As you turn a sharp bend on Louisiana’s Highway 44 on the way in to the small town of Reserve, the horizon is broken almost immediately by a tall, imposing structure that billows large plumes from its stacks.
This is the Pontchartrain Works, a towering chemicals plant that has stood on this land, about 45 miles from the city of New Orleans, for over 50 years.
For decades, the residents of Reserve had accepted the plant’s existence as a minor inconvenience. It is an eyesore and the cause of frequent foul-tasting air. But there was little available evidence to suggest that a series of extraordinary illnesses experienced in the community – rare autoimmune diseases, chronic lung problems, multiple cancer deaths – were linked to pollution from the plant next door.
That was until 2015, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an “air toxics” report that said Pontchartrain Works was the primary reason that Reserve was the location with the highest risk of cancer due to airborne toxins anywhere in the US. This is largely due to a substance called chloroprene, now listed as a “likely carcinogen”, that is emitted by the plant, which is now the only place in America to produce a synthetic rubber called neoprene.
In an area of land next to the plant, a sprawl of suburban housing occupied almost entirely by African American residents, the cancer risk is 50 times the national average. It’s this site that I and my former colleague Jamiles Lartey have visited numerous times in the past six months for the Guardian’s year-long reporting project Cancer Town.
Our aim has been to give sustained, international coverage to the fight for clean air in this area of southern Louisiana, with a series of investigative reports, profiles, historical context and reporting from neighbouring communities fighting similar battles against big polluters.
We have followed the small but growing number of activists from Reserve as they marched dozens of miles to protest, and covered two trips that residents have made to Japan, where they tried in vain to force meetings with the executives of the Japanese petrochemicals company Denka, which operates neoprene production at Pontchartrain Works.
This summer we co-sponsored two town hall events in New Orleans and Reserve with the national civil rights leader Rev William Barber, who has placed air pollution here at the centre of his national moral revival campaign and challenged the Democratic candidates for president to visit Reserve.
“If you cannot come here to Reserve, then you don’t have any business being president,” Barber said outside the Pontchartrain Works on a sweltering day back in July. “If you can’t come here to Cancer Alley, you don’t need to be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
His words have not gone unnoticed. Last month, the Democratic frontrunner Elizabeth Warren released an environmental justice platform placing air pollution in Reserve at the centre of her ambitious policy pledge. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker has also visited the region and pushed legislation in Congress.
But if the residents of Reserve are to be victorious – their demands include that emissions from the plant fall to what the EPA defines as a safe exposure limit – they will need support from local legislators.
Louisiana, in America’s deep south, has earned a reputation for its notoriously lax approach to environmental regulation, often favouring a cash-rich oil industry that dominates the state’s economy. Indeed, many local officials have old employment ties to the plant, which for almost five decades was run by the US chemicals giant DuPont.
But, since the start of our project, there have been rare signs of progress for the community. Shortly after its launch, Louisiana’s state environment department issued notice that it planned to sue both DuPont and Denka over alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. A civil lawsuit is ongoing.
The governor of Louisiana has commissioned an official health study to examine cancer rates in Reserve amid criticisms of current data. The local school board has begun examining whether to close an elementary school that sits a few hundred feet from the plant.
Much of the long-term outcome from this battle lies in the results of two elections. The first, the race for Louisiana’s next governor, will be decided on Saturday. The conservative Democratic incumbent, John Bel Edwards, who despite being a petrochemical industry backer has inched towards action in Reserve, faces off against a Trump-endorsed Republican, Eddie Rispone, who has expressed no interest in the community here.
The second is the presidential election next year. The Trump presidency has already spelled disaster for environmental causes in the US, with the rolling-back of dozens of protections and a decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Four more years will almost certainly lead to further damage in Reserve.
Irrespective of the results, the Guardian is committed to covering what happens next in Cancer Town. To telling the stories of those who have lost loved ones to disease they link to emissions from the plant. To report stories showing the consequences of loose and poorly enforced environmental law along with its deep connections to race and economic inequality in this region. And to hold politicians accountable for inaction.
Our reporting here has drawn us into the community’s struggle. And we are thankful to the residents who have invited us into their homes and told us intimate details about their own health and the devastation they have felt losing loved ones to cancer.
I often think of the words of Robert Taylor, a leading community activist in Reserve who has lived here his whole life. Taylor has lost his mother, sister and nephews to cancer, his wife is currently fighting the disease, and his daughter is battling a rare intestinal disease linked to chloroprene.
“I still can’t believe that this one community could be asked to suffer this much, merely for the profit of these foreign corporations,” he told us. “What kind of people are they to knowingly wipe out a whole community of people for profit?”
