LAPLACE, Louisiana--From her home on Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," Lydia Gerard looks down at her 8-month-old great-granddaughter and wonders if she will one day suffer the same fate as her many friends and relatives whose lives were cut short by the disease.
Gerard lives along the Mississippi River, just a few blocks from a synthetic rubber plant that the administration of former President Joe Biden sued, claiming it posed an imminent public health hazard. Gerard, like more than 90% of people living within 1 mile (1.5 km) of the plant, is Black.
"She's not even 8 months yet, and has to be subject to breathing all that," said Gerard, referring to the plant's emissions of chloroprene, which in 2010 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classified as a likely human carcinogen.
Seven weeks after President Donald Trump took over in January, the new EPA leadership withdrew the lawsuit against the plant's Japanese owners, Denka Performance Elastomer LLC, siding with company lawyers who disputed the lawsuit's contention that emissions were linked to significant cancer risk.The Trump administration's press release announcing the end of the lawsuit said the dismissal fulfilled the president's Day One executive order to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion, and that it aligned with the EPA's new pledge to "end the use of 'environmental justice' as a tool for advancing ideological priorities."
Three environmental researchers and five former EPA officials interviewed by Reuters say the end of the EPA's DEI and environmental justice programmes - which seek to ensure a healthy environment for minority groups that often live closest to sources of contamination - will be most felt in Black and Hispanic communities that have long endured the harmful effects of pollution. Those health inequities are the legacy of racial discrimination that was legal from the country's inception until 1965, the type of historical injustice DEI policies were designed to correct.
Trump has also rescinded a 1994 executive order by President Bill Clinton that directed every federal agency to develop an agency-wide environmental justice strategy to address adverse health or environmental effects on minority and low-income populations.
"It's DEI being treated like a four-letter word," said Linda Birnbaum, a retired toxicologist and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who spent 19 years at the EPA. "People who are already most impacted by high pollution are going to be most hurt by the loosening of regulations."
Asked to comment on the findings of this story, an EPA spokesperson directed Reuters to a video statement by Trump's new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, who has outlined a strategy emphasizing deregulation, saying the U.S. can protect the environment and promote economic growth at the same time."In practice, 'environmental justice' has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activist groups instead of actually spending those dollars on directly remediating the specific environmental issues that need to get addressed," Zeldin said in the video posted on the EPA website last month.
Zeldin has also promoted traditional EPA initiatives such as expediting cleanup of toxic "Superfund" sites and collaborating with states on clean air and water projects. He expressed pride in EPA removal of hazardous material from Los Angeles wildfire sites in only 28 days.
On March 12, the new EPA unveiled what it called "the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history" by rolling back 31 initiatives and eliminating the agency's DEI arm and its 10 regional environmental justice offices, which worked with communities to identify and mitigate local sources of pollution. It said it has saved $2 billion in wasteful spending by canceling hundreds of grants in conjunction with billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
Some business leaders and conservative groups have praised Zeldin's deregulation measures, predicting they would lower the cost of living for all Americans and stimulate energy production. Reuters could not immediately establish if they also explored the environmental impact on minority communities.
Cancer Alley, a nickname that dates to the 1980s, is an 85-mile (137-km) stretch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that is home to some 150 chemical plants and oil refineries.Multiple studies over the years point to elevated health risks, including one in 2022 that found nearly every census tract in the area ranks in the top 5% nationally for cancer risk.
In 2023, the Biden administration sued Denka, demanding it eliminate the alleged dangers posed by chloroprene emissions. Denka said the lawsuit relied on flawed and outdated data that emerged from studies of mice, while an updated 2021 survey of humans showed no increase in cancer deaths.
Denka criticized the EPA's reliance on the data that assumed affected people would have to breathe chloroprene emissions 24 hours a day for 70 years. Moreover, Denka said the plant's emissions were reduced 85% after a $35 million upgrade completed in 2018.
"Where is the cancer? I mean, you could just call it Cancer Alley ... but we don't see the increase in cancer," said Jason Hutt, an attorney for Denka and a partner at Bracewell LLP.
One peer-reviewed 2021 study, the only one to examine effects in the surrounding community, found elevated levels of cancer and other maladies for people living closest to the plant. Denka dismissed this field survey, which was prompted by concerns from a community advocacy group and led by the progressive University Network for Human Rights, as "flawed and biased" and cited an EPA assessment that called it "uninformative."
The 2021 field study found 52 cancer cases among people living within 1.5 km of the plant, a prevalence 44% higher than the national level, which would have produced 36 cases.That translates to an additional 16 people, out of a sample of 777, who contracted cancer within the previous 23 years, said Ruhan Nagra, lead author and a law professor at the University of Utah.
Within a second concentric circle extending to a radius from 1.5 to 2.5 km from the plant, cancer rates dropped to virtually even with the national level.
Children in the closer zone also had higher rates of headaches and nosebleeds, and adults reported more chest pain, heart palpitations and breathing difficulty than people in the outer zone, the study said.
Gerard, 70, lives in the inner zone. She said her husband died of kidney cancer in 2018 at age 67. Her grandmother died of lung cancer.
"We had other people," she said, referring to those diagnosed with cancer, which Reuters was unable to independently confirm. "Cousins, and people in the neighbourhood, next door, across the street, down the street - a lot of people."
