USA TODAY International Edition
A new threat in Louisiana’s ‘ Cancer Alley’: COVID- 19
How decades of racism left a community vulnerable
RESERVE, La. – The doctor called on Mother’s Day with the news Karen Wilson had dreaded for weeks.
Your brother won’t survive the night, he told her. Expect another call soon.
Wilson’s younger brother, Jules Duhe, had been on a ventilator fighting COVID- 19 since April.
At 2: 30 a. m., the phone call came, springing her awake. Duhe, 53, was dead. Wilson sat up in bed, cold shivers running through her.
Just four years earlier, Wilson had buried her older brother, James Duhe, who died of liver cancer at age 61. In August, Wilson’s sister, Shirley Jacob, already suffering congestive heart failure and other ailments, also contracted COVID- 19. She died within a week.
Three funerals in four years. It was nearly more than the family could handle, even in a place like Reserve, where the risk of cancer is the highest in the nation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
“A lot of people around here were dying of cancer,” Wilson said. “Now, they’re dying of COVID.”
In the first half of the 20th century, Reserve was a mostly white small town on the east bank of the Mississippi River adjusting to life in post- slavery Louisiana. But in the 1960s, chemical plants arrived in force.
White people moved out and African
American families moved in at a time when Black Americans faced discriminatory housing practices elsewhere but found easy access to home loans close to the plant.
Today, Reserve is majority Black, surrounded by a dozen petrochemical plants that provide some jobs while also releasing potentially harmful toxins into the air: ammonia, chlorine, hydrogen cyanide, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and a little- known chemical called chloroprene.
The transition of Reserve from slave plantation to toxin- choked community shows what systemic racism looks like. Its residents once worked the local sugar cane fields; now they pray for medical help as they endure high rates of cancer, respiratory illness, diabetes and kidney disease. All are preexisting conditions that render people more vulnerable to COVID- 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Since the coronavirus emerged here in March, St. John the Baptist Parish, which includes Reserve, has consistently ranked among the top 30 U. S. counties with the highest COVID- 19 death rates, according to data compiled by USA TODAY.
St. John the Baptist Parish, with a population of 43,446, had recorded 105 deaths as of Oct. 12. Nearly 60% of the parish’s COVID- 19 victims were Black
and many came from Reserve.
“This is a result of historical racism,” longtime Reserve resident and activist Robert Taylor said. “We’ve gotten the worst of everything, and we’re getting the worst of this.”
Plants in the parish emit chemicals deemed likely carcinogens by the EPA. The largest of those, Denka Performance Elastomer, releases the highest amount – more than 75,000 pounds of chloroprene in 2018, or 42 times the amount of the next- highest emitter, EPA records show.
The 100- mile stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is known as “Cancer Alley” because of its high number of petrochemical plants. The long line of racism – from slavery to decades of discrimination – entrenched along that riverfront territory is a key reason COVID- 19 is spreading there so quickly, said Robert Bullard, a distinguished professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University who is considered the father of the modern environmental justice movement.
“It was like a heat- seeking missile that zeroed in on the most vulnerable populations,” Bullard said, “and the result was this death bomb.”
The only neoprene plant in the US
Highway 44 in St. John the Baptist Parish runs parallel with the Mississippi River and winds alongside squat, redbricked homes, church chapels and roadside BBQ joints. As the road approaches Reserve, the sprawling tangle of tubes, steel pipes and smokestacks of the Denka plant emerges to the north.
The facility was expanded in 1968 by DuPont to produce neoprene, a synthetic rubber used to make tires in World War II and now used for wetsuits, laptop sleeves and other products. In 2015, DuPont sold the neoprene production part of the facility to Japanese firm Denka.
To make neoprene, the plant emits chloroprene, classified by the government as a “likely” carcinogen. It’s the only site in the U. S. that still produces neoprene.
A report from the Louisiana Cancer Control Partnership concluded that Black men and women in Louisiana “bear an unequal burden of cancer” compared to their white neighbors. A 2018 report from the Louisiana Department of Health zeroed in on St. John residents, finding that its residents got cancer at “significantly higher incidence rates” between 2006 and 2014.
Last year, the University Network for Human Rights went even deeper, surveying residents living within a mile of the Denka plant. It found that 40% of respondents regularly experienced chest pain, heart palpitations or both.
And now, studies are finding those sickened St. John residents bearing the brunt of COVID- 19’ s wrath. Researchers at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic reviewed nine parishes along the river and found that St. John ranked No. 1 in coronavirus deaths. Even factoring in the 28 deaths attributed to the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Home, a nursing home in Reserve ravaged by the virus, the parish’s COVID- 19 death rate remained alarmingly high, said Kimberly Terrell, the study’s main author.
“These are communities that for decades have been breathing air that harms their lungs,” Terrell said. “And it’s pretty clear that people who have damaged lungs are more susceptible to COVID- 19.”
Denka officials dispute any connection between the chemical plant and the
high death rate from COVID- 19 in the surrounding neighborhood. In a statement to USA TODAY, Denka spokesman Jim Harris said St. John the Baptist residents exhibit “country- leading rates” of preexisting conditions.
“We are unaware of a study suggesting chloroprene exposure could cause COVID- 19, but there is absolutely no basis for that link,” Harris said.
DuPont and Denka have challenged the government’s classification of chloroprene as a likely carcinogen, arguing that there’s no proven link between chloroprene and high levels of cancer in St. John. But internal company documents show that its scientists knew for decades about the dangers posed by the toxin. In a technical manual prepared in 1956 by DuPont, the company warned that chloroprene could enter the body through inhalation, causing a weakening of the central nervous system and “damage to vital organs.”
“Exposure to only a small dose may be severe enough to cause death,” read the document, which is stored at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont is headquartered.
‘ Smoke of Progress’
When Louisiana Gov. John McKeithen had to travel from the state capital of Baton Rouge to New Orleans, he often told his driver to skip the freeway and take the river road instead.
The car sped past rows of sugar cane fields, former slave plantations just a few generations earlier.
Sitting in the backseat of his Cadillac limousine, McKeithen, who held the post from 1964 to 1972, and his press secretary, Mary Brocato, would review speeches or the day’s agenda. The governor’s attention would inevitably wander out the window, Brocato said.
“He would say, ‘ You know, Mary, this is going to be all industry and all plants and factories within 10 years.’”
McKeithen stepped into the governorship as Louisiana roiled with civil rights turbulence. McKeithen was known as a segregationist with ties to the KKK, but his views on race shifted as governor, and he intervened to quell racial violence in the city of Bogalusa, according to “Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915- 1972.”
But one of his top policy goals was drawing business and industry to Louisiana. McKeithen took recruiting trips around the country and ran full- page newspaper ads urging industrial plants to “Fill The Air With The Smoke of Progress.” By the late 1960s, his dream was largely fulfilled: More than 200 chemi
cal facilities operated in Louisiana, most of them in the corridor.
By the late 1950s, DuPont zeroed in on the former Belle Pointe Plantation in what today is Reserve, a sprawling property on which 141 slaves once harvested corn, wool and sugar. The company bought more than 600 acres of the plantation and began to build.
White families closest to the plant began moving out. Black families snatched up discounted homes and moved in, thinking they were getting a great deal at a time when it was otherwise difficult for Black Americans to secure home loans because of redlining and other discriminatory practices. Reserve went from being 60% white in 1960 to 61% Black in 2010.
Regulators’ slow response
The federal government has, for decades, documented cases showing how communities of color and low- income communities are more vulnerable to health and environmental threats compared with society at large. “Housing segregation, the influence of race in local zoning practices, and infrastructure development all contribute to this disparity,” according to a 2003 report by the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The first time Congress forced the EPA to closely monitor chemicals like chloroprene was 1990. It wasn’t until 2000 that the Department of Health and Human Services released a report describing chloroprene as “reasonably anticipated” to be a human carcinogen. It took yet another decade for the EPA, tasked with regulating plants such as Denka, to declare chloroprene “likely” to be a human carcinogen in 2010.
In 2015, the EPA published the National Air Toxics Assessment, or NATA, a detailed accounting of air pollutants, and ranked all 72,000 census tracts in the U. S. by the overall cancer risk to people in those communities.
Census Tract 708 in St. John the Baptist – closest to the Denka plant – ranked No. 1 in the nation for overall cancer risk. Five of the top 10 census tracts in the country – and nine of the top 20 – were in St. John the Baptist Parish, according to the report. Census Tract 708 is 92% Black.
The EPA set 0.2 micrograms per square cubic meter of air over the course of a lifetime as a safe level of chloroprene and installed air monitors in six locations near the plant to monitor Denka’s output of the toxin. Since the monitors were installed in 2016, they have shown chloroprene levels far above that level, with one monitor just west of the plant showing an average daily concen
tration 26 times above the EPA’s recommended level.
In 2017, Denka agreed to lower its chloroprene emissions by 85%. The company spent more than $ 35 million to install new equipment. In May, Louisiana regulators confirmed that Denka had achieved that 85% reduction.
Still, the air around the plant remains well above the 0.2 micrograms per square cubic meter threshold recommended by the EPA. And Denka has been pushing the EPA to downgrade its assessment of chloroprene as a “likely” carcinogen and to raise the allowable limit of emissions.
Harris, the Denka spokesman, said the company agreed to reduce emissions “to assist its community and ensure peace of mind for its neighbors” but is now requesting higher emissions rates because it claims a recent study shows chloroprene is safer than previously thought. The study was conducted by consultants hired by Denka.
The EPA has been deliberating over Denka’s latest request to reclassify the chemical for more than two years with no decision in sight. In a statement, the agency said the level of 0.2 micrograms per square cubic meter of chloroprene is simply a recommendation, not an enforceable rule or red line. The amount of chemical emitted from a plant is enforceable and, in that respect, Denka has remained below the 350,000 pounds per year allowed by state and federal regulators.
COVID sweeps through
The Denka plant has continued to operate unabated during the pandemic even as churches, schools, businesses and other sectors have been forced to close.
Meanwhile, residents of Reserve are relying mostly on Concerned Citizens of St. John to push state and federal regulators to better monitor the Denka plant and keep them informed. Last year, Taylor, the longtime resident who is the group’s founder, traveled to Japan with other Reserve residents to meet with Denka representatives and voice concerns over the emissions.
Since the start of the pandemic, Taylor has witnessed his childhood friend die from COVID- 19.
As he talked, Taylor looked out his front door down East 26th Street to the trail of victims left behind by cancer: two brothers who died from cancer, a husband and wife who lived across the street, another good neighbor.
“They’re killing us,” he said. “Then they tell us to prove they’re doing it.”