Cancer Alley



Cancer Alley is the regional nickname given to an 85 mi stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, in the River Parishes of Louisiana, which contains over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries. This area accounts for 25% of the petrochemical production in the United States. Environmentalists consider the region a sacrifice zone where rates of cancer caused by air pollution exceed the federal government's own limits of acceptable risk.

Community leaders such as Sharon Lavigne have led the charge in protesting the expansion of the petrochemical industry in Cancer Alley, as well as addressing the associated racial and economic disparities.

History
Following an oil and gas boom around the time of World War II, a number of refineries spawned along the Mississippi River near the Gulf Coast. Many of these facilities were previously located in major population centers, such as Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but during the 1950s, many sought to migrate to less densely populated places. Many relocated to the small communities along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, many of which had significant or majority African American populations. By the 1970s, the area had a proliferation of plants producing vinyl chloride, nitrogen fertilizers, and chlorine. By the 1970s, serious air pollution and water pollution was noted by federal agencies. An EPA report found 66 pollutants in New Orleans drinking water, and 31 lethal chemicals in the air of Plaquemine. In 1976, Coast guard divers retrieving sediment samples from a bayou suffered second-degree burns on their hands. By the early 1980s, residents in the neighborhood of Good Hope had grown accustomed to regular fires at a local oil refinery, and developed their own informal evacuation plans for their occurrences. Despite the known problems with pollution, the petrochemical industry in the area continued unabated, and even continued expanding. In the early 1980s, an oil refinery purchased the land of Good Hope for expansion.

Beginning in the 1980s, locals also perceived certain species of plants and animals becoming less common. By 1988, locals began referring to an area in Chalmette as "Cancer Alley". The "alley" later grew to encompass an eighty-five-mile stretch along the Mississippi River stretching from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and includes the parishes of East Baton Rouge, West Baton Rouge, Iberville, Ascension, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, Jefferson, Orleans, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines.

Industrial plants emitting toxic waste in Louisiana continued to proliferate in the 21st century. According to EPA data, the number of industrial plants in Louisiana that reported their toxic releases grew from 255 to 320 from 1988 to 2017, an increase of 25%, even as the number of such plants nationwide dropped by 16% over that period.

Per a 2003 study that surveyed 11 plants in St. James Parish, researchers found that the plants employed between 4.9% and 19.4% African Americans, which is low in comparison to the overall population of the county (49.2% in 2000). In 1969, DuPont opened a plant to manufacture the chemical chloroprene, the main ingredient in neoprene, in Reserve, Louisiana on the border with LaPlace, Louisiana. The plant was sold in 2015 to Japanese chemical company Denka. The area immediately adjacent to the Denka/DuPont neoprene plant in St. John the Baptist Parish has been recognized by the EPA as having a likelihood of its residents getting cancer from air pollution over 700 times the national average. According to EPA, it emits 99% of the nation's chloroprene pollution. EPA opened civil rights investigations over this pollution from Cancer Alley.

Community organizing
In 1996, Shintech Inc. announced that they would be creating three new polyvinyl chloride (PVC) manufacturing plants in Convent, a small majority Black community (2010 population of 711, 65.7% Black) that serves as the parish seat of St. James Parish. The state of Louisiana issued Shintech permits to proceed with the project in 1997, despite their acknowledgement that these locations would be adding 623,000 pounds of pollutants to the air annually. The residents of Convent formed a coalition called St. James Citizens for the Environment (SJCJE) that drew the attention of outside legal groups including the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. In 1998, after considerable pressure and lobbying, Shintech withdrew its project plans.

In 1992, when the Taiwanese-owned Formosa Plastics Corporation proposed to build a $700 million rayon and pulp processing plant in Wallace, a small majority Black community (2000 population of 570, 93.7% Black) in St. John the Baptist Parish, which would have been the world's largest if completed and was expected to create 5,000 jobs, the 750 residents of the town waged a legal battle and eventually won forcing Formosa to build their plant elsewhere.

In 2018, the Formosa Plastics Corporation proposed the Sunshine Project, a $9.4 billion industrial complex to be located on the west bank of St. James Parish that is estimated to become the petrochemical and plastics project with the single greatest environmental detriment, at an estimated 13,628,086 tons of greenhouse gas emissions yearly. The proposed complex would span 2,500 acres and will be situated one mile from an elementary school, On January 15, 2020, RISE St. James, a faith-based grassroots organization of St. James Parish community members, in conjunction with the nonprofit conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity, the grassroots organization Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and the nonprofit Healthy Gulf, sued the Trump administration for permitting Formosa Plastics' proposed petrochemical complex. The lawsuit sought to invalidate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' fast-tracked Clean Water Act permits that the Corps issued the prior year. It had come to light that independent archaeologists that Formosa Plastics hired had discovered that enslaved people were buried in unmarked graves beneath the 2,300-acre site that Formosa planned to develop their plastics complex on. Citing violation of federal laws in the approval of destroying wetlands, the region's first and quickly dwindling line of defense against progressively-intensifying natural disasters, as well as the failure to protect the water, air, and health of the surrounding communities, and the violation of the National Historic Preservation Act in failing to protect the burial grounds of enslaved people, the lawsuit demands the rescinding of the permits issued in September 2019 as well as the conducting of a full environmental impact study. On November 4, 2020, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced its plans to suspend its permit for the Sunshine Project.

While developments in Formosa Plastics Corporation in St. James Parish remain to be monitored, the multigenerational disenfranchisement and exploitation of Black people and people of Color are difficult to ignore. "One oppressive economy begets another," says Barbara L. Allen on the subject, a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech. She continues, "The Great River Road was built on the bodies of enslaved Black people. The chemical corridor is responsible for the body burden of their descendants." Her words are particularly poignant in relation to the economic stimulation and job creation that is promised with the proposal of each new plant in the area, while a tiny minority of full-time industry jobs are actually filled by community members who bear the brunt of the pollution burden – for example, in St. Gabriel of Iberville Parish where there are now 30 large petrochemical plants within a 10-mile radius, only 9% of the full-time industry jobs in the city are held by local residents, and at least one in four residents live in poverty. The promised economic prosperity in these major investments has never yet to be delivered, yet continues to be a cited reason for the continued approval of petrochemical permits.

Criticism
On March 2, 2021, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee discussed the continued industrial projects along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The UN council on contemporary racism strongly condemned what they defined as environmental racism in their discussion with experts and other UN officials:"This form of environmental racism poses serious and disproportionate threats to the enjoyment of several human rights of its largely African American residents, including the right to equality and non-discrimination, the right to life, the right to health, right to an adequate standard of living and cultural rights."The sentiments stated by environmental activists were echoed by the Human Rights Commission.

On January 27, 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order regarding environmental justice and specifically cited Cancer Alley as a hard-hit area. Louisiana Chemical Association President Greg Bowser responded to President Biden's remarks on the region, refuting claims that residents of the industrial corridor have a higher risk of developing cancer in multiple articles. Furthermore, he cited Louisiana Tumor Registry (LTR) data to support his claims. The LTR claims that there has not been an increase in cancer deaths connected to industrial pollution.

Activists and locals have disputed the conclusions of the LTR asserting the tracts used cover large areas and the data does not allow for specific locations adjacent to chemical plants to be analyzed individually. They also posited that the data may be incomplete as those that died during the COVID-19 pandemic who also had cancer might not be included. Louisiana health officials are unable to release the specific cases and data because of medical privacy laws.

The EPA, in both 2016 and 2020, reported that those residing in Cancer Alley are exposed to more than 10 times “the level of health risk from hazardous air pollutants” than other residents in the state. Human Rights Watch, from October 2020 to November 2023, reviewed data from 12 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants operating in the Cancer Alley area. Out of these 12 facilities, only one of them was “reported in compliance with all three federal laws” in the 3-year observational period. Only 2 of these facilities “were in compliance with the Clean Water Act” as well.

Government action
The EPA's National Air Toxic Assessment looked at toxic emissions around the nation in 2011 and released the findings in 2015. The study found that the air in LaPlace, Louisiana, which is an area in Cancer Alley, had a higher-than-expected level of chloroprene. This subsequently caused the EPA to begin working closely with the owner of the neoprene plant in the area, Denka Performance Elastomer, and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to lower chloroprene emissions. The overall goal was to lower chloroprene emissions by 85%.

The state of Louisiana says that Denka has reached the goal of lowering emissions by 85%, but some residents remain skeptical. Many residents believe that instead of reducing emissions by a percentage, the emissions should be 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter of air, which is what is considered a safe level by the EPA.

In April 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiated civil rights investigations of Louisiana state agencies. The probe focused on whether the process of granting permits along the industrial corridor violated the civil rights of residents who live nearby. The probe specifically examined the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and Department of Health regarding the permitting of a Denka Performance Elastomers plant, as well as a proposed Formosa Plastics Sunshine plane and a proposed Greenfield Exports grain terminal.

In February 2023, the EPA and prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Louisiana filed a complaint against Denka Performance Elastomer under Section 303 of the Clean Air Act. The complaint asserted that the company's LaPlace, Louisiana, plant posed an imminent danger to public health based on its emissions of cancer-causing chloroprene. Air monitoring near the Denka plant found chloroprene levels as high as 14 times the recommended level.

According to the EPA, air monitoring performed near Denka's plant has shown that chloroprene levels are as high as 14 times the recommended level of 0.2 μg/m3, which poses "an imminent and substantial endangerment" to nearby communities. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry sued the EPA, challenging the government's use of the disparate impact standard of the Civil Rights Act, which says policies cannot cause disproportionate harm to people of color and continue greenlighting industrial activities in an area already overburdened by pollution. Five weeks later, the EPA dropped its Cancer Alley investigation. In February 2024, the EPA requested a delay in an impending federal trial against Denko until after the agency finalized a rule expected to tighten emission limits for chloroprene.

Environmental racism
Many scholars and residents of Cancer Alley have referred to the area as a "frontline example of environmental racism". Environmental racism can be defined as the institutional rules, regulations, policies, or government/corporate decisions that deliberately target certain communities for locally undesirable land uses and lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, resulting in communities being disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous waste based on race. Environmental racism can also be caused by several factors. These factors include intentional neglect, the alleged need for a receptacle for pollutants in urban areas, and a lack of institutional power and low land values of people of color. It is also a well-documented and well-known fact that communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately impacted by polluting industries and lax regulation of these industries. 75% of Black Americans are reported to more likely live in communities dubbed as "fence-line", communities in close proximities to sites of pollution and industry. Over 1 million of Black Americans are reported to live within a half-mile radius of oil and gas wells.

Another reason for the disproportionate siting of industrial facilities in poor and Black communities is the “Not In My Backyard Movement” (NIMBY). Primarily White neighborhoods rallied together against the petrochemical companies that were being placed in their communities. As a result, these companies shifted their sights and locations towards poor communities of color. NIMBY’s growth occurred in the 1970’s at the same time public awareness about health risks related to pollution from these waste facilities grew. These White communities had social power and “clout” that low-income communities of color did not have.

Environmental impacts
The location of Cancer Alley also poses more environmental impacts other than air pollution. Since Cancer Alley is located closer to the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes pose a great risk and have caused large amounts of damage in past years. For example, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused almost 11 million gallons of oil to spill into the water near New Orleans. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 caused power outages which led to unrefrigerated chemicals in a plant in Houston decomposing and igniting into a large fireball. In 2020, Hurricane Laura caused a fire at a plant that produced pool chemicals which led to chlorine gas being burned for three days.

One of the largest environmental impacts happened when Hurricane Ida hit in 2021. The storm's projected path was through the industrial region. The threat of the hurricane's destruction caused the industries located in Cancer Alley to release unprocessed chemicals and gases into the air via "flaring." Even though flaring causes chemicals to be released into the air, the process is legal in emergencies and burns the chemicals directly into the air. After the hurricane, residents were not only left with damaged homes but also more pollution in the air and water than usual.

Activism and environmental justice
In recent years in the United States, the environmental protection and civil rights movements have merged to form an environmental justice movement in response to minority and low-income communities throughout the country being constantly threatened by pollution. Many communities that face the largest burdens from pollution tend to be poor and consist mainly of minorities. Due to this, poor and minority communities will resort to grassroots activism to protect themselves. Many have also cited the EPA's failure to be consistent in their enforcement of federal environmental laws.

In September 2022, environmental justice advocates in southern Louisiana were able to declare victory after two decisions denied two major petrochemical complexes from moving forward. The state district court judge Trudy White released a decision that reversed and vacated 14 air regulations permits that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) had issued for the proposed Formosa Plastics Group complex in the town of Welcome. The town already has multiple oil refineries and industrial plants and is located in Cancer Alley.

Another group that has been actively fighting against the petrochemical industry in Cancer Alley is Rise St. James. Rise St. James is a faith-based grassroots organization that fights for environmental justice and works to defeat the proliferation of petrochemical industries in St. James Parish, Louisiana. The organization successfully defeated the construction of a $1.25 billion plastics manufacturing plant in 2019 and is currently fighting to prevent Formosa Plastics from building a multibillion-dollar plant in the parish. Rise St. James is also committed to educating the community and those outside of the community about the chemicals they breathe in every day. The organization's website includes a "Chemical of the Month" page and provides information on a specific chemical and how much it is found in certain areas of Cancer Alley.

In popular culture
British industrial metal band Godflesh used a photograph of a cemetery located in Cancer Alley as the cover art for their 1996 album, Songs of Love and Hate.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild discusses the environmental and health conditions in Cancer Alley, as well as the socioeconomic and political ramifications, in her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land.