CANE BURNS UNDER FIRE
Florida’s sugar growers are conducting annual burns — a decades-old practice that some residents, and a lawsuit, argue threaten the health of rural towns.
This article was originally published in Grist, an online environmental news site, and reported in partnership with Type Investigations.
The simple act of breathing has been a challenge for residents of the Glades, a string of small rural towns in Palm Beach County, for as long as 13-yearold Kil’mari Phillips can remember.
In fourth grade, Phillips’ teacher always kept the classroom’s blinds closed so her students wouldn’t see the fire. One day, she forgot.
“Do you see this?” a classmate, seated by the window, asked Phillips. “Am I crazy?”
Even from the far side of the classroom, Phillips could see giant flames engulfing acres of sugarcane fields outside.
“That’s when everybody started screaming,” Phillips remembered. Students from other classrooms rushed in when they heard the cries from down the hall. “Everybody thought they were gonna die.”
The Palm Beach County school year coincides with the seasonal agricultural practice of sugarcane burning. Before harvesting, leaves around the cane are ignited and burnt off like newspaper, revealing the sugarrich stalks, which are about 70 percent water. This decades-old practice fills the air with smoke, soot and ash. The result is the kind of particulate matter pollution that has been linked to a litany of adverse health effects — including, most recently, a heightened risk of dying from COVID-19. In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that jurisdictions consider suspending agricultural burns during the pandemic. Nevertheless, massive burns in the Glades continued throughout this spring’s harvest season and began again in October.
Phillips knows that the burning season’s begun when her breathing gets more difficult and her friends’ asthma flares up. It’s become a marker of time.
“It became so normal to us because it’s been happening all our lives,” she said.
Phillips has since learned that her school district itself facilitates the harvest, leasing a sugarcane field adjacent to Rosenwald Elementary School in the town of South Bay to U.S. Sugar, one of the biggest sugar producers in America.
About a hundred yards from Rosenwald — which Phillips attended from 2011 to 2017 —
7.8 acres of cane are processed during the harvest season, despite widespread concerns about dramatic, polluting burns like the one that terrified Phillips and her fourth-grade classmates. (A U.S. Sugar representative said that “internal protocols” prevent burning from taking place on its nearby acreage during school hours — and that those protocols have been in place for more than a decade.) According to the latest lease, signed in 2017, U.S. Sugar pays the school district for the cane grown on the land and offers students “opportunities” in agricultural education.
Pollution from the seasonal burn spreads far beyond Rosenwald. Two miles away at the Hattie Fields preschool, 4-yearold Kennedy McKenzie’s asthma attacks leave her sick for two weeks out of every month during the school year, according to her mother, Letoni Moore. Five miles down the road from Rosenwald, in Belle Glade, former school nurse Anne Meehan had to stock a half-dozen nebulizers in her closet to treat sick students every year before she retired in 2001. The devices were in use “all day long,” Meehan recalled.
Ten miles north, in Pahokee, students have carried trash bags over their heads to protect themselves from falling ash when they walk to school, according to
Mariya Feldman, a former teacher. Theresa Staley, another former teacher, said she suffered such strong allergic reactions that she had to quit her job and move.
There is clear scientific evidence that sugarcane burn emissions are hazardous to human health. As a result, most other states and countries that employ the method are working to phase it out in favor of mechanical harvesting, or “green harvesting” processes, where leaves are mechanically removed instead of burned off. The archaic practice persists, however, in the rural towns of the Glades, where about a quarter of the nation’s sugarcane is produced.
The community is located just 40 miles from Mar-a-Lago and the ostentatious wealth associated with coastal Palm Beach County, where ornate and gilded mansions rise out of the ground instead of acres upon acres of cane stalks. The small towns that sit just off the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee are a world apart. The largest town, Belle Glade, is known as “Muck City,” in reference to the marshy land where sugarcane grows.
While Palm Beach County is majority-white, Belle Glade is 60 percent Black and has a median household income that is less than half of the county’s overall. More than 40 percent of its residents live in poverty. Besides sugarcane, the Glades has exported a bumper crop of elite football players: NFL All-Pro Fred Taylor, Super Bowl MVP Santonio Holmes and first-round draft pick Kelvin Benjamin.
Some attribute this athleticism to the fast-paced practice of hunting rabbits that rush out of the sugarcane fires.
The most unique features of the Glades are the giant flames accompanying the seasonal burn. A Sierra Club analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data estimates that the practice releases more than 3,000 tons of hazardous air pollutants in the region every year, including carcinogenic chemicals like formaldehyde, benzene and acenaphthylene. According to a 2016 study by researchers at Florida International University and the University of California, Merced, particulate matter pollution in the area was 15 times greater during the harvest season than it is at other times of year.
It’s no surprise then that a pandemic involving a respiratory disease would take an outsized toll on this community. In the Glades, documented infection rates in some ZIP codes have been nearly three times higher than Palm Beach County’s rate overall.
The seasonal burn casts a long shadow over the Glades. The hoods of cars are faded due to ash buildup, and nebulizers are
THEY’RE KILLING PEOPLE BY DOING THIS. IT’S TAKING INNOCENT PEOPLE’S LIVES FOR NO APPARENT REASON.
Kil’mari Phillips
ever-present in the community during the harvest season. Thousands of people in the region are employed by two of the biggest national sugar producers — U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals — in a region that has suffered from high unemployment for decades. The sugar growers also fundraise for charitable causes, securing food, clothing and household supplies for residents.
Public agencies at the county, state and federal level have declined to phase out sugarcane burning, despite growing concerns about the adverse health effects of the practice expressed by both public health researchers and Glades residents themselves, as well as a class action lawsuit currently under way in the region. This neglect has left this low-income, predominantly Black community acutely vulnerable to respiratory illness.
YEARLONG INVESTIGATION
A yearlong joint investigation by Grist and Type Investigations has found that the School District of Palm Beach County has leased the land adjacent to Rosenwald Elementary to U.S. Sugar for harvesting since 2002, despite consistent concerns raised by parents, students and teachers about the effects of the burn; that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has for decades maintained discriminatory zoning rules that ban burning only when smoke drifts into wealthier areas of the county; and that public officials have referred resident complaints about the burn to the sugar industry itself.
On a windy afternoon last fall, Phillips sat on her front porch with a young puppy in her lap, just 300 feet from Rosenwald and its fields of fire, momentarily resigned about the noxious air quality in her community.
“They’re killing people by doing this,” she said. “It’s taking innocent people’s lives for no apparent reason.”
The incident in Phillips’ fourth-grade classroom was not the seasonal burn’s most extreme intrusion into Rosenwald. On Feb. 6, 2008, plume after plume of smoke billowed into the school. Administrators faced a dilemma when deciding how best to respond, according to internal correspondence: “Would the evacuation expose students to even more smoke from the sugar can [sic] burn or would keeping them in the school expose them to less smoke than the evacuation?”
By the end of the day, six students had been taken to the hospital and nine more had been treated by paramedics on-site.
As the community grappled with the fallout from the emergency, it was not widely known that the school district was actively collecting revenue from growers starting fires like these. Six years earlier, Rosenwald had quietly become the hub of a partnership between the sugar industry and the Palm Beach County School District.
The month before the incident, in fact, the school board was considering renewing the pact. “The question we may get now from the Board is whether this is a good/fair deal,” wrote a lawyer for the school district to another official in an email dated Jan. 9, 2008. But at the school board meeting two weeks later, Joseph Moore, the district’s chief operating officer at the time, recommended the lease be renewed. The estimated revenue was projected to be $7,000 per year over the next five years. The safety and health of students was not mentioned in any internal correspondence provided to Grist and Type Investigations after a public records request, and the school district’s lease renewal with U.S. Sugar ultimately took effect three weeks after the evacuation.
Claudia Shea, director of communications for the School District of Palm Beach County, did not respond to questions sent over several months about the district’s lease with U.S. Sugar; complaints from teachers, parents and students about health concerns regarding the burn; or allegations by teachers that they are discouraged from speaking against cane burning at school. Shea ultimately provided a statement saying that, because agriculture is the primary land use in the region, it is impossible to locate schools “not in immediate proximity to these agricultural operations.” Shea also said that “the School Board has no authority to regulate agricultural activities of the region” and that the federal, state and local agencies tasked with permitting and regulating the burns “ensure a healthy learning & working environment” at district schools.
Initially, the lease agreement also included an educational program called Sharing Our Agricultural Roots (SOAR) that helped students plant gardens of cherry tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage and spinach. “Far beyond the educational aspects of what school gardens contribute is the selfesteem that they provide,” reads a program description from 2011, which was provided Grist and Type Investigations in response to a public records request. The description does not note the fact that the burn curtailed the amount of time that students could spend outdoors, tending to these gardens.
The hazards that the seasonal burn brings Rosenwald and its students are openly acknowledged by some stakeholders. On its website, the architecture firm contracted by the Palm Beach County school board to modernize Rosenwald emphasizes that its new design prevents students from having to walk outside during the school day: “Sugarcane fields are burned sending hazardous pollutants into the air. The heavy smoke and ash prohibit outdoor play, keeping the children inside throughout the school day many times during the year.”
The school district has also budgeted for an extra janitor to clean the “ash and muck” at Rosenwald and 11 other schools in the Glades. Teachers and students throughout the region say that the smoke is an everpresent concern. When Brittany Ingram, a former teacher at Belle Glade Elementary School, asked her students what would improve their community for a class assignment, she recalls several students writing “clean air” in their journals. In March 2017, she decided to distribute flyers around the school to raise awareness about a community event calling for mechanical harvesting as an alternative to the burn.
Soon after distributing the flyers, however, she says she was reprimanded by her supervisor.
At Pahokee Middle School, Dayan Martinez became accustomed to always seeing a handful of asthmatic students sitting in the main office while their peers were exercising during P.E. Martinez taught sixth-grade meteorological science, but he stayed quiet when it came to discussing the clouds of smoke that would form outside of his own classroom. He wasn’t a Glades native and was wary of raising concern about a practice so deeply associated with many residents’ livelihoods.
“Sadly, you don’t ask many questions sometimes,” he said.
Rosenwald’s current lease with U.S. Sugar, signed in 2017, expires in 2022. The lease renewal estimated that revenue increased slightly, from $7,000 to $12,000 every year. The SOAR gardening program was omitted from the most recent agreement. Instead, it states that the sugar company’s partnership benefits Rosenwald by “affording them the opportunity to be involved in agricultural events sponsored by U.S. Sugar.”
‘WE ALREADY KNOW’
Dozens of scientific studies link exposure to sugarcane smoke to a litany of adverse health outcomes, according to a literature review currently being conducted by researchers at the University of Florida’s department of environmental and global health. Among the maladies associated with the practice are chronic kidney disease and increased risk of fetal death.
“We already know that particulate matter is hazardous,” said Eric Coker, a professor in the department. “Particulate matter can actually affect almost every organ system in the body, from neurologic to cardiovascular to respiratory to reproductive.”
As a result of these hazards, sugar-producing regions in Brazil, India and Thailand are taking steps to phase out the burn. In Louisiana, growers primarily use mechanical harvesting, instead of burning, to harvest their crop. Palm Beach County is an anomaly. And because of this, Glades residents say, they suffer unduly from ailments like asthma, bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cancer.
The regulation of sugarcane smoke in Florida involves four different federal, state and county agencies that permit and monitor the burns and air quality. Ultimately, they’re tasked with ensuring that pollution does not exceed federal air quality standards. The EPA’s environmental justice mapping tool, which combines demographic and environmental indicators, places the Glades within the 80th to 98th percentile in its index of the most hazardous areas for respiratory health in the U.S. However, even though the respiratory risk in the Glades is higher than in most of the country and surrounding areas, it still doesn’t violate legal standards established under the Clean Air Act, according to the EPA. Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, which is responsible for monitoring the state’s compliance with the Clean Air Act, also said that Palm Beach County meets national air quality standards. In a recently filed class-action lawsuit, residents dispute those conclusions.
In 1978, Palm Beach County passed the Environmental Control Act, which authorized county commissioners to regulate pollution. But agricultural industry stakeholders insisted on and were granted an exemption for pollution generated by their activities, according to Jim Stormer, who worked on the county health department’s air pollution control program from 1990 to 2015. Even if sugarcane burning created air pollution, the county had no power to force sugarcane farmers to comply with the law.
In the 1990s, the EPA introduced a new standard to measure hazardous particulate matter in the air: PM 2.5. This type of particle, named for its size, is especially harmful because it can get lodged deep in the lungs. Scraping together grants, Stormer teamed up with researchers at the University of Florida to collect data detailing the chemical composition of sugarcane burn emissions to submit to the EPA. Stormer also offered support to researchers at Florida International University in determining the percentage of hazardous emissions in the Glades that could be attributed to sugarcane burning. One of those studies found that ambient levels of harmful particulate