementation from 18 months for all sterilizers to two years for large facilities and three years for smaller ones, a change Brown attributed to industry pressure. The decision will come as a disappointment, he said, to residents who hoped for more immediate relief. 

Notably, the new regulations do not require companies to monitor the air near their facilities, making it difficult for communities to assess the concentrations of ethylene oxide near their homes. The agency has argued that such a provision is excessive given the new monitoring requirements inside of facilities, but advocates of the change note that internal monitors don’t capture leaks that happen outdoors, such as from trucks carrying newly sterilized equipment. 

Ethylene oxide emissions from the warehouses where medical equipment is stored after sterilization are a growing concern. After fumigation, these items can carry traces of the chemical that evaporate for days or weeks afterward. Officials in Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division found that this off-gassing can create substantial concentrations of the chemical in the air, and a recent Grist investigation revealed that dozens of workers at one warehouse in Lithia Springs experienced nausea, headaches, rashes, and seizures after being exposed to these fumes on the job. The EPA’s new regulations do not cover such emissions, an omission Brown called “unfortunate.” 

“There’s still a lot more work to be done,” he said of the new rule. “But this is a good step in terms of stricter emission controls and new emission controls that did not exist before.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

When reports emerged in late December that the Israeli military planned to pump seawater into the underground tunnel networks used by Hamas fighters in Gaza, scientists and advocates around the world raised alarm over the prospect of an environmental disaster. Flooding the tunnels threatened to permanently salinate the land, making it impossible to cultivate crops. Seawater could also seep underground and into an aquifer that the majority of Gazans rely on for water. Palestinian rights groups and protesters around the world were already accusing the Israeli government of committing genocide against the Palestinians, with more than 20,000 killed by Israeli bombings on Gaza since Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October. Now, another term has entered the conversation: “ecocide.” 

Broadly defined as the severe, widespread, and long-term destruction of the environment, ecocide isn’t considered a crime under international law. At the moment, the only way to prosecute vast environmental destruction internationally is as a war crime in the International Criminal Court, or ICC, based in The Hague, Netherlands. But a growing number of countries, advocates, and legal experts are trying to change that. While some, like representatives from the island nation of Vanuatu, are motivated by the escalating climate crisis, and others, like Ukraine, are more interested in prosecuting environmental war crimes, they ultimately share the same goal: making ecocide the fifth international crime the ICC could prosecute, along with crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and genocide. 

Their campaign reached a major milestone in 2021, when a panel of legal experts worked over six months to create a legal definition of ecocide. Afterward, a number of countries and the European Union incorporated at least part of this definition into new legislation, which, experts said, increases the likelihood that it will eventually be adopted by the International Criminal Court. While there are plenty of obstacles to making such a law effective, advocates interviewed for this story said that the symbolic importance could have far-reaching consequences. Creating a law against ecocide could eventually force government officials and corporate executives to think twice before polluting rivers, poisoning the air, or destroying the land.

“It would make clear what we care about and what we think cannot be left to individual states to regulate,” said Kate Mackintosh, the executive director of the Netherlands-based UCLA Law Promise Institute Europe, which provides training for students interested in international law. She explained that to be a crime under international law, an act must be a violation against not only its direct victims, but all of humanity. “Destroying our environment has got to be on that level.”

The term “ecocide” was coined during the Vietnam War after the US military sprayed more than 90 million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides across South Vietnam’s countryside. The chemical’s 20-year half-life can increase to more than 100 years if it’s buried beneath the soil, and people in southern Vietnam are still living with its effects more than half a century later. After visiting the region in the early 1970s and observing the chemicals’ devastating effects, a group of American scientists and legal experts began a campaign against using herbicide as a weapon of war. Their efforts led to an executive order by President Gerald Ford in 1975 renouncing the use of defoliants in future wars and to a UN convention in 1978 prohibiting the “hostile use of environmental modification techniques.” 

But none of these official declarations made ecocide prosecutable as a crime under international law, experts pointed out, underscoring the significance of the current campaign to codify it as one.

After the adoption of the UN convention, the movement against ecocide died down for the next several decades. When it reemerged in the early 2000s, it was tied to concerns about climate change. A UK-based campaign helmed by the late lawyer and environmentalist Polly Higgins gained traction at the ICC’s annual assembly in 2019, when Vanuatu called for the court to consider recognizing the crime of ecocide. The South Pacific island nation, where sea-level rise has eaten away coastlines and saltwater has contaminated most sources of drinking water, is widely considered to be a leader in the global fight against climate change. 

Vanuatu’s petition “put ecocide back on the diplomatic table,” said the British environmentalist Jojo Mehta, who founded the Stop Ecocide campaign with Higgins in 2017. It was the impetus for that panel of lawyers to convene in 2021 with the aim of developing a legal definition of ecocide that could be adopted by the ICC. After months of deliberation, they settled on the meaning of ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

Mackintosh, who was on the panel, emphasized that this definition allows prosecutors to pursue legal action simply if they can prove the intent to cause environmental harm. “The crime is not making the damage happen,” she explained. “It’s creating substantial risk of that damage.” 

This distinction fills an important gap in the ICC’s legal code. The Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court in 2002, criminalizes environmental damage under its war crimes statute. Prosecutors must prove that the damage to the environment is “widespread, long-term, and severe”—that is, the damage must already be done. But there hasn’t been a single successful prosecution of environmental crime under this statute, not even in seemingly clear-cut cases, such as the Russian military’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine last summer. The hydropower facility, more than 1 mile long,  held back one of Europe’s largest reservoirs, and when it burst, a torrent of water flooded over 230 square miles, killed scores of people, and spread chemical pollution across the land. 

While there is no clear path for codifying ecocide as a crime under international law, Mehta said, the campaign has already cleared several hurdles, particularly with the European Union’s adoption of its own ecocide law in November. In the coming years, the Stop Ecocide campaign will focus on getting together an informal group of countries willing to propose a law at the ICC’s annual assembly. “It’s not really a question of if,” she said. “It’s a how and a when.”

The campaigners pushing for an international ecocide law have two main objectives. The first would be to bring specific people, such as the military officers behind the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction, to justice, because the ICC requires that defendants be individuals rather than governments or corporations. That presents some challenges, said Richard Falk, a veteran legal expert and environmental advocate. (Falk, along with the biologist Arthur Galston, was the first to use the term “ecocide” in the 1970s.) For instance, if the ICC wanted to prosecute the fossil fuel giant Shell for contaminating vast swaths of the Niger Delta with crude oil, it would have to pin the blame on individuals within the company, rather than on the company itself. “That would make the proof of intent extremely difficult,” though not impossible, to establish, Falk said. 

The second major objective of an international ecocide law would be to prevent widespread environmental damage. On this point, experts Grist spoke to were torn about the effectiveness of an international ecocide law. For one, prosecuting any crime takes time, during which the environmental destruction may continue. What’s more, Falk said the ICC has previously behaved as a “policy instrument” of Europe and the US and often votes with the flag rather than the law. In a case like the war in Gaza, countries might defend their diplomatic allies rather than trying to judge their guilt or innocence in good faith, he said. 

Rob White, a professor of criminology at the University of Tasmania who has written extensively about ecocide, wrote in an email that he agreed with this perspective, adding that “one could well argue” that Israel’s actions in Gaza fit the existing Rome Statute’s standard of “widespread, long-term, and severe” environmental destruction. “However, as the genocide unfolding in Gaza also illustrates, international law is basically useless” in stopping the ongoing aggression, he said. 

All four of the ecocide experts interviewed for this story said that Israel’s actions in Gaza could plausibly fit the definition of ecocide, as determined by the panel. Evidence of immense environmental devastation is everywhere in the Gaza Strip, from the razing of farm lands with heavy machinery to the use of white phosphorus on porous soil. The Israel military confirmed in late January that it had started flooding underground tunnels with seawater, raising fears that it will contaminate the main source of drinking water for the strip’s 2 million people. 

While Mehta acknowledged that it would be difficult to stop acts like these even with an ecocide law in place, she is optimistic that the law would have a deterrent effect. She offered the example of the United Kingdom’s Children Act of 1989, which made it illegal for parents to hit their children, helping to turn a once acceptable behavior into a taboo. The law has “actually got a kind of cultural force to it, which I think is super, super important,” Mehta said.

The experts Grist interviewed insisted that an ecocide law would, at the very least, serve an important symbolic purpose. 

“The impact of this kind of decision, even if it’s not enforced, does have a legitimating and mobilizing effect on civil-society activism,” Falk said. He pointed to his and scientists’ efforts after the Vietnam War, which led to Ford’s executive order and the UN declaration that effectively made the use of Agent Orange taboo. “It’s the most you can expect from the law,” he said.

The 85-mile stretch of land along the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana is among the most studied industrial corridors in the country. Over the past several decades, advocates, scholars, and journalists have published numerous reports detailing the dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals in the environment and their effects on the health of the region’s residents, many of whom are Black and low-income. It’s why the area is known around the world as “Cancer Alley.”

A report published on Thursday by Human Rights Watch sheds new light on the experiences of residents living near the region’s sprawling petrochemical complexes, and includes details of a first-of-its-kind analysis that found higher rates of poor birth outcomes among women living in south Louisiana. In the areas with the worst pollution, for instance, the report found that more than a quarter of babies are born with low birth weights, more than double the state average. 

The researchers put much of the blame on state regulators, who have repeatedly permitted plants in areas where the air is already choked with pollution and have failed to enforce federal standards. To that end, Human Rights Watch recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency initiate an investigation into whether the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality should be the agency administering the Clean Air Act in the state.

Human Rights Watch’s lead researcher on the report, Antonia Juhasz, told Grist that she hopes her team’s work will help to spur change at the state and federal levels. Headquartered in New York City, the organization is best known for its work documenting the cases of jailed activists, dictatorships, and humanitarian conditions in crisis zones around the world, not for its North America-based research. 

“We were hoping that we could provide additional research by applying Human Rights Watch’s unique model of going in and documenting harm in a very careful, interview-by-interview process that has been applied all around the world to human rights,” Juhasz said.

The study comes as the fossil fuel industry ramps up its build-out throughout the region, with at least 19 new petrochemical projects in the works, and as southern Louisiana comes under greater scrutiny. In 2022, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd identified the area known as Cancer Alley as one of the 50 most polluted places on Earth. Boyd said these “sacrifice zones” represent “a stain upon the collective conscience of humanity.” 

Much of the new report is descriptive, painting a picture of giant industrial facilities belching out huge plumes of black smoke that drift over the homes, schools, and outdoor spaces where people live, work, and play. Juhasz interviewed 37 residents living in the nine parishes between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and found that severe respiratory conditions such as bronchitis and childhood asthma are common. 

“Residents said these ailments added stress to already at-risk pregnancies, resulted in children being rushed to emergency rooms and kept inside to avoid polluted air, missed days of work and school, sleepless nights due to wracking coughs, and the deaths of family members and friends,” the report reads.

It also details the results of a yet-to-be-published study finding rates of low birth weight (less than 5.5 pounds) soared as high as 27 percent in census tracts with high levels of air pollution. By contrast, the national rate is 8.5 percent. (The analysis is currently under peer review for the publication Environmental Research: Health.)

To complement this research, Juhasz interviewed people such as Ashley Gaignard, 46, a resident of Donaldsonville in Ascension Parish, which has the highest reported amount of toxic air pollution in the region, with more than 22 plants operating within its borders. All three of Gaignard’s children had low birth weights and two were premature. Her son Jason, 23, was born with an undeveloped lung. The condition contributed to severe lifelong asthma that has led to frequent emergency room visits and nebulizer treatments.

Juhasz said this research is important because birth outcomes are not often considered in studies of exposure to toxic air pollution. “Most women are unaware of this risk,” she said. “Most medical professionals are unaware of the risk. And so that information is not getting shared or acted upon.” 

The report lays out a list of recommendations to various state and federal agencies to improve conditions in Cancer Alley. In particular, Juhasz and her team suggested that the EPA initiate an investigation into whether it should withdraw the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s authority to administer the Clean Air Act in the state. In addition to weak enforcement protocols and a permitting process that repeatedly allows more industrial development in Black communities, the report notes, the state agency has adamantly denied claims that residents living near the region’s hulking chemical plants are getting sick from the pollution. 

A former EPA staffer and air pollution expert, Scott Throwe, said he doubts whether such an investigation would be fruitful, and he could not think of a time in his 30 years at the agency when one was conducted. But he agreed with the report’s argument that the federal government’s lack of action in Cancer Alley has been disappointing. At the start of his term in 2021, EPA Administrator Michael Regan promised to make the disproportionate pollution in Black neighborhoods across the country a priority for cleanup, and specifically visited Cancer Alley residents on a “toxic tour” of the South. More than three years later, Throwe said, not much has changed. 

“I was happy to see Mr. Reagan’s initial efforts and intentions, but unfortunately, I really think the follow-through has just been anemic,” he said. “I just don’t see the efforts to hold the states accountable.” 

Climate change looms larger in Louisiana than it does almost anywhere else in the United States. The state is facing down monster hurricanes as well as sea-level rise, and it still relies on a fossil fuel industry that pollutes the state’s air and erodes its wetlands. 

But the state’s incoming governor, Republican Jeff Landry, doesn’t see it that way. Landry, who has served as Louisiana’s attorney general for almost eight years, is one of the most stalwart opponents of President Joe Biden’s climate policies, and he won election this fall after calling climate change a “hoax” and defending polluters.

He earned an outright majority of votes in the first round of the gubernatorial election last month, surprising many observers who thought the race would head to a second-round runoff. He will succeed the term-limited Democrat John Bel Edwards, whose commitment to climate action made Louisiana an outlier along the Gulf Coast. With a Republican-controlled legislature backing him, Landry could tug the state in a stark new direction, unwinding Edwards’ plans and bolstering support for industries with a long record of environmental issues.

Landry has made a national name for himself as Louisiana’s attorney general through aggressive litigation against the Biden administration, leading several lawsuits against Biden policies on everything from offshore oil lease sales to flood insurance to the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. His most aggressive fight has been against the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been trying to address air pollution in the state’s oil and gas industry.

The latter years of Landry’s term as attorney general coincided with a major push by residents in the state’s main industrial corridors to curb the toxic pollution in their backyards. After years of regulatory rollbacks under former President Donald Trump, advocates finally saw an opportunity for systemic change after the 2020 election. During his first week in office, Biden signed an order that created two new executive bodies dedicated to addressing environmental justice, a term that refers to the disproportionate levels of pollution borne by low-income people and communities of color across the country. That same year, a federal judge ordered the EPA to begin responding to the civil rights complaints it receives, a responsibility that the agency had long ignored. 

Encouraged by these developments, advocates filed two civil rights complaints against Louisiana regulators for their failure to reduce dangerous emissions in “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where more than 150 industrial facilities spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air of predominantly Black communities. A 2019 investigation found that many residents of the region inhale air that is orders of magnitude more toxic than the EPA’s safety standards. The EPA opened an investigation into these conditions in April 2022, and then brought together state officials, residents, and advocates to reach an agreement on how best to protect people living in the vicinity of the region’s hulking chemical plants. 

Documents obtained by Grist revealed significant progress at the negotiating table, but last spring things began to sour, and Landry may have been the reason why. Adam Kron, an attorney at Earthjustice who worked on the case, told Grist that the breakdown in talks coincided with Landry’s sudden attendance in the negotiation meetings. Then, in June, Landry sued the federal government, arguing that the proceedings represented a vast overstep of the EPA’s authorities. The case could have implications beyond the EPA’s handling of the Cancer Alley complaints: Landry’s legal argument took aim at the agency’s ability to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that no person should, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, be subject to discrimination under any program that receives federal funding. 

By challenging state regulators’ permitting of plants in majority-Black areas, Landry wrote, EPA officials were “moonlight[ing] as social justice warriors fixated on race.” In a twist, he accused federal officials of being discriminatory, arguing that their actions implied that chemical plants should be concentrated in other, whiter areas. Shortly after Landry filed suit, the EPA dropped both civil rights complaints in Louisiana, dealing a major blow to Cancer Alley residents who had fought for years to overhaul the state’s permitting and regulation of big polluters. 

Kron said that the case clearly laid out the governor-elect’s vision for addressing civil rights concerns in communities facing disproportionate exposure to toxic emissions. “As attorney general with no direct authority over [state regulators] he managed to work these agreements, and now he’ll be the one with direct control over those agencies,” he said. “It really doesn’t bode well.”

Landry has also challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to adapt to worsening climate disasters. Earlier this summer, he sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency over its new flood insurance pricing system, which has resulted in higher insurance premiums for many homeowners in coastal states such as Louisiana and Florida. Experts agree that flood insurance prices under the old system didn’t reflect rising flood risks, but Landry and several other Republican state attorneys general argued that the federal government had exceeded its authority when it raised insurance premiums. 

In addition, Landry and the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, sued the Biden administration in August in an attempt to force the administration to hold larger oil lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. He also led Republican states in a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its attempts to set a new standard for the “social cost of carbon,” a key metric for setting climate policy. The conservative-led Supreme Court sided with the administration in 2022 and again last month. 

An attorney and former sheriff’s deputy who hails from the state’s central coast, Landry has always been an ardent supporter of the oil industry. He majored in environmental science at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and started what his campaign calls an “oil and gas environmental service company” after graduating, then went to law school before winning a single term in Congress during the “red wave” election of 2010.

In 2011, the year after the BP oil spill, Landry pushed the Interior Department to restart drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico and compared department employees to the Nazi Gestapo when they refused to meet with him on short notice. The same year, when then-President Barack Obama gave a speech to Congress announcing his jobs plan, Landry held up a sign that read, “Drilling = Jobs.” As attorney general, he served on the board of his top political ally’s oil services company, raising ethics allegations.

Louisiana’s outgoing governor, Edwards, also supported the oil industry, and has even feuded with the Biden administration over its attempts to limit new oil drilling, but he has paired that support with action on climate change. Louisiana’s climate action plan, which an Edwards-appointed council approved last year, calls for the state to halve emissions from 2005 levels by the end of the decade, the same as Biden’s national target. 

In response to Landry’s gubernatorial victory, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group, called Landry a “friend of industry” and speculated that he will continue to support the development of liquefied natural gas export terminals in the southernmost parts of the state. In 2017, Landry worked with a Houston-based businessman to import more than 300 Mexican laborers to help construct a massive new liquefaction facility in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. According to the Times-Picayune, the venture involved two firms owned by Landry, and a third owned by his brother.  

Landry has called climate change a “hoax,” arguing that the Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen in cycles “repeated long before civilization of man.” He has also criticized renewable energy, arguing that the Biden administration’s focus on solar and wind is an attempt to force Louisiana into “energy poverty” and that “the DC swamp must face the fact that the manufacturing of wind turbines and solar panels requires natural gas, crude oil, and coal.” The political organization Climate Cabinet expects Landry to rescind Edwards’ climate plan upon taking office. Neither Landry’s state office nor his campaign responded to Grist’s request for comment.

Even so, there may be one area where the outgoing and incoming governors have common ground. During his two terms as governor, Edwards helped implement a $50 billion coastal restoration program that will leverage money from a BP oil spill settlement to protect the state’s coastline from further erosion. These coastal restoration efforts enjoy broad support from Louisiana voters in both parties, and even politicians who oppose climate action have touted levees and marsh-creation projects in their towns. During his time as attorney general, Landry endorsed a settlement deal with the mining and oil company Freeport-McMoRan that would see the company spend $100 million on this kind of erosion control, despite industry objections. 

Kimberly Davis Reyher, the executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a nonprofit advocacy group, says she’s hopeful that Landry will maintain investments in coastal restoration even if he unwinds other climate and environmental protections.

Coastal erosion is “not a partisan issue here, so you don’t have to argue about climate change,” she told Grist. “You just go down to the coast and observe the water going up and the land going down.” She added that the Edwards administration succeeded in building a bipartisan consensus around coastal restoration issues and said she’s “hopeful” that Landry will look for ways to supplement the BP erosion funding, perhaps by trying to get a larger share of lease revenue from oil and gas companies. 

When it comes to other climate and environmental issues, though, she’s far less optimistic about a Landry governorship. “We’ll see what happens,” she said.

Sewage collecting in crudely dug trenches. Failing septic tanks that send waste bubbling into backyards. These are some of the common sights across Alabama’s Black Belt, a strip of 24 continuous counties blessed with deep fertile soil but long plagued by inadequate wastewater infrastructure and the commensurate parasitic disease. 

It’s a problem, advocates say, that the state has the resources to address. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency opened a civil rights probe last week into the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and its implementation of a federal program designed to boost water infrastructure in communities across the country. The decision comes after advocates filed a complaint in March alleging that, for years, the state has hindered Black residents in rural areas from obtaining federal funds to update their wastewater systems. 

It’s a region where children play on sewage-laden soil and an overwhelming stench envelops some neighborhoods for weeks on end. “It’s really disgraceful and painful that people endure this, especially when we have the opportunity to fix it,” said Aaron Colangelo, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defence Council who has been working on the issue.

The March complaint was filed under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin under any program that receives federal funding. At issue is the state’s distribution of money from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, a federal program that provides financial assistance for states to carry out water infrastructure projects. 

In urban areas, that usually means funding updates to municipal wastewater treatment plants or controlling sources of toxic pollution. But in Alabama’s sparsely populated Black Belt, where a disproportionate number of residents are Black and live in poverty, it entails providing financial support for people without access to a centralized sewer system to build onsite septic tanks. The Black Belt gets its name from its soil, a dark earthen clay that drains water very slowly, making it difficult to set up septic systems. Many of the ones that do exist are antiquated and in dire need of repairs—at least 50 percent in one rural Alabama county, according to a UN report from 2011. 

In theory, federal dollars from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund should help. But in their March complaint, attorneys at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Southern Poverty Law Center alleged that state regulators designed a system that makes it impossible for rural residents to access this crucial financial assistance. 

One of the ways that the Alabama Department of Environmental Management does this, the complaint states, is by only allowing public bodies to receive funding, ruling out rural homeowners and community groups (in contrast, other southern states like North Carolina and Arkansas give high priority to onsite sanitation systems). 

“The result is stark: Alabama has distributed more than one and a half billion dollars in Clean Water State Revolving Fund money since the program’s inception in 1987, but it has never awarded any money” to support individual households’ onsite sanitation needs, the complaint read.

A lack of wastewater infrastructure can have severe public health consequences. One study from 2017 found that one-third of residents in Alabama’s Lowndes County are dealing with hookworm, an intestinal parasite that can cause anemia and stunt children’s mental development. 

The direness of the wastewater situation across the Black Belt has been well documented for more than a decade. In 2017, a UN poverty official toured the region and remarked that he’d never seen anything like it in the First World. A 2021 civil rights probe by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services into the conditions in Lowndes County concluded in May with the state agreeing to identify homes with inadequate sanitation systems and updating them. 

Colangelo, the lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called that settlement “remarkable,” but added that it will only solve the problem for one of the Black Belt’s counties. The EPA’s probe this week will hopefully address the issue statewide, he said, requiring regulators to accept individual household bids for onsite sanitation funding and to conduct outreach to communities that are not aware that the financial assistance exists.

Earlier this summer, the EPA dropped a high-profile civil rights complaint in Louisiana’s primary industrial corridor, where more than 100 industrial plants dump toxic pollution into the air of predominantly Black neighborhoods. While that decision prompted advocates to consider whether the agency would fail to follow through with other Title VI complaints, Colangelo told Grist that he does not expect a similar situation in Alabama. “It’s on EPA to see it through, but we’re confident that they will,” he said. 

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management has 30 days after the EPA’s announcement to respond to its probe in writing. After that, the federal agency could choose to bring all parties to the negotiating table to work out an agreement or conduct an investigation of its own. 

Pastor Philip Schmitter waited more than 20 years for the Environmental Protection Agency to do its job. In 1992, he’d filed a civil rights complaint to halt the construction of a power station that would spew toxic lead into the air of his predominantly Black community in Flint, Michigan. Decades passed without a response, so he joined four other groups around the country in a lawsuit to compel the agency to address their concerns.

The case hinged on the EPA’s duty to enforce Title VI, a provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI allows federal agencies to take action against state policies that discriminate by disproportionately harming groups protected by the Act—the discriminatory policy being, in this case, Michigan’s permitting of a plant that would pollute Black neighborhoods. After the EPA lost the suit in 2020, agency officials finally began timely investigations of civil rights complaints and made some of the EPA’s first-ever findings of discrimination. 

That progress, however, could be short-lived.

This week, the EPA abruptly terminated three of its highest-profile open civil rights complaints. The move deals a major blow not only to the majority-Black communities that filed them but also to the EPA’s own authority to enforce Title VI in places with some of the nation’s worst air quality. The cases originated in the region widely known as “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor in southeast Louisiana, and were voluntarily closed after the state’s Republican attorney general sued the federal government for alleged abuses of power during the complaint negotiations.

Grist obtained copies of two draft agreements from the now-defunct negotiations, which reveal efforts by EPA officials to institute profound changes to Louisiana’s permitting process, which has historically concentrated chemical plants near Black communities. One of the most substantial terms of the resolution would have required state regulators to assess whether a community is already exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution before permitting new plants there. With the cases closed, the prospect of those changes has all but vanished. 

“This is basically the EPA not using the full power of its environmental laws,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who worked on the case. He described Title VI as one of the clearest ways to advance environmental justice, a goal that Biden EPA has repeatedly called a priority. “It’s disappointing to see EPA acquiesce to what seems like a lawsuit that really doesn’t have much grounding to it.”

The Title VI statute states that no person should, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, be subject to discrimination under any program that receives federal funding. The provision is wide-reaching, covering hundreds of thousands of programs across the country and governing decisions as diverse as where a road can go or who can get treatment at a hospital. But in the environmental space, it’s been largely underutilized, with the EPA routinely failing to respond to dozens of cases within the 180-day period required by the law.

The 2020 federal court ruling on Schmitter’s case gave communities in Louisiana’s St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes hope that Title VI could finally help limit pollution in their backyards. Together, their complaints alleged a number of negligent actions by state regulators, including a failure to curb cancer-causing emissions that violate federal safety standards and to consider pre-existing pollution when permitting new industrial plants. A formal resolution of their cases would have likely addressed these concerns.

The draft agreements that Grist obtained include sweeping measures to change the way the state of Louisiana approves new industrial facilities, like folding community involvement into critical moments of the decision-making process and requiring officials to prove, both before and after plants begin operating, that their emissions will not disproportionately harm people of color. In Louisiana, majority-Black communities are exposed to at least 7 times the emissions, on average, as predominantly White communities in industrial areas. 

“We were hoping to get systemic change,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, who worked on the complaints. “For decades, people have been fighting against individual polluters and individual facilities, but when the decision-making process itself is flawed, you need something that seeks to improve it.”

Louisiana officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite progress with the agreements, testimony in Louisiana’s legal filings suggests that, at some point during the negotiation process, things between state and federal officials began to sour. Then, in late May, the state’s attorney general, Jeff Landry, sued the EPA. 

The case hinged on the EPA’s ability to pursue actions based on “disparate impacts,” or the idea that a policy or agency decision can disproportionately harm a specific group of people, regardless of whether or not that harm is intentional. These standards have always been unpopular with some state officials who view them as evidence of federal agencies meddling in matters beyond their authority. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is sympathetic to these concerns, ruling in numerous landmark cases over the past few years to vastly restrict the powers of federal regulators. 

But multiple lawyers that Grist interviewed argued that Louisiana’s legal arguments would have ultimately been unlikely to undermine Title VI, raising the question of why the EPA appears to have preemptively conceded on the matter.  “It was unripe—there was no action by the EPA that Louisiana could challenge,” said Kron. “So it seems like a strange lawsuit for [the federal government] to take as a serious enough threat to just undo this whole process that’s been going on for over a year.”

Environmental advocates and residents in Louisiana also decried the decision to close the complaints. “I often feel like our communities are left to fight on our own,” said Joy Banner, an activist and long-time resident of the region. “It’s disappointing when we have organizations at the federal level who aren’t willing to step in to fight along with us for our basic human right to survive.” 

EPA spokesperson Khanya Brann told Grist that the agency remains “fully committed” to improving the environmental conditions in the communities that filed the complaints. “Community participation has been critical to identifying both problems and solutions, and we look forward to our continued partnership with the residents in both parishes as we continue our joint efforts to improve public health and the environment,” she said.

The EPA wrote in its letters announcing the closure of the complaints that it would address residents’ concerns through other means, like its pending litigation against one of the region’s most infamous chemical plants and its proposed rules for tightening standards for certain types of facilities operating in the region. But residents told Grist that those measures do not cover the totality of their concerns, and that a major benefit of the Title VI process is its speedy timeline: While court cases can drag on and emissions standards can take years to implement, a resolution of the complaints may have granted communities much faster relief from toxic emissions.  

Claire Glenn, a criminal defense attorney with a background in civil rights law, compared EPA’s use of Title VI to other federal agencies’ more robust implementation of the law. The Department of Transportation, for example, requires regulators to consider whether a project will disproportionately impact a group of people before it’s ever constructed. However, she added, deciding where a transit line goes is often less controversial than approving a multi-billion dollar company’s new industrial complex.

“I think the reason EPA’s Title VI program is so hamstrung is because it is so directly butting up against corporate interests,” she said.

Advocates told Grist that they are exploring other options to advance residents’ concerns, and called the EPA’s actions this week a setback but not a roadblock. Residents said that they are determined not to give up. 

“We come from a long line of people who fought,” said Banner. “This is just one little hill that we have to overcome—but ultimately I see us heading to the mountain, and victory is the mountain.”

Thousands of employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are lobbying this week for Congress to address staffing issues that they say are limiting their ability to meaningfully carry out the Biden administration’s ambitious climate goals. 

Leaders of AFGE Council 238, a union representing roughly half of the EPA’s 14,000-member workforce, said in a memo that non competitive salaries and a lack of career development opportunities are fueling attrition and overburdening staff. Congress could address these issues by expanding the EPA’s funding in the annual appropriations legislation, which it will write later this year. Failure to do so, the union warned, will jeopardize the implementation of President Joe Biden’s two major legislative achievements—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Union leaders began briefing members of Congress about the situation on Monday, presenting them with a series of demands that include the creation of a more robust promotion structure and the development of a program to support equity and inclusion. Staffers are also planning a rally at EPA headquarters on Wednesday. 

Sources familiar with the EPA’s workforce told Grist that the actions on Capitol Hill this week have been a long time coming. 

The EPA has spent the past six years embroiled in multiple crises. Hundreds of senior staff members departed after former President Donald Trump rolled back dozens of environmental safeguards, creating gaps in institutional knowledge that continue to haunt the agency today. The COVID-19 pandemic further hobbled enforcement programs, as on-the-ground inspection rates for power plants, refineries, and other pollution sources plunged. 

Now, the threat of climate change is expanding the EPA’s mission in a way that Congress could not have imagined when the agency was founded in the early 1970s. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act will require staff members to dole out billions of dollars in grants to state and local initiatives and expand its Superfund cleanup program to protect communities of color living near sites of uncontrolled contamination. The agency will take on these efforts at the same time as it fulfills its regular statutory duties, which include developing complicated new rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and vehicles and increasing enforcement efforts to ensure companies are abiding by those regulations. But staffing levels have not kept up with these expanded duties. 

Today, the workforce is around the size that it was under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The AFGE has said that the agency will need 20,000 full-time staff, a 40 percent increase, to carry out the programs it has been tasked with. 

Nicole Cantello, who practiced as an EPA attorney for three decades before joining AFGE Council 238 full time in 2020, told Grist that the issue is not only with hiring, but also with retention. A dearth of promotional opportunities and limited work-from-home options have caused retirement-age employees to depart early. Roughly 20 percent of the EPA’s staff have been at the agency for 30 years or more and could elect to retire soon. 

“We want to push EPA to create a retention plan that will keep that cohort at the agency for a little longer, because we have a five to 10-year window here to implement” the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, she said. 

Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that is campaigning with AFGE in Washington this week, said that in addition to helping the U.S. achieve its climate goals, an expanded workforce would allow the EPA to more thoroughly develop its own science instead of relying on studies designed and developed by industrial companies. He pointed to the EPA program that issues rules around the use of toxic chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals.” In the past, industrial companies have tried to conceal the hazards of these types of chemicals, leading to lags in their regulation. 

“That’s an actual example of how understaffed parts of EPA can make mistakes that have long-term human health consequences,” he said.

EPA spokesperson Melissa Sullivan told Grist that the agency is working to onboard nearly 1,800 new employees and that attrition rates at EPA are among the lowest in the federal government. She added that the agency has significantly expanded its outreach program to target qualified candidates.

“While the federal government often cannot equal private sector salaries, it can provide employees with more stability and other benefits,” she said. “Specifically, the agency offers the opportunity to protect human health and the environment and positively affect an untold number of people’s lives.”

For members of AFGE, the staffing shortages are both personal and existential. A failure to address them could have repercussions for generations to come.

“Our mission has grown enormously, and climate challenges continue to escalate, but EPA’s inability to hire and retain staff has created a crisis,” said AFGE Council 238 President Marie Powell Owens in a statement. “We need to raise pay and restore career ladders now. The future of the EPA and our planet are at stake.”

The industrial plants in the riverside Louisiana city of Port Allen have worried Diana LeBlanc since her children were young. In 1978, an explosion at the nearby Placid oil refinery forced her family to evacuate. “We had to leave in the middle of the night with two babies,” said LeBlanc, now 70. “I always had to be on the alert.”

LeBlanc worried an industrial accident would endanger her family. But she now thinks the threat was more insidious. LeBlanc, who has asthma, believes the symptoms she experienced while sick with the coronavirus were made worse by decades of breathing in toxic air pollution.

“That is the one time in my life I thought, I’m not going to survive this,” she said. “I’m going to become a statistic. I was that sick.”

New research, conducted in part by ProPublica, shows she could well be right.

COVID-19 can be made more serious—and, in some cases, more deadly—by a specific type of industrial emission called hazardous air pollutants, or HAPs, according to new peer-reviewed research by ProPublica and researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The study, published Friday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found this association in both rural counties in Louisiana and highly populated communities in New York.

The analysis examined air pollution and coronavirus deaths in the roughly 3,100 U.S. counties and found a close correlation between levels of hazardous pollutants and the per-capita death rate from COVID-19.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines HAPs as chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer and other serious health problems. Under the Clean Air Act, industrial facilities emitting these pollutants are subject to regulations.

Hazardous air pollution may help explain the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in communities like West Baton Rouge Parish, home to Port Allen. With 39 deaths as of Sept. 7, the parish’s per-capita death rate from COVID-19 ranked it among the top 3% of all U.S. counties with at least 30 deaths. Several of its neighbors in Louisiana’s industrial corridor also rank near the top of the list.

COVID-19 and Air Pollution Exposure

The coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed over 189,000 lives across the country, including more than 4,900 in Louisiana, offers a rare opportunity to study the public health outcomes of both short- and long-term air pollution exposure.

Because the virus affects the respiratory system, researchers have rushed to study the potential association between mortality rates and air pollution. Early studies, including one looking at particulate matter—distinct from HAPs, but often found with them—have suggested a link.

Last year, the Times-Picayune and the Advocate and ProPublica published the series Polluter’s Paradise, which used data from an EPA model to quantify levels of hazardous air pollution along the lower Mississippi River’s industrial corridor. As the virus battered many of those same communities this spring, we wanted to determine whether air quality was contributing to high death rates.

The SUNY-ProPublica analysis uses pollution information from the EPA’s 2014 National Air Toxics Assessment, a screening tool aimed at helping state agencies identify and measure the sources of HAPs. These pollutants can come from industrial facilities as well as from power plants and vehicles.

NATA combines information on pollutants that affect the respiratory system into a variable called the “respiratory hazard index.” The analysis found that an increase in the hazard index at the county level corresponded to an increase in COVID-19 death rates. This association existed at all levels of HAPs exposure, including levels that the EPA deems acceptable.

The analysis controlled for a long list of variables, including population density, income, race and age, as well as community health indicators such as prevalence of smokers, adult obesity, preventable hospital stays and physical inactivity.

Peer Review

A recent study by researchers from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that long-term exposure to particulate matter made the coronavirus more deadly. But EPA officials and industry groups have dismissed the research primarily on the basis that it lacks peer review, a standard but time-consuming process where new research is evaluated by independent experts prior to publication.

ProPublica and the Times-Picayune and the Advocate sent the EPA a copy of the new analysis on hazardous air pollutants, which has been peer reviewed, seeking comments. Enesta Jones, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that understanding the links between air pollution and COVID-19 is a “complicated process that will take many years.”

“The research in this area is just beginning, and EPA looks forward to reviewing papers once they are peer-reviewed and published,” she said.

Cancer Alley

The industrial corridor that stretches alongside the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans is nicknamed “Cancer Alley” because of the perceived health risks associated with local chemical emissions. LeBlanc considered herself lucky because no one in her family has had cancer. But she does have asthma, and so do two of her three children.

According to EPA data, West Baton Rouge Parish has more air pollution that affects the respiratory system than 99% of counties nationwide.

Research has long supported an association between asthma and exposure to air pollution. While researchers are not sure how this happens, they believe air pollutants could prevent the body’s immune system from being able to tell the difference between a harmless allergen and a dangerous particle, like a virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that people with asthma are at higher risk of getting very sick from COVID-19.

In mid-March, LeBlanc began having flu-like symptoms. It started as a fever and cough. “Then, the second week it got doubly worse,” she said. LeBlanc went to a drive-thru site in Baton Rouge to get tested for coronavirus. Her test came back positive.

She was sicker than she’d ever been. “I had nightmares. I had coughing. I had aches in my bones. I couldn’t even touch myself,” she said. “That’s how painful it was.”

LeBlanc has nearly recovered. But she said she still has not regained her senses of smell and taste and she gets fatigued more quickly. She believes her debilitating symptoms owed partly to her compromised immune system. “Now what causes your immune system to be down? Is it the air you’re breathing?” she asked.

Dr. Michael Brauer, a professor of public health at the University of British Columbia, said there is substantial evidence of a link between air pollution and respiratory infections. “If you’re exposed to a viral infection or bacterial infection and at the same time are exposed to air pollution, that infection is more likely to become severe,” he said.

But air pollution can also have permanent effects on health that make COVID-19 symptoms more severe, whether or not a person continues to breathe in polluted air. Vijay Limaye, an environmental health scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Science Center, said that short-term declines in air pollutants in New York City due to lockdown measures in March and April did little to protect populations suffering from long-term exposure.

“In some cases, damage to our lungs, our brains, our hearts from air pollution is irreversible. And there are certain harms inflicted by these exposures that can’t be mitigated even after months or years of breathing cleaner air,” said Limaye.

Asthma Alley

ProPublica and SUNY researchers created a nationwide ranking of counties by combining two variables: COVID-19 mortality rate and the quantity of pollution affecting the respiratory system. First on the list is the Bronx, a borough that was hit particularly hard by COVID-19.

“The air quality issues here and the type of decision-making that’s happened over and over has made us Asthma Alley,” said Mychal Johnson, an organizer from the South Bronx, referencing the local nickname of an area with one of the highest asthma hospitalization rates in the country.

“Waste transfer stations, fossil fuel power plants, heavy diesel trucking,” Johnson said, listing the various sources of pollution in the South Bronx. “We knew that what we had been fighting all these years was only going to make us more susceptible to COVID mortality.”

While all of New York City’s five boroughs except Staten Island occupied slots in the study ranking’s top 20, the remainder of the list included more sparsely populated counties in Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia that contain industrial facilities or power plants. Five counties in the top 20 are located on the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana’s chemical corridor, including West Baton Rouge Parish.

LeBlanc’s son moved his family to a farm farther away from chemical plants in the parish because of his concern about air pollution, and his mother is moving there soon. But a trucking company just north of the property is seeking a permit from the state to increase its air pollution.

“I do worry about my grandchildren,” she said. One of her grandsons has severe asthma and allergies, at times requiring a nebulizer. “It’s just something we’ve had to live with, and that’s the terror of it,” she said.

When LeBlanc’s children were young she had a bag packed at all times in case an industrial accident happened and they needed to evacuate. “I lived in fear of just having to pick up my babies and run,” she said. “I did everything I could for them and here it’s come to the next generation.”