Cancer Alley
[4] Environmentalists consider the region a sacrifice zone where rates of cancer caused by air pollution exceed the federal government's own limits of acceptable risk.
[5] Community leaders such as Sharon Lavigne have led the charge in protesting the expansion of the petrochemical industry in Cancer Alley, as well as addressing the associated racial and economic disparities.
[9] By the early 1980s, residents in the neighborhood of Good Hope had grown accustomed to regular fires at a local oil refinery, and developed their own informal evacuation plans for their occurrences.
The area immediately adjacent to the Denka/DuPont neoprene plant in St. John the Baptist Parish has been recognized by the EPA as having a likelihood of its residents getting cancer from air pollution over 700 times the national average.
[13] In 1992, when the Taiwanese-owned Formosa Plastics Corporation proposed to build a $700 million rayon and pulp processing plant in Wallace, a small majority Black community (2000 population of 570, 93.7% Black) in St. John the Baptist Parish, which would have been the world's largest if completed and was expected to create 5,000 jobs, the 750 residents of the town waged a legal battle and eventually won forcing Formosa to build their plant elsewhere.
[25] Citing violation of federal laws in the approval of destroying wetlands, the region's first and quickly dwindling line of defense against progressively-intensifying natural disasters, as well as the failure to protect the water, air, and health of the surrounding communities, and the violation of the National Historic Preservation Act in failing to protect the burial grounds of enslaved people, the lawsuit demanded the rescinding of the permits issued in September 2019 as well as the conducting of a full environmental impact study.
Human Rights Watch reviewed data from 12 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants operating in the Cancer Alley area from October 2020 to November 2023.
[29] On January 27, 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order regarding environmental justice and specifically cited Cancer Alley as a hard-hit area.
[35] As of 2019 activists and locals have disputed the conclusions of the Louisiana Tumor Registry asserting the tracts used cover large areas and the data does not allow for specific locations adjacent to chemical plants to be analyzed individually.
[39] This subsequently caused the EPA to begin working closely with the owner of the neoprene plant in the area, Denka Performance Elastomer, and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to lower chloroprene emissions.
[40] In February 2023, the EPA and prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Louisiana filed a complaint against Denka Performance Elastomer under Section 303 of the Clean Air Act.
[41] The complaint asserted that the company's LaPlace, Louisiana, plant posed an imminent danger to public health based on its emissions of cancer-causing chloroprene.
[42] Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry sued the EPA, challenging the government's use of the disparate impact standard of the Civil Rights Act, which says policies cannot cause disproportionate harm to people of color and continue greenlighting industrial activities in an area already overburdened by pollution.
[43] In February 2024, the EPA requested a delay in an impending federal trial against Denka until after the agency finalized a rule expected to tighten emission limits for chloroprene.
[42] In April 2024, the EPA announced a new rule targeting more than 200 chemical plants across the U.S., requiring them to cut enough toxic emissions to reduce cancer risks for people living in those areas by 96 percent.
These factors include intentional neglect, the alleged need for a receptacle for pollutants in urban areas, and a lack of institutional power and low land values of people of color.
Since Cancer Alley is located closer to the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes pose a great risk and have caused large amounts of damage in past years.
The threat of the hurricane's destruction caused the industries located in Cancer Alley to release unprocessed chemicals and gases into the air via "flaring.
[48] In September 2022, environmental justice advocates in southern Louisiana were able to declare victory after two decisions denied two major petrochemical complexes from moving forward.
[51] State District Court Judge Trudy White released a decision that reversed and vacated 14 air regulations permits that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) had issued for the proposed Formosa Plastics Group complex in the town of Welcome.
[52] British industrial metal band Godflesh used a photograph of a cemetery located in Cancer Alley as the cover art for their 1996 album, Songs of Love and Hate.
Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild discusses the environmental and health conditions in Cancer Alley, as well as the socioeconomic and political ramifications, in her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land.
