Poison In the Air....

[CousinIT]

"We undertook an analysis that's never been done before. Not even by the EPA."

ProPublica mapped the spread of toxic air pollution from industrial facilities across every neighborhood in the country—and identified 1000+ hotspots of cancer-causing air.

https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air

From the urban sprawl of Houston to the riverways of Virginia, air pollution from industrial plants is elevating the cancer risk of an estimated quarter of a million Americans to a level the federal government considers unacceptable.

Some of these hot spots of toxic air are infamous. An 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana that’s thronged with oil refineries and chemical plants has earned the nickname Cancer Alley. Many other such areas remain unknown, even to residents breathing in the contaminated air.

ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. Using advanced data processing software and a modeling tool developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing chemicals from thousands of sources of hazardous air pollution across the country between 2014 and 2018. The result is an unparalleled view of how toxic air blooms around industrial facilities and spreads into nearby neighborhoods.

At the map’s intimate scale, it’s possible to see up close how a massive chemical plant near a high school in Port Neches, Texas, laces the air with benzene, an aromatic gas that can cause leukemia. Or how a manufacturing facility in New Castle, Delaware, for years blanketed a day care playground with ethylene oxide, a highly toxic chemical that can lead to lymphoma and breast cancer. Our analysis found that ethylene oxide is the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide. Corporations across the United States, but especially in Texas and Louisiana, manufacture the colorless, odorless gas, which lingers in the air for months and is highly mutagenic, meaning it can alter DNA.

In all, ProPublica identified more than a thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. They are not equally distributed across the country. A quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest levels of excess risk are in Texas, and almost all of them are in Southern states known for having weaker environmental regulations. Census tracts where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white. In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts.

[hunter]

1. Automobiles and gas appliances spew carcinogens...

... but people seem less concerned about those, probably because they are so familiar.

[pecosbob]

2. As long as the EPA remains co-opted by industry this sort of testing will never be performed by them

[mopinko]

3. ethylene oxide is used to sterilize medical equipment.

there is a place in a chicago suburb where leaks of this became known, and guess what? it got shut down in pretty short order.
not sure what the long term resolution is going to be, but a dem on a red county board raised a stink, and shit happened.