Louisiana communities are left in the dark on toxic air – and industry helped keep it that way

Lawmakers weakened community air monitoring as industry pushed back against greater scrutiny

Kimbrelle Kyereh lives just a few hundred feet from the massive chemical storage tanks in St Rose, in south-eastern Louisiana. Oily fumes sometimes drift into her home, bringing headaches, nausea and insomnia. On one such night, she grabbed her son at 3am and fled to an all-night Ihop.

In 2023, after years of coping with the noxious odors, Kyereh began collecting air samples in her yard for a local environmental justice group. But soon after, Louisiana passed an industry-backed law that sharply restricted how that kind of data could be used.

Ten of Louisiana’s heaviest air-polluting facilities, based on self-reported data shared with the EPA, operate without a single public air monitor within five miles.

This list includes Dow Chemical’s plastics factory in Plaquemine, which is about eight miles from the nearest air monitoring station. The station measures only ozone even though the plant releases an array of toxic pollutants including ethylene oxide, a known carcinogen.

No public monitors measure ammonia – despite the fact that CF Industries’ Donaldsonville plant emits more than 7m lbs of the hazardous chemical each year, according to EPA data.

The three chemicals that researchers have concluded “together account for the large majority of total cancer risk” in the area – ethylene oxide, chloroprene and formaldehyde – aren’t monitored by the state at all.
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