AP: More Blacks Live With Pollution

Toxic Gumbo
In the "Cancer Belt," Louisiana Black Communities
Fight Industrial Polluters
By Ron Nixon
Special to SeeingBlack.com

A string of lights illuminate the night sky over the rural, 100-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the day, these lights give way to clouds of smoke that rise from the giant mechanical structures that dot the area's landscape. The structures belong to 138 companies that comprise a virtually who's who of the petrochemical industry: Texaco, Borden, Occidental Chemical, Kaiser Aluminum, Chevron, IMC-Agrico, Dow, Dupont to name a few.

State and local officials call this progress. The petrochemical industry, they say, contributes billions of dollars and jobs to the state and local economies. Residents who live in the areas nearby the industry call it another name: "Cancer Alley." For them, the area's industry has yielded few jobs, destroyed the natural environment and brought a host of illnesses they attribute to emissions from the plants. Residents say the area is but one more example of what they call environmental racism—the targeting of communities of color for undesirable facilities.

A number of studies suggest that such claims are not unfounded. Nationally, a 1987 study by the United Church of Christ's Commission on Racial Justice found Blacks were four times were more likely to live in areas with toxic and hazardous waste sites than Whites. A 1992 investigation by the National Law Journal found that when government does enforce environmental regulation and fine companies, fines are much higher in White communities than in Black ones. In Louisiana, reports by the US Commission on Civil Rights and an unreleased report by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region Six, have raised concerns about the location of chemical plants and their possible impact on the health of their neighbors, who are primarily people of color.
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Convent is a lower-income, rural, 84% African American community along the Mississippi River in St. James Parish, Louisiana. n15 Located in the eighty-five-mile area commonly referred <*39> to as "Cancer Alley" or the "Chemical Corridor," Convent is a highly toxic community even by Louisiana and Chemical Corridor standards. In 1995 industrial facilities in the Convent area emitted 251,179 pounds of toxic air pollution per square mile: over sixty-seven times the amount per square mile emitted for the rest of the parish, the third most polluted parish in the state; ninety-three times more than the amount emitted per square mile for the highly-polluted Chemical Corridor; 129 times more than the average for Louisiana, described as easily the most polluted state in America on a square mile or per capita basis; and 658 times more than the U.S. average. n16 A person could spend half a day in Convent and be exposed to almost as much toxic air pollution as the average American breathes in a year.

Unfortunately, industrial development has not resulted in a noticeable economic improvement for many Convent residents. The median annual income for the Convent area is only $ 11,476, compared to a median income for the parish of $ 23,000 and a national average of $ 30,000. n17 Almost half of the households in Convent have incomes less than $ 15,000 per year, less than 50% of the children graduate from high school, and unemployment runs as high as 60%. n18 Convent is a classic example of a local community <*40> suffering the burdens of industrial pollution while the economic benefits of the industry flow outside the community to non-resident employees and distant corporate officers and shareholders.
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