THE CORRIDOR: Episode 4
What Can Be Measured Can Be Changed
We know that many of the chemicals being released by plants in the Corridor can cause cancer. We also know that the cancer risk along this stretch of the Mississippi is unusually high. But how do we know for sure that these things are connected? In this episode, we explore what we know about pollution and disease.
Guests
KImberly terrell
sheila tahir
Sheila Tahir is a born and raised New Orleanian who fiercely loves her beautiful, complicated home. While wanderlust has brought her all over the world, Louisiana always calls her back. The stories of this place, its people and its myriad cultures, have a hold on her soul. She has a B.A. in English and a M.A. in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Currently she is enrolled in the Justice Studies PhD Program at the University of New Orleans and she also works as a research assistant for the Tulane University History Project.
leticia nogueria
Leticia Nogueira, PhD, MPH, is the scientific director of health services research at the American Cancer Society (ACS). Dr. Nogueira is thought leader in environmental health, recognized as the first scholar to establish a link between climate change and cancer. She applies a systems thinking approach to her research, identifying modifiable determinants of cancer risk, access to care, and survival that can be addressed by policy changes.
Credits
The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is the lead reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. Executive produced by Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
Transcript
[00:00] INTRODUCTION
AMY: You’re listening to The Corridor, presented by Threshold. To learn more and support our work, go to threshold podcast dot org.
JAY: Welcome to the Corridor, I’m Jaha Nailah Avery. So far this season, we’ve met people living on the front lines of industry and heard about how this area became a hub for petrochemicals.
JAY: For decades, residents have said they’re getting sick from the pollution being released by the plants. From breathing difficulties to watering eyes and burning skin, there are so many signs that chemicals are seemingly at fault. But industry leaders and regulators have consistently said no, these plants are safe; they say there's no significant evidence of a link.
JAY: So… what’s happening here?
JAY: Well for starters, health is complicated. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, our family history, and the homes and neighborhoods we live and work in can all be factors in when, why, how, or even if we get sick. Nothing about our health is simple.
JAY: And understanding how all these elements work together requires gathering and sharing information.
JAY: Even when everyone is working together to protect public health, this stuff is still really complicated.
JAY: But everyone is not working together in Louisiana. Again and again, people who live near these petrochemical plants have to fight for basic information about the chemicals being released in their own back yards. And even when that information does get shared, there’s still disagreement about what it all means.
JAY: And all of this is happening in a place where public health is so notorious that it’s been given the nickname Cancer Alley.
JAY: So… what’s really going on with pollution and disease in the corridor?
JAY: That’s what we’re going to try to figure out in this episode. We’re going to look at what we know, and what we don’t, about pollution and disease, and why after all these years, people are still debating the facts.
[02:25] SEGMENT A
KIM: All of these chemicals have been studied in the laboratory. Many of them have been studied in workplace settings. They're all known to be toxic. So it’s not really a question of, is it putting people at risk? It’s a question of the extent of that risk, and the extent of the exposure.
JAY: This is Dr. Kim Terrell, a scientist who studies public health and pollution in Louisiana. Kim says that we know the chemicals coming from these plants are dangerous. What’s less clear is how much of these chemicals are in the air, and the risk that they pose to residents.
KIM: Yeah so we have one of the highest concentrations of industrial activity anywhere in the U.S. Louisiana consistently ranks number one or number two for the most amount of toxic air pollution released by industry every year.
JAY: Residents have complained about toxic pollution in these parishes for years. But what do we actually know about what’s in the air here? Is any kind of monitoring being done?
KIM: And a lot of people think, well, you know, surely there must be monitoring, right? Surely air quality is within the legal limits.
JAY: Kim tells me that air quality is monitored by state officials. It’s something the Environmental Protection Agency requires for all states under the Clean Air Act. But even though monitoring is happening, it turns out that that doesn’t mean that the air is safe.
JAY: To understand that, we have to look at the Clean Air Act itself.
MUSIC
JAY: Before the Clean Air Act, urban air pollution in America was dire. In the 1960s, the smog in cities like Pittsburgh was so bad that the city kept its streetlights on - even in the daytime - just so people could get around. Parked cars would be covered in dust and ash. A lot of this came from the burning of coal, which released things like carbon dioxide and soot into the air.
JAY: But that changed when President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act of 1970. That law gave us federal limits on major pollutants and vehicle emissions. It also required industry to adopt technology that keeps pollution under control.
ARCHIVAL
JAY: And mostly, it worked. Emissions of the most common pollutants have fallen by around 80% in the US since the Clean Air Act passed.
JAY: But despite all that, pollution is still a big problem in places where industry is heavily concentrated… places that also happen to be home to mostly low income and BIPOC people. These neighborhoods are known as “fenceline communities,” because they literally share a fence with plants. And it's these areas, where homes and plants are next door neighbors, that really need air monitoring. But it’s also where EPA and the Clean Air Act can fall short. Take a single plant here, Formosa Plastics, which Louisiana permitted to operate in St James.
KIM: So you know, Formosa Plastics is permitted to emit about two dozen different toxic air pollutants, plus a lot of more common pollutants like particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, things that contribute to soot and acid rain. So in Saint James Parish, there are no air monitors for any pollutant that's emitted from these facilities. There is a monitor for ozone, and that's good. But I think most people would be shocked to see the incredible density of industrial facilities and the complete lack of air monitoring in many of these communities.
JAY: It might be shocking, but the lack of air monitoring next to industrial facilities isn’t necessarily breaking the law. EPA requires that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality monitors some types of pollutants, but it doesn’t mandate where those air monitoring stations are located.
KIM: There is monitoring, but there's huge gaps in the monitoring network. And where the monitors are placed is very telling.
JAY: In New Orleans, one of only two air monitoring stations sits on the edge of City Park, a big greenspace near Lake Pontchartrain. [PAHNCH-uh-train]
KIM: Nobody lives in City Park.The air in City Park is not representative of the most polluted parts of the city.
JAY: City Park is huge - bigger than Central Park in New York. And even though it isn’t in the most polluted part of town, I decided to go see the station for myself.
JAY: Well, we're out here at the air monitoring station at City Park. Kind of just like a little tin shack. The door to the air monitoring station is padlocked. The fence around it is padlocked. There’s a fence around it, it’s padlocked. And there’s barbed wire on top of the fence. And there's nothing around here as far as on this particular lot.
JAY: The main thing this station is monitoring for is particulate matter, which is tiny airborne pollution that comes mostly from cars, coal fires, and industrial processes. From what I can see, there’s not many cars or factories around this park. There are places in New Orleans that are exposed to a lot more industry, though.
KIM: So, for example, in my neighborhood, right across the river is a line of petrochemical facilities. We don't have a permanent air monitoring station.
JAY: All across Louisiana, air monitors are in places that might be convenient for regulators, but not necessarily near industry where all these pollutants are being emitted, and where people live. And these monitoring stations are only keeping track of a handful of pollutants.
JAY: There’s hundreds of other chemicals that aren’t required to be continuously monitored at all, despite the huge health risks they pose. So without that constant monitoring, it can be really hard to know what’s coming out of these plants. On top of that, Louisiana’s limits for these pollutants are pretty outdated—they were set in the early 1990s, and haven’t changed since.
KIM: Louisiana's air pollution limits for toxic pollutants have not been updated in decades, and in many instances, are vastly higher than what the EPA considers safe. Science improves. We have a better understanding of the risks and harms of toxic pollutants today than we did 30 years ago. But that's not that understanding isn't reflected in current limits.
JAY: Take chloroprene for example. It’s one of the key chemicals in neoprene, the squishy rubber used in everything from laptop sleeves to beer koozies [COO - zeez].
KIM: The EPA recommends a maximum level of 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter. The Louisiana ambient air standard is more than 800. So we're comparing a level of 0.2 to over 800. It's like saying, okay, I gave my teenager a credit card and it has a spending limit, but the spending limit is $20 trillion, right? It's like you, you may be better off without any limit at all, because at least you're recognizing, hey, there's there's really no effective limit here.
JAY: To state the obvious, that difference really matters. Chloroprene can cause all kinds of health problems including headaches and organ damage. And we’ve known how dangerous it is for a long time. DuPont, the inventor of neoprene, warned of the dangers of chloroprene in the 1950s. A DuPont manual from the time says that chloroprene quote “causes depression of the central nervous system and damage to vital organs.”
JAY: So we know that chloroprene is really bad. What we don’t know is how much of it is actually in the air at any given time because it isn’t one of the chemicals that’s being monitored at one of those DEQ-run stations. Most of what we know about it comes from the plants themselves because the state allows them to self report on what they are emitting and how much.
KIM: So I think if you asked the Department of Environmental Quality, they would say that they are complying with the law and that they are doing all the monitoring that the law requires them to do. I think if you asked an environmental attorney, they would say that in places where there's a disproportionate amount of industrial activity, that we monitor the air to make sure that it's safe.
JAY: Kim says Louisiana is doing the bare minimum to monitor air pollution. They also aren’t doing much to enforce violations of the rules either. A 2021 report found that it took the DEQ an average of 2 years to respond to violations, and even longer to follow up on enforcement.
JAY: And this wasn’t just a one-time thing; it’s a long pattern. Here’s a news report from 2002.
NEWS CLIP: DEQ did not enforce 31% of water inspection violations, 38% of water monitoring violations, and 25% of air monitoring violations. DEQ cannot easily provide reliable information on who it regulates. 1/4 of self-monitoring. Reports for air and water have never been submitted or can't be found by DEQ. Some $15 million in fees and penalties have not been collected. 69% of major water facilities and 55% of hazardous waste units are operating under expired permits….
“The public sees an emission coming from a plant along the river. They have little assurance that DEQ knows what that emission is”
JAY: So with minimal monitoring and enforcement, Kim says it’s nearly impossible for anyone to know what health risks they face. And that has also made Louisiana an attractive place to do business.
KIM: Louisiana is often kind of the last stop for facilities in the US. You know, if they get shut down in other states because of health concerns, they can be confident, you know, that they'll be able to operate with minimal oversight in our state of Louisiana.
JAY: On paper, there is some oversight. Every business that emits pollution has to apply for permits disclosing what pollutants they will release and how much. As long as the proposal meets emissions standards, the state usually issues a draft permit. But Kim says there’s a lot we don’t know about what plants are telling the DEQ when they apply.
KIM: When the DEQ is deciding whether or not to issue the permit, the public doesn't have access to all of the information that the DEQ is considering. And so, the DEQ issues that decision. And there's garbage science in it.
JAY: Kim says the DEQ gives lots of deference to the data provided by the plants when making decisions. They don’t look for other numbers, or get advice from experts unaffiliated with that plant, unless someone raises questions during the public comment period.
JAY: Kim gives me a concrete example of how this worked with Formosa Plastics in St James.
KIM: With the Formosa Air permit, ethylene oxide is one of the pollutants of concern. It's a very powerful cancer-causing substance. And so what the DEQ did is they said okay. Yeah, yeah yeah. There's all this concern about ethylene oxide. We looked at the cancer rates in places in Louisiana where there's facilities that release ethylene oxide, and all those rates are low, so there's no problem.
JAY: But there IS a problem.
JAY: The DEQ only looked at current cancer rates. But cancer isn’t like a cold. It doesn’t just appear after an exposure. The health impacts from pollution often take decades to develop… but the permitting process only looks at what’s happening here, right now.
KIM: That is not how you do epidemiology. That's not how you do cancer research, right? Like they didn't measure how much. They didn't provide any information about when that ethylene oxide was emitted or what's called latency. The years or decades that it takes for people to develop cancer. And it was just absolutely absurd.
JAY: For most permits the DEQ is also only looking at the pollution from this ONE plant and not the combined effects of multiple plants releasing dozens of toxic chemicals in a small area.
JAY: And that’s not the only problem. The geographic scope of the numbers really matters. Most data is reported at the parish level, masking the situation in smaller neighborhoods that sit next to plants.
KIM: There is this common misconception that Cancer Alley is like this chunk on the map, right? Where like, you would just expect, you know, all the cancer rates across that whole chunk to be really high." And so I think anytime we're looking at like health data or economic data, we have to really ask ourselves, okay, are we looking at the communities that are living next to these plants, or are they getting averaged out by all the people who live farther away, who have access to more money and their neighborhoods have not been depreciated by industrialization.
JAY: Again the plants have to apply for permits where they disclose all the chemicals they plan to release. The public can comment on drafts of these permits but honestly, it feels like you need an advanced degree in chemistry to even understand what’s going on.
KIM: And the burden always seems to be on the community to document that there is a problem where it really should be the other way around. Right. It should be on the facility to demonstrate that they can operate safely.
JAY: People in these communities are trapped in a Catch-22: they’re concerned about their health, and they want proof that the plants are safe. But the government agencies that could provide that proof aren’t doing it.
JAY: Kim says it doesn’t have to be this way. Other states are monitoring toxic air more effectively. And they are updating and enforcing emission standards.
KIM: Putting in more air monitors, making sure that legal limits for pollution are actually based on the best available science. There's so many things that seem completely feasible that other states are doing, by the way, that we are not doing here in Louisiana. So I think there's so much progress that can be made, let’s focus on the things we can change now and actually improve people’s lives.
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JAY: The hold that industry has over the state - economically, politically, and psychologically - makes progress on monitoring and enforcement difficult here. But not impossible. And in the meantime, some people are taking things into their own hands.
JAY: We’ll have more after this short break.
Break
[18:11] SEGMENT B
JAY: Welcome back, I’m Jaha Nailah Avery. It’s an early morning in January and I’m in New Sarpy, about a 15 minute drive west of the New Orleans airport.
SHEILA: I’m going to ask you to sign our liability waiver. It basically says that you’re going to be exposed to some pollution.
JAY: There are all kinds of ways that EPA and the state of Louisiana could keep people in the loop about air quality near these plants - fancy pollution sensors, public health experts, and making industry hand over information. But for the most part, they’re not doing that. And that's why I’m here, going on a tour with Sheila Tahir of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
SHEILA: So, my name is Sheila Tahir. I'm the bike ride manager at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. I'm a born and raised New Orleanian.
JAY: The Bucket Brigade is a nonprofit that partners with communities to fight pollution in the corridor. Sheila leads tours for them, highlighting Black history and environmental racism.
SHEILA: The Bucket Brigade did a health survey here in 2001. And we went door to door to each resident and asked them questions like, do you have cancer? Does anyone in your life have cancer? Do you get nosebleeds? Do you get headaches? Do you have anyone who has had a miscarriage in your family, etc.?
JAY: New Sarpy was one of the first communities the Bucket Brigade worked with. Health surveys are one way they keep track of what's happening to residents here.
SHEILA: So when we did that, we found that respiratory illnesses were off the chart, and that cancer was also elevated here. But it's really impossible to prove that your cancer illness came from a specific facility.
JAY: Another tool they use is the namesake of the Bucket Brigade - a literal bucket, which Sheila shows me on the tour.
SHEILA: There are bucket brigades all over the world, where you have, like, a ten gallon plastic bag inside that, every time you smell something in the air, you will open this. You'll open this, and they're supposed to use a vacuum to pump this up beforehand.
JAY: That bucket was the idea of attorney Ed Masry, a name you might know if you’ve seen the movie Erin Brockovitch. Masry was Brockovitch’s boss. In the mid-90s, he worked on a pollution case in California and hired an environmental engineer to develop a simple tool to monitor air quality. Something community members could use themselves. It was a 5-gallon bucket that cost $75.
JAY: Sheila shows me how the bucket works. Air is sucked into a bag inside the bucket through a valve. Once the bag is filled with air, she removes it from the bucket and sends it to a lab for testing.
SHEILA: They take an air sample for three minutes, and then once you have it, you open this up and you ship it to a lab in California, where they will pay, or the bucket brigade would pay to have the contents analyzed.
JAY: Testing isn’t cheap — about $500 per sample. And that cost often falls on people in the community.
SHEILA: So this is a way that people would start to get familiar with what chemicals are in the air.
JAY: And when these samples are sent to the lab, what do they find? Often it’s things like chloroprene, benzene, ethylene oxide, vinyl chloride, and 1-3 Butadiene. If you don’t know what any of those chemicals are, neither did I.
JAY: But I soon learned that one thing they all have in common is that they all can cause cancer.
LETICIA: Cancer is not one disease. It's many different diseases. Each has its own risk factors, its own prognosis, its own therapy approach.
JAY: This is Dr. Leticia Nogueria, the Scientific Director of Health Services Research at the American Cancer Society.
JAY: Like Leticia said, cancer isn’t one disease. There are more than a hundred types, but they all start the same way: a group of cells starts multiplying fast and spreading around your body.
LETICIA: And then the cells start dividing like crazy. And that's how a tumor starts.
JAY: There are trillions of cells in our bodies. And all those cells are controlled by genes that give them instructions about things like when to start and stop growing. Normal cells follow the instructions they’re given. Cancer cells don’t.
JAY: And as the number of these cancer cells grows larger and larger, they start to crowd out the normal cells, which makes it really hard for your body to work like it should.
JAY: Lots of different things can cause your cells to start dividing like this: family, age, even some viruses. Some we know a lot about, and some we don’t, but what we’re really concerned with here is what scientists call environmental exposure.
LETICIA: There are these windows of exposure throughout our entire lives, there are environmental exposures that can impact any of what scientists call the hallmarks of cancer.
JAY: These hallmarks of cancer are essentially red flags signaling that normal cells have turned into cancer cells.
JAY: Any substance that triggers these red flags and causes cancer is called a carcinogen. We’re exposed to a lot of them in our daily life, from tobacco and sunlight to processed meats and alcohol. But simply having contact with one doesn’t mean you’ll develop cancer. And we know a lot more about some carcinogens than others.
LETICIA: Smoking tobacco, for example, is something that the scientific community has studied for a long time, extensively. We have a lot of information.
JAY: But we know a lot less about others, and for those, it’s much harder to know exactly how they affect our bodies.
LETICIA: It depends on the cancer. It depends on the environmental stressor. And it depends on a lot of other things that happen throughout your entire life. And sometimes even before you were born, things that your mom was exposed to or that both of you were exposed to when you were in utero.
Some of these pathways, we have a good understanding. And some of them we don't have a good understanding, and it's usually a combination of factors.
JAY: All kinds of air pollution has been linked to disease, including cancer. But even if we know that something causes cancer, it’s really hard to draw a straight line from a carcinogen to a health issue. That’s why the EPA says air pollutants like chloroprene increase your risk of cancer.
JAY: And it's that word - risk - that has opened the door for industry and government officials to insist that the health threats of pollution are miniscule compared to individual lifestyle choices. It’s a talking point that’s been around for decades.
JAY: Here’s Louisiana’s State Health Officer Dr. Jimmy Guidry [pronouncer: GID - dree] in 2005:
JIMMY: The instance of cancer in Louisiana isn’t any higher than anywhere else in the country. Matter of fact, we’re middle of the pack. If you do have cancer in Louisiana, you’re more likely to die of it because people find out about it later so they don’t get it treated. Most of the cancer in Louisiana is a result of smoking.
JAY: It’s important to note that Guidry is talking about average rates across Louisiana, not the cancer rates near the plants. That’s something Kim told us we need to be careful about when looking at the numbers.
JAY: And in 2021, when President Biden referred to “Cancer Alley” as a place in need of environmental justice, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy condemned it as a “slam upon the state.” He pointed to smoking and obesity as among the reasons for the state’s higher cancer rates.
JAY: That’s what the trade group for chemical companies says, too. Here’s what Greg Bowser, former president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, told me in 2024:
GREG: I'm a big believer that how you live has more to do with your health outcomes than where you live. And I say that because, you know, you start talking about obesity and smoking and some of the bad habits that we have. Yeah, that has a bigger impact in many, many cases on how things happen in your life.
JAY: Lifestyle factors do matter in determining whether you develop a disease - no one disputes that. But how much extra risk are you exposed to if you live near one of these plants? I asked Leticia.
LETICIA: So as a scientist, I need to tell you that all of these things are probabilities, right? The probability that you're exposed to any single contaminant and then they're going to develop cancer, the probability that your father smoked when you were growing up and you're going to develop cancer. We have some ideas about how much each of these exposures increase the risk of developing cancer, but we don't know everything.
JAY: There are things we do know, though. There’s a long history of politicians and industry leaders blaming Black communities for their health issues, instead of listening to their concerns. Take one of the most deadly lifestyle choices out there—smoking. Smoking increases your likelihood of getting sick, and Louisiana has one of the highest rates of cigarette use in the country. But the parishes reporting the highest rates of smoking aren’t in Cancer Alley. Tobacco is one of many carcinogens we’re exposed to regularly and some of them ARE choices we’re making. But air pollution isn’t a choice anyone made. It's an extra risk on top of everything else.
JAY: And another thing we know for sure: the chemicals coming out of these plants are very dangerous. They’re called toxic for a reason.
KIM: The mix of pollutants that come out of these large facilities affect basically every body system.
JAY: This is Kim Terrell again. One of the pollutants that often shows up in air samples is benzene. Benzene is naturally produced by things like volcanoes and forest fires. But it's also commonly found in paint thinners, cleaning products, and gasoline—the types of products that include warnings about using them in well-ventilated areas while wearing protective gear.
KIM: Benzene is a really common industrial pollutant, And it I mean, it impacts your blood system. It can cause leukemia over the long term. It can cause immune problems. It can cause lung problems. And we've known that for over 100 years. Benzene is one of, kind of the oldest known industrial occupational hazards.
JAY: And it isn’t just dangerous for humans. It can prevent trees, grasses, and other plants from photosynthesizing. Animals exposed to benzene can develop tumors just like humans. And benzene is only one of several dozen toxic chemicals emitted by plants here, chemicals with known health risks.
KIM: Essentially, every pollutant is going to impact your lungs because your lungs are ground zero for exposure to the outdoor air. We don't regulate pollutants that are harmless. Pollutants are regulated because they're known to cause health impacts.
JAY: But as we’ve seen, those health impacts can take years to develop. And whether a person gets sick and what that sickness looks like depends on lots of different factors.
JAY: Even so, researchers in Texas were able to show that people who lived near an oil refinery had an elevated rate of cancer. The risks from the pollution translated to more disease.
JAY: Kim Terrell and her colleague Gianna St. Julien set out to do the same for the corridor - to see if cancer rates really are higher for those living beside plants.
KIM: So 2 of our recent studies focused on documenting and quantifying the disparity in pollution in communities of color. Right. So, so yes, they are overburdened, but by how much was what we were trying to answer? And the other study was focused on evaluating whether actual rates of cancer in neighborhoods are related to the amount of air pollution. Spoiler spoiler alert yes they are.
JAY: Kim found that pollution in some black communities was way way higher than in white communities in the corridor, confirming what residents had been saying for years.
KIM: It doesn't take a scientist to understand if too many people in your family are dying from cancer. But science can be helpful in documenting that it's not just your family. It's families across the state who live in areas that are polluted by industrial chemicals.
JAY: The fact that the cancer risk is high in Black communities here isn't surprising. In Louisiana, and in fact, across the entire country, the most racially segregated neighborhoods tend to face the highest risk of disease from air pollution. There’s all kinds of other health disparities, too, many linked to the history of race in the US. That’s true in the corridor, too, before you even consider the impacts of the plants. So by the time we add in air pollution from the plants, Kim says residents are experiencing what’s called a double disparity. One big contributor to these health disparities comes from housing and zoning policies.
JAY: You can see how this plays out in the corridor when you look at the land use plans for each parish. These plans determine where industry goes and where people’s houses go. In 2014, for example, St James Parish updated its land use plan, changing the zoning for the majority Black areas from just residential to residential AND industrial, opening the area to more development, more industry. The plants were in St James before this plan revision but it’s these kinds of zoning changes that keep Black people at risk.
JAY: This difference isn’t just on paper - you can see it when you drive from community to community.
KIM: And I think what would probably surprise most people is when you drive through Cancer Alley, it's so different, like there's places that look like an industrial apocalypse, and there are places that look like grandma's house.
JAY: Something I heard again and again as I reported this season is that science is finally catching up to what many people here already know. Until relatively recently, research on public health in the corridor has been scarce despite decades of concerns about pollution. And that gap - between what residents say and what the science shows - has had real consequences for residents trying to make their case. Kim hopes that published data like hers will be harder for lawmakers to ignore.
KIM: I think having that in the peer reviewed literature, you know, decision makers, some of them are going to do what they're going to do regardless, but it makes it harder for them to dismiss the firsthand experiences of people who say, this is not normal. We should not have this much cancer, this much asthma, this much disease and death in our communities.
JAY: So let’s go back to where we started. Even without all the public health information that we might like, what can we say about the connection between pollution and cancer here in the corridor?
JAY: We know that air pollution can cause cancer. We know that exposure to carcinogens increases your risk of cancer. We know that chemicals like benzene, ethylene oxide, and chloroprene are known carcinogens and that these chemicals, and many others, are emitted by more than 150 plants in the corridor. And we know that EPA mapping and other studies have shown that the cancer risk in the corridor is unusually high.
JAY: There are things that are less clear - like how much toxic pollution is being emitted into the air because of rules that don’t require constant monitoring of emissions. And there’s lax enforcement of rules, even when emissions standards are being violated. It’s also difficult to draw a straight line from exposure to a chemical to a diagnosed disease, because disease is complicated. But again, we know that the chemicals being released in the corridor do cause cancer and that the concentration of toxic pollution here is high.
JAY: Here’s Leticia again.
LETICIA: I do think that what can be measured can be changed. If we have a better idea of the community level exposure around these, then there is a chance that there will be increased awareness of these health hazards and the environmental contamination. And that might start changing people's, or at least providing the information so people can make informed decisions about what type of development is worth the risk.
JAY: It would definitely be better to have more data, and people here are teaming up with all kinds of experts to do that work. But one thing is clear: there is more air pollution here than anywhere else in Louisiana. And the evidence is stacking up that this is resulting in higher rates of cancer. And that’s just cancer. We haven't even talked about all the other health issues that air pollution can cause like asthma. And then there’s the problems caused by all the other kinds of pollution in this area.
JAY: But residents are fighting an uphill battle: the companies who release these carcinogens have way more power - financial and political - than residents. And they’ve by and large used that power to quash community concerns, and to fight against tighter environmental regulations… all to bring us more stuff.
KIM: And I think, you know, a lot of times community members hear this narrative of, oh, this is necessary for the modern lifestyle, right? Like this is just the cost of, you know, the comforts and, you know, essentials that we have in our life. Every time I look at a beer koozie, I question that narrative. Right? Like, are there, you know, are there really no alternatives? And if there is not, why is it that one group of people has to bear most of the harm while everybody gets the benefits?
JAY: Kim knows the challenges of fighting pollution personally. When I first spoke with her, she was the director of community engagement at Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic. But in the spring of 2025, Kim resigned. She said that pressure from the governor’s office had caused university administrators to censor her work on pollution and racial disparities in the corridor. A spokesperson for the governor told the Associated Press that this wasn’t the case, but also commended Tulane for standing up for Louisiana businesses.
JAY: This wasn’t the first effort to restrict science in the corridor. In 2024, the state passed a law making it illegal to use community air monitoring data, like the buckets, to advocate for pollution control. All of this makes it increasingly hard for residents to get reliable scientific information from experts, while also leaving them unable to use their own research.
JAY: Environmental health is so strongly contested in Louisiana because the hazards of industry are tied to crucial parts of the modern economy. People that want more regulations and pollution enforcement are asking for things that will cost these huge companies money. Money that’s also tied to state and national economies. That's part of what makes this battle for change so hard. And for the people most affected by industry in the corridor, that feels like just another hurdle in a long history of inequality.
JAY: But that hasn’t stopped anyone here from trying.
JAY: Next time on The Corridor….
DOLLIE: The whole community came together. We felt like we had no choice but to do. And we were not trying to start a movement. We were just standing up for what we knew was right.
JAY: The birth of the environmental justice movement.
Credits
AMY: The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is our reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.
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