The social justice and moral revival campaigner Rev William Barber has called on 2020 presidential candidates to visit Reserve, Louisiana, the town with America’s highest risk of cancer due to airborne toxins.
Barber took part in a two-day tour of toxic pollution sites in southern Louisiana as part of his national Poor People’s Campaign. Last month he drew several prominent Democratic 2020 candidates, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, to an event in Washington.
“If you cannot come here to Reserve, then you don’t have any business being president,” Barber said on Saturday. “If you can’t come here to Cancer Alley, you don’t need to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Barber was speaking at the entrance to the Pontchartrain Works facility, a chemicals plant in Reserve that is the primary cause of a cancer risk 50 times the national average.
Flanked by members of the Concerned Citizens of Saint John the Baptist, a parish advocacy group fighting air pollution, Barber added: “These folks are not anti-job or anti-industry. They’re anti-death. They’re anti-being-killed when it doesn’t have to happen.
“You can have both. You can have the jobs and you can have regulation on not poisoning the water, poisoning the air and destroying people’s lives.”
Reserve is the centre of a year-long Guardian series, Cancer Town, exploring air pollution in St John the Baptist parish and other communities between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, a stretch of land known as cancer alley.
“It made us feel like we aren’t in this fight alone,” said the Concerned Citizens president, Mary Hampton.
The Pontchartrain Works facility is the only place in the US that produces the synthetic rubber Neoprene, which contains the primary constituent chloroprene, listed by the Environmental Protection Agency as a likely carcinogen.
The plant is owned by the Japanese chemicals firm Denka, which purchased it from the US chemical giant DuPont in 2015. DuPont had run Neoprene production at the site since 1964.
Barber visited another plant in neighbouring St James parish, the Uncle Sam plant operated by the fertilizer company Mosaic. The facility is home to a 200ft reservoir of acidic wastewater encased in walls of trace-radioactive gypsum.
“That monstrosity is one of the greatest threats we face in southern Louisiana,” said Robert Taylor, director of the Concerned Citizens of Saint John the Baptist, gesturing at the imposing walls.
Barber and assembled residents also discussed the history of the land along the Mississippi where chemical plants now sit. Nearly all of it was once given over to sugar and rice plantations.
“So they went from plantations to plants, killing people with contamination,” Barber said.
The tour came the morning after a town hall in New Orleans, co-hosted by the Poor People’s Campaign and the Guardian, to discuss the impact of pollution in the region.
In a panel session attended by community members, local politicians and environmental scientists, Barber pledged to make pollution issues in Reserve a central part of his campaign.
“We have to drive this into the public narrative,” he said. “We have to drive this into the public consciousness, and that part of the reason why the Poor People’s Campaign is here.”
On Thursday, a study published by the University Network for Human Rights found that residents in Reserve have been diagnosed with cancer at “highly unusual” rates. The report was dismissed by Denka, which had not been shown its findings.
“From what we have learned, the study appears to be based on individual interviews rather than scientific analysis of actual cancer incidences,” a Denka spokesman, Jim Harris, said.
The company has long disputed the dangers presented by chloroprene and is currently lobbying the federal government to change its “likely carcinogen” status.
