HJBR Jan/Feb 2020

POLLUTER’S PARADISE 20 JAN / FEB 2020 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE   SHE and others began pushing back in 1993, and the following year, residents voted to turn their corner of unincorporated Iber- ville 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 out, the petrochemi- cal pileup continued unabated beyond St. Gabriel’s borders. “I bet you money there are 20 plants right now just around St. Gabriel,” Schexnayder said, nearly twice as many as there were when the incorporation drive began. She’s not even close. There are now 30 large petrochemical plants within 10 miles of her house, most of them outside the city limits. Thirteen are within a 3-mile radius of her home. The nearest facility, only a mile away, is the world’s largest manufac- turer of polystyrene, commonly known as Styrofoam. Stories of fed-up Louisianans like Schexnayder fighting back against corpo- rate polluters have gotten worldwide media attention over the last year, as a raft of enor- mous new petrochemical facilities takes shape along the Mississippi River corridor. Much of the focus has been on the potential hazards posed by specific plants, including the $9.4 billion plastics factory that For- mosa plans to build in St. James Parish and the long-standing Denka neoprene facility in St. John Parish, whose dangerous emis- sions were highlighted in an Environmen- tal ProtectionAgency model that estimates cancer risk around chemical plants. Indeed, the stretch of the Mississippi River between NewOrleans and Baton Rouge is nicknamed “Cancer Alley” because of its concentration of petrochemical facilities. Though the air quality here has improved significantly since the 1980s, as it has in the rest of the nation, the recent history is less encouraging. Not only is toxic air pollution in Louisiana’s industrial belt rising in abso- lute terms, the estimated air quality rela- tive to its peers is getting worse, an analysis ST. GABRIEL, LOUISIANA O ver a half-century, Hazel Schexnayder saw this riverside hamlet transformed from a col- lection of old plantations, tin-roofed shacks and verdant cornfields into an industrial juggernaut. By the early 1990s, she’d had enough of the tow- ering 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.”