Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019

Welcome to “Cancer Alley,” Where Toxic Air Is About to Get Worse

Author:     Lylla Younes, Tristan Baurick and Joan Meiners
Source:     ProPublica, The Times-Picayune, and The Advocate
Publication Date:     Oct. 30, 12 p.m. EDT
 Link: Welcome to “Cancer Alley,” Where Toxic Air Is About to Get Worse
Stephan:   When you look at the Great Schism Trend, which I have been covering for the past 20 years, it becomes clearer and clearer that states governed by Republicans are in decline while states governed by Democrats are improving. If you look at California, Oregon, and Washington, for instance, and compare their last decade of social outcome data with say, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana one cannot help but be stunned at the differences and the direction of the trends amongst these six states. Frankly, I wouldn't live in a Red value state. It would be dangerous to my health and wellbeing. And yet voters in those states vote against their own wellbeing again and again. Here is an example of what I mean.

The Eastman plant looms behind St. Gabriel apartments.
Credit: Sophia Germer/The Times-Picayune and The Advocate

ST. GABRIEL, LOUSIANA — Over a half-century, Hazel Schexnayder saw this riverside hamlet transformed from a collection of old plantations, tin-roofed shacks and verdant cornfields into an industrial juggernaut.

By the early 1990s, she’d had enough of the towering chemical plants and their mysterious white plumes, the roadside ditches oozing with blue fluid, the air that smelled of rotten eggs and nail-polish remover, the neighbors suffering miscarriages and dying of cancer.

“We were inundated with plants,” Schexnayder, now 87, said. “We didn’t need any more around here.”

She and others began pushing back in 1993, and the following year, residents voted to turn their corner of unincorporated Iberville Parish into the city of St. Gabriel. They wanted sidewalks and other amenities, but more than that, they wanted some say over the chemical plants popping up in their backyards.

While the newly created city was able to keep new plants […]

Read the Full Article