Community Advocates Push for Change
Community advocates and researchers have pressed for expanded monitoring, especially in predominantly Black communities near industrial facilities.
Louisiana State University associate professor Adrienne Katner concluded in 2022 that roughly 400 high-emission facilities in Louisiana had no public air monitoring.
Communities only learn about toxic releases when there’s a shelter-in-place order or evacuation.
“It’s a public health emergency waiting to occur,” said Katner.
In 2023, researchers from Johns Hopkins University drove a mobile laboratory through Louisiana’s industrial corridor.
In 14 of 15 locations, cancer risks from toxic emissions exceeded EPA figures, in some areas by more than 11 times.
“If large emissions from these facilities are happening far away from the air monitors, they’re often going to go unnoticed,” said Peter DeCarlo, an atmospheric scientist at Johns Hopkins.
“But that doesn’t mean they’re not gonna have an effect on the people who live there.”
The state has seen a retreat from monitoring.
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New Orleans’s Irish Channel neighborhood, near a 48-acre storage terminal handling hot asphalt and other toxic chemicals, had a temporary state monitor that recorded elevated levels of harmful particulate matter.
In 2022, Louisiana regulators shut it down.
In 2023, the EPA urged state regulators to create a permanent monitoring station there, to no avail.
Louisiana’s 2022 monitoring plan included a section titled “environmental justice considerations”, describing monitors in communities such as St Rose and the Irish Channel.
