 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's session, Sacrifice Zones, Communities and the Path of Industrial Pollution. My name is Rocio Ortega, and I am the events associate at ProPublica, and I'll be your host today. We'll get started in just a few minutes. We're just waiting for a few more people to sign on. Thank you so much for your patience. Close captioning of the program is available and can be enabled by clicking on the closed caption option on the bar towards the bottom of your screen. Today, we're partnering with Spotify and Gimlet Media's How to Save a Planet podcast for an inside look at ProPublica's award-winning investigation into the nation's hidden toxic hotspots. And it looks like we have just enough folks on now, so let's go ahead and get started. If you're just joining, my name is Rocio Ortega, and I am ProPublica's events associate. Welcome to today's session, Sacrifice Zones, Communities and the Path of Industrial Pollution. Thanks to McKinsey and Company for their support of today's event. Close captioning of the program is available and can be enabled by clicking on the closed caption option on the bar towards the bottom of your screen. For those new to us, ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to investigative journalism. Today, we're partnering with Spotify and Gimlet Media's How to Save a Planet podcast for an exciting live virtual podcast taping. Climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis will soon walk us through the groundbreaking investigation by ProPublica that revealed more than 1,000 hotspots of cancer-causing industrial air pollution across the US. I'd now like to formally introduce our moderator, Kendra. Kendra is a climate reporter and currently works for Gimlet, the podcasting company. We'll also be speaking with fellow ProPublicans, Maya Miller, who is an engagement reporter working on community-sourced investigations, and Al Shah, who is deputy editor on the news app's team. Finally, we'll also welcome John Beard, Jr. towards the end of the session, who is the founder and CEO of Port Arthur Community Action Network, an environmental justice advocacy and community development organization. As an additional note, the session is being reported and a link to the video will be emailed to everyone who registered. Thank you all so much again for being here today, and I hope you enjoy this discussion. I'll go ahead and let Kendra take it from here. Thank you, Kendra. Thank you, Rossiya, for having me today. And I'm really excited. And before we dive into this conversation, I want to sort of lay out for the audience here the impact that you've had just two days after you published your analysis of industrial pollution. The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that its administrator, Michael S. Reagan, would visit the communities that you featured in your reporting. In February, three US representatives introduced a bill that would require the EPA to create a pilot program for air monitoring in communities overburdened with pollution. And in addition to some of the very rigorous analysis that was in your reporting, I think it was bolstered also by this fact, by this term, that you use sacrifice zones. And so one of the things that I wanted to maybe begin with, the basics, which is what is a sacrifice zone? Armaya. Sorry, no. Yeah, so a sacrifice zone more generally is geographic area that has permanently been damaged by environmental harm or has been economically disinvested in over time. And it's usually through locally unwanted land use and usually is an impact of environmental racism. And it's actually a term that people attribute to the Cold War as first being used around then when they were making nuclear weapon productions. And they were making them in sites that had radioactive fallouts because of those locations. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, and for this project specifically, we were looking at a specific database that the EPA puts out. And using that database, we identified the sacrifice zones based on areas around industrial facilities that are big enough that they have to report their emissions to the EPA, emit certain cancer causing chemicals. And individually or in aggregate, raise the cancer risk in those areas too, above 100,000. So there are sacrifice zones more generally. But for this project specifically, we took a kind of individualized approach to this specific data set to find these places around the country. How did that idea come about? And how did you know to tap into that data set? So the idea started in 2019, actually. And we were working back in 2019 with the Times-Piquiun and the Advocate newspaper down in New Orleans. They were working on a project that time looking at the area known as Cancer Alley, which is the stretch, kind of a colloquial term for the stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, which is an area that's full of industrial facilities, lots of chemical plants, lots of refineries. It's an area that has long been known as a place that's been overburdened and one of the most burdened places in the country for industrial pollution. And that wasn't news. But what was news was that there were a lot of new facilities that wanted to come into a place that was already overburdened. And so we wanted to try to figure out how are these new facilities going to increase cancer risk in an area that was already one of the most overburdened in the country. And the problem was that a lot of the databases that most people use to do these kind of analyses work on the level of a census tract, which is a larger area, especially because the area, most of the areas in Cancer Alley are very spread out. It was hard to use census tract data to kind of pinpoint where that pollution was. And that's when we discovered this database called REZE, the Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Database that the EPA puts out, which is kind of an obscure database. But the cool thing about it was it models these emissions and these concentrations of chemicals down to less than a square kilometer. So we could use this database to really pinpoint where pollution was spreading from the individual sources and how it bloomed out from the fence lines. And discovering this database, kind of working with it, allowed us to do an analysis that we hadn't seen done before and we were able to kind of show specifically how these new facilities that were proposed for the area would increase the burden in places that were already overburdened. So that was the first project that we did back in 2019. And then once we published that story for using data for about seven parishes in Louisiana, we decided, you know what, let's try to do this for the entire country. And that was- No big deal, little labor. No big deal, it was, yeah, at the time, I think if I knew what I know now, I don't know if I would have said yet, let's go full steam ahead on this because the data was very, very large and it took a long time to just figure out how to compute it. But that was kind of the genesis of it because we realized once we saw the power of this database in this small area of Louisiana, we thought, oh, there must be places like this all over the country. Let's see if we can tease that out. One kind of follow-up question is, what was, like you mentioned that for anyone who maybe hadn't read that particular story, what was the analysis that you did? Like what was so unique about it? What made it stand out? How was it able to kind of tease out these risks that other people weren't able to see? What was unique because we were able to do the analysis down to these individual grid squares, which were less than a kilometer wide. And what we did was we took permits that new facilities wanted, were filing to be able to go into these areas and we plugged those into the same model so we could basically see this hypothetical world of what it would look like if all these new facilities were built in these areas that were already overburdened and we found that, yeah, these areas, they already have some of the highest cancer risks in the country would see those risks go up even more if these facilities were built. And we built an interactive map for that project that let people see specifically what it would look like in these communities if, say, this new facility was built. So you're kind of able to see the overlapping risks, right? It's not just that you have a power plant in your community, it's that you have a power plant and a cracker plant and now they're talking about bringing in, I don't know, a smelter, I don't know why, right? I'm hypothetically. But so you have this robust data set and you have this map, this interactive website that you created, but how do you go from that to a story? Well, it was not, we didn't go from that to a single story, really what it was was like almost like a full mine of stories. And once we were able to do the analysis for the entire country and that took a long time, we kind of opened that cache of data to a bunch of reporters in our newsroom and everyone kind of bit off a piece of it. So we did stories about West Virginia, we did stories about Laredo, Texas, Pascagoula, Mississippi, the whole supply chain of Cascade dish soap. We did a lot of different aspects of the story because it was such a rich vein of data and that's kind of one of the cool things about building what we call news applications which are these kind of big interactive databases is they're like, they're not just stories, they're like story generators almost. So we found a lot of different sides of it that we can pull off. One more question before I have a question from my which is, so you're doing this for the entire United States and you're finding a lot of impacted communities, how did you decide which ones you were actually going to feature in a story? I mean, that must have been a really hard decision to make like, we're gonna talk about this place X but not please why. Oh, you said that was for Maya. No, that's for Maya. No, I mean, a lot of it came down to what the numbers looked like in those communities and that's how we prioritized them. And the numbers were obviously very big in Houston, very big in places like Port Arthur, places like Louisiana, but also places that you wouldn't expect that kind of popped out, places like West Virginia, places like kind of small places in Pennsylvania, places that popped out. So we kind of followed the numbers where they led and that's how we kind of decided on the stories. One of the things that I thought was really incredible about this series is that you didn't just publish the story and tell the communities to kind of figure it out. You reached out to communities. Maya, do you wanna talk a little bit about that engagement strategy and sort of what came out of it? I would love to. Yeah, so we thought about engagement and community engagement pretty early on in the process actually. So once Al and his colleague Layla Eunice who created this news app made it available to reporters, I dug in and started thinking about, okay, there's people who are living here who might not know about this. Maybe people who have been doing a lot of work around this like John who we'll talk to a little bit later. But yeah, so I reached out to some folks and just said, hey, is this something that you know about? And this was just when the database was first became available. And some people said, no, I had no idea and I have all these questions and other people. For example, there was a woman in Wilmington, Delaware, Penny Dryden who had learned about this grew up in this area and had applied for a grant for it to do local air monitoring. And so she had really become intimate with the nuances of this and had learned some of the answers to common questions. And we also got in touch with Lydia Gerard pretty early on to say, hey, we have this map. She lives in Louisiana and she had shared with us that she went to a lot of community meetings and a lot of EPA meetings and tried to put input in when people were deciding whether or not to allow a facility to be built. So during the permitting process. And so as the map was being finalized, we worked with residents to also compile these questions and answers that a lot of people had and a lot of people just from living in these areas were experts in themselves on, do I buy an air filter? What can I do? Do I write to my legislator? What can I do to protect myself and my family and my neighbors? And so we were getting that ready all for publication. And then we also wanted to ensure that the residents who live in all these hotspots there were more than a thousand that we identified of areas where estimated cancer risk from industrial facilities were prevalent. And so we didn't want to take for granted that anybody was a prop... All of those people were pro-publica readers and like new... How dare they not be? Exactly, right? I mean, come on. Yeah, so we, I returned to a tool that I usually go to often in this work of community engagement. Looked at the Census Bureau's American Community Survey which has really detailed information on access to Wi-Fi in local neighborhoods, whether people have computers, languages spoken at home. And so from looking at the top hotspots and looking at that information, kind of gleaned that across these hotspots that most people did not have as many computers in their households, there were more Spanish speakers, did not have as much access to Wi-Fi as average US residents. And so we turned to this tool that the USPS, the Postal Service has where you can essentially say, hey postal worker, please take this postcard and put it into every household or business on your route. And you just give them a postcard and they do so. And so we mapped out the routes that were closest to the top 15 hotspots. And in these postcards we wrote, you can learn about the possible cancer risk from industrial facilities near you. We also had it in Spanish. And on the back of the postcard, we explained who we are, we explained, hey we've been looking at this EPA database for two years. We learned that you might live in an area where with estimated cancer risk and here's where you can get more information that we've compiled with residents who live here. And also, yeah, here's where you could visit the map to learn more. And so we actually then through that created a really great feedback loop where people were getting back in touch with us and saying, hey, it's not just cancer, it's also property values have been stagnant in this area. And I'm afraid to leave my house or the smell is unbearable and I get headaches. So things that people living there and cleaning expertise from just living in these areas shared with us. And so having that way to meet people where they were was really important for us throughout the whole project. Do you, one of the things that I think often comes up when doing journalism is like the line between journalism and activism. And it doesn't feel like, and often people, journalists will create something and they'll put out in the world and just hope someone who it impacts will consume it. Do you think that journalism has a community engagement role or that it should have a community engagement role? Yeah, absolutely. And so I'll tell you a story that I love that is like often passed around the engagement journalism world is that, and I don't know who told this to me but thank you to whoever did. Reporter was covering an entire state and drove into this community and realized that there was, saw that there was a bridge that was broken and spent a couple of days reporting on it, seeing how to fix the bridge, et cetera and put out the story, only to learn after the fact that nobody actually had used the bridge for decades. And so I think one of the tenants of just engagement journalism is ensuring that the people who are affected or impacted by what you're reporting on are a part of the journalism process from the beginning through the middle to end and post publication and then closing the loop with them. And so I think that a lot of journalism, we've had declining readership and there's been a lot of reports about lack of trust in journalism and approaching journalism in collaboration with residents who are affected by what you're reporting on is one way to potentially start building back that trust and thinking about, okay, I'm creating journalism as a public service for these residents, what will be a public service for them? What information do they need? What information gaps do they have that we can help fill? And so ensuring that we're in touch with residents from the onset of that reporting, through the middle, through crowdsourcing experiences and then the end to ensure that the journalism actually reaches them because if you're putting something on the internet and they're not seeing it, then does anyone read it? If a tree falls, does anyone hear it? So I think that that's some of the reasons why there's been a renewed investment in engaged journalism over the last couple of years across the industry. I feel like when a lot of the times when I speak to people who aren't environmental journalists about the public and health inequity impacts of environmental racism, it's often unbelievable to them. I remember I was touring a collage pond with someone as one does and they were, it was online and it was like leaking into the local water supply and they were just like, how, how is it? Like they didn't, like the guy that was, you know local in the community was taking us around kept like reiterating this and they kept turning to me and be like, are they saying what I think that they're saying? Because how can this be real? Have you encountered that feeling during this investigation like people sort of are like, how can what you're telling us be true? Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people we spoke to who did not even know that they lived in a industrial facility that was putting out chemicals into the air that increased their cancer risk. They were just shocked to learn that and they were like, how is it possible that I have not been told? Why isn't it required that when I'm moving to this area of people don't tell me this? And then the way that the EPA frames cancer risk is like one, and you heard Al mention one in a hundred thousand earlier. There's also essentially after a lot of understand looking at the science of health and also looking at the economics of it. They've decided that anything that puts a community above one in 10,000 cancer risk is what they term unacceptable. And that means that if you live in an area and 10,000 people around you, one person will get cancer because of your exposed to breathing in this air that has this air toxic or toxic air pollution in it. And so even if that threshold is crossed and many of those thresholds are crossed across the country and were revealed in the map, the EPA isn't gonna necessarily immediately act. It's not like, okay, you've crossed this threshold for excess cancer risk that we say is unacceptable. And now we're gonna start investigating this. It's like they can start investigating it. And so a lot of people felt that kind of frustration and of like, hey, I'm living in an area where excess cancer is one in 400 and nobody's doing anything about it. How is that so? And so talking to folks who have lived in these communities for a while as we were reporting this initially, showed us that ways that people took steps into their own tans of applying for grants to do air monitoring of pushing their local health department to do cancer cluster analyses to see if the rates of cancer were actually higher so that they could potentially get traction to change the situation that they were in. I guess this is for both Al and Maya, whoever, you know, a celebrity death match, you can answer it. But in doing this reporting, are there any stories that you've come across that either surprised you or that like still really stick with you in kind of a visceral way? One of the stories that surprised me the most was actually a story that ended up not being a story. When we were first going through the data, a big thing jumped up at us, which was that the airplane company Boeing, it looked like they were poisoning the entire city of Portland, Oregon. And so you're looking at this, you're like, how is this possible? The cancer risk from this Boeing plant in Portland looks like, you know, it's massive. And so we're like, this is a scoop. You know, this is a great scoop. No one's written about this before. No one knows about this. No one has seemed to care about this. Let's go report this out. And my colleague, Ava Kaufman, went out and kind of did a bunch of reporting in Portland and figured out that essentially it wasn't true if the company had messed up their reporting forms and that they weren't emitting, you know, they weren't emitting this level of carcinogens into the air in Portland. And no one seemed to be, no one, this didn't seem to like raise alarm bells at the EPA. This didn't seem to really have an impact anywhere. So even though they were putting it into this database that they were poisoning everyone, no one seemed to care about it. So that was a story that really resonated with me because this is kind of the best data we have on where these cancer causing emissions are. But if no one's using it, what does it matter, you know? Yeah. Thanks for that. And that's wild. And so we're gonna, I think, pivot to a couple of other specific examples. Maya, I know that at least in one community, Verona, when they found out they were a sacrifice zone, they pushed for a meeting with the EPA and then they asked that, you know, for a public come out because they didn't think they would be taken as seriously without media and you all did come out and kind of what was that experience like? Yeah, it was really interesting. So we got an email kind of a couple of week or so after publishing this being okay, you know, we saw the map, the local TV station through a partnership we did with them had done a piece on it too. So that was also kind of the engagement work of ensuring that people saw this and weren't necessarily reading ProPublica. And I got on the phone with somebody and she said, you know, our mayor's wife actually has cancer and we're all really concerned and we're gonna have this meeting next week. Please, will you all come out there? Because we are afraid that they're gonna try to discredit the work that you all have done and without representatives there, you know, to back up the work then we might be kind of back at square one. And so we went and we were in my colleague, Lisa Songwin and she was in a high school gymnasium with the regional EPA office and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and they were all speaking about, you know, this facility and the cancer aesthetic causes for residents. It was pretty astounding to see firsthand, just, you know, witness a community trying to navigate this regulatory system and kind of coming up against roadblocks at every turn. You know, in the beginning, they mentioned how the data is self-reported and it's not verified and someone's shouted out from the bleachers like that's the stupidest thing I've heard in my goddamn life. And so yeah, people were getting pretty heated. Yeah, and then state officials said that they were prevented by Missouri law to actually take any steps beyond what the EPA was doing and then the EPA said that they had limited authority over the facility. So they had all these, you know, residents who were just like really, really concerned about being exposed to this toxic air that was increasing their cancer risk and all the agencies that are meant to protect them were kind of giving them this run around or like they were saying that they were, you know, with the regulatory systems in place, really unable to do much. And so it was pretty outstanding to see and pretty reflective of what we heard in other places across the country facing similar risks. One of the other places that you all talked about was a place called Port Arthur, Texas and we have someone, John Beard here with us today who's from Port Arthur. I saw him shaking his head in frustration when you were relaying that to Ray Verona. John, how long have you lived in Port Arthur? Kendra, I've lived in Port Arthur all of my life, 60 plus years. Oh wow. And so- It's my hometown. And so for people to understand kind of what the Republic identified and also kind of the work that you're doing there now, what, can you tell us a little bit about like what the community is like for people who maybe haven't been to Port Arthur? Well, I like to first of all, give people a little geography lesson that when you look at the weather map or mapping, you see where Texas and Louisiana and the Gulf Coast meet. That's Port Arthur. We're a small seaport community, even though we're heavily invested in oil and petrochemicals. Port Arthur was actually founded by a rail and steel magnet, Arthur Steelwell. And then three years after that, it's been a little top-dusher blew in north of Port Arthur in the city of Beaumont. And ushered in the petrochemical age, which we all experienced today. And the largest refinery in the country is in Port Arthur. Two other refineries that are quite large are located there, Valero, as well as Total, VASL. We also have serial pollutants like Oxbow-Calcinine, the German pellets facility, which takes our beautiful East Texas forests and chops those trees down, grinds them in pulp, makes them into small pellets and ships them to Europe and call it renewable energy. But we've got a heavy concentration. If you Google Earth and look at the picture of Port Arthur, you'll see we're surrounded by refineries with tank farms and pipelines. There's no patch of land, hardly it's not even affected in some way by the petrochemicals. And you yourself, at one time, worked in the petrochemical industry, right? You worked in a refinery? Yes, I did. I worked for Exxon Mobil Corporation for 38 years. I had worked in maintenance as well as process. So one of the guys that basically creates the oil and gas you use. But I was also an emergency responder and an industrial firefighter and dealt with hazmat management also. So that gives me, I take quite a good background in this and how these things work and operate in terms of the laws and regulations. And also as Maya mentioned earlier, the kind of shell game these companies play with self-reporting and who's in charge. It's kind of like the keystone cops who's on either really Abbott and Costello, who's on first and all of that. It's constantly shifting. And it makes it very difficult for communities and people in general to just navigate these problems and try to get solutions. And these days you don't work for their refineries, correct? You work for, you founded the Port Arthur Community Action Network. Can you tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing now and how it relates to the work that you used to do? Sure. Pocon is a environmental and social justice and community development organization. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but we can't let that go by. Can you, wait, then the acronym is Pocon? Yes, not Pocon, it's Pocon. That is delightful. Or sometimes in the hyphenated form PA hyphen CAN which also stands for Port Arthur CAN. And that kind of just came up quite by accident because Port Arthur CAN be better. It can be different. It can be a good place to live, not just a place to come to work at. That's what's begun to happen. That'll touch on some of the racial justice aspects of it later. But Pocon was basically started, really it's four months, it was started in 2014 as an outgrowth of the EPA and Justice Department intervening in a case with the Flint Hills Resources Company, which was at that time, belonged to the, can't think of a family whose name. The Huntsman family and they were accused of emitting into the community into a predominantly black, historically black community, benzene directly into the air and they were caught in the lie and two of their employees went to jail. I think the plant manager and maybe the environmental manager did prison time because of that. What does benzene do? Like why does it matter that they were emitting benzene into the air? Benzene is a known carcinogen and too many times you have these emissions and people will say, oh, it's just a small or minute amount. But there's, but here's the question you have to ask them. This comes from my background in this business. What you have to ask them is what is the smallest amount that you can be exposed to and not get cancer? Nobody can answer that question. What may be a small amount for me that may do simply nothing may kill you. So you have no way of knowing. So as we try to tell folk all the time, there's no acceptable level of emission. If it is cancerous, if it is immediately dangerous to life and health, then you can't or shouldn't emit it. And if you're emitting it, then you're basically killing people. And that's the point we try to drive home with the con and work that I do with regard to all of these companies is to get reductions in pollution, where it's very difficult, especially here in the state of Texas to get these type of reductions to where we can make the community safe. Everybody likes to talk about the fact in compliance, but they're still emitting toxic substances and that's not good. And how did you make this big pivot from working a refinery to sort of pushing higher environmental standards and pushing their refineries to be better and industrial actors to be better neighbors for lack of a better word? Well, once again, I was born and raised in that community. And my family, my parents came there, my dad from East Texas, my mother from Louisiana in search of a better life in search of the higher wages and jobs that the industry at that time created. And I remember hearing my parents and my godparents who lived across the street talk about the fact that you could go to bed that night if your house was white and wake up that next morning and the side of your house would be stained because of something that was released during the night. And people still talk about that. As a matter of fact, on Akan's Facebook pages and on my personal Facebook page, you can go and you can see every now and then a series I do fall while you slept. And it shows the emissions that go on at night from a number of these facilities and places, some of which are the worst polluters in the entire state of Texas. So we decided to pivot and do this because we saw that there was a need to do things different and better and change the direction and the way that things were happening in the community because the quality of life for people was being so adversely effective. When did you, given all of that and the work that you were doing, when did you first hear about the Republican investigation and sort of how did you react when they showed you the concrete data and how it was affecting Port Arthur? Well, I was glad someone decided to take it up. It's kind of overdue in a number of ways simply because in 2010, Port Arthur selected as a revival showcase city. And we were told that we have over twice the state and national average for not just cancer, but heart, lung and kidney diseases. And nothing had been done about that since. Nothing had been done. There'd been no epidemiological studies. The state had not come into an avian, the city, nor the county had done anything about it. It's kind of sort of unfortunately accepted by people. But I have a say that if you parachuted there or landed in Port Arthur and walked the street streets and went to talk to someone and you would find not a single person of adult age who would not answer this in the negative. Do they know of anyone who's either had cancer, died from cancer, is under treatment or in remission from cancer? You would not find a single person of adult age would tell you, no, they know of no one. And that's in the city of about 55,000 people. That's scary. And I've had numerous friends pass away that worked with me at the plant now in recent times. And some of them are people that I've known for a number of years that have died from cancer. Mysterious illnesses, rashes, diseases and nothing's really being done about it. And so that propelled me in my capacity not only in doing what I did since I retired but also as an elected official serving on city council for nine years, city of Port Arthur and various other capacities seeing the adverse effect that this industry that says it brings so much good to life was having such a negative and bad effect on the people that lived in Port Arthur. And so how did you all connect? Well, in terms of how we connect with the community, we have a lot of- No, I mean, how did you connect with Republica? Sorry. Oh, with Republica. I don't really exactly know how, but I've been told about the work that you all were doing and one of you guys reached out to me if you began talking about- Yeah, I definitely dropped into your email. Yeah, that's right. That's right, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you just began the dialogue to talk about the problems and the things were here. As I tell folk all the time, if I give you a chance to kind of just give you a glimpse of what it's like here to tell that story, then you begin to see that there are some problems here. And that's what we have to do. We have to amplify these problems and how they affect people because while Port Arthur is significant, especially to me because I'm from there, as you said earlier, Al, there are thousands of other places that have similar problems and nothing's being done. So the journalism aspect that you spoke of Maya is truly beneficial because it sheds light on. And that's gonna be a difficult thing when we talk about Port Arthur because a lot of people made their living from that industry that parents did. The city's coffers, 60% of the city's budget is based on industrial taxes. So they see this as a good thing, but they're bad things too, they come from it and you can't ignore those things. So we have to start addressing those things properly and make sure that we hold the people that need to be held accountable because if we don't, then we're gonna continue to have these problems and nothing will ever get done. So I praise and thank our publicers for the work that they're doing in that regard. Have you noticed since the stories came out? What was that again? Sorry, have you noticed like any shifts or any changes since the stories came out? No, but I've made it my business through our social media pages and other contexts to share that with local media, to get them to see that. And I'm pretty decent relationship with them, but even they are reluctant to say too much or do too much against industry because industry rules are pretty big stick. They pay a lot of the bills, they do a lot of what they consider good things in the community. And they utilize their money well in that regard, but it still does not stop or explain the fact of so much pollution going on. Matter of fact, that's why in our pursuit of trying to achieve environmental justice, what we have done is say that not only are they polluting the air, but they're also violating the right of people that live in these areas of the right to breathe, clean air and to live in a healthy, safe environment. Precisely or precisely rather, it's a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. So it makes it very, very difficult for people to live and move about and have the same level of activity in folks in other areas too. They don't enjoy that same thing. So Al, the data's out there. Have you seen it impacting communities already? Yeah, I mean, like you were talking about in Verona, that was one example, but a lot of communities around the country have started calling for accountability in meetings with mayors, in meetings with local leaderships, regional EPA leaders, it's been happening in besides Verona, Laredo, a bunch of other places. We've also seen local news stories lead to inspectors going into places that haven't been inspected in years. There was a plant in Michigan, for example, that was inspected for the first time in 17 years. So yeah, there's been an impact kind of all over the country inspired by the project and by kind of knock-on effects of local stories about the project, so that's very hardening. Maya, what would you like to see people do with it moving forward? Yeah, I guess continue to engage with it. Some experts we spoke to at the outset, both people who live there and people who've been involved in the regulatory process, both on the EPA side and then local health side, said that one of the first steps to achieving impact is for people to understand the risks they face. And so really just hoping that we can continue to get the map out to folks and have them read it, share it with their neighbors. We've heard people doing that and continue to just start conversations around it. Yeah, one thing I'll add is that during the reporting process, since industrial facilities and many of the ones that we were looking for were responsible for so many products that we use day-to-day, like Al mentioned, Cascade Dish Soap was one of the, we tracked the supply chain of Cascade Dish Soap actually goes through Port Arthur as well and seeing all the kind of stops it takes and the local cancer risk increases for residents across the country. Yeah, it was hard on an individual level to feel like we could really do much because I look around my room right now, a lot of the things come from industrial facilities. At one point, the reporters on the project were like, maybe we should start washing our hair with bananas and just rethink everything about how we live. But I think that the first step is just really better understanding the risks out there and trying to start with that. I'm not gonna lie, when I learned that it was Cascade, I felt this sigh of relief because I don't have a dishwasher so I couldn't be implicated in this. It's like the only good thing of not having a dishwasher, I guess. John, there are other people out there who might be observing similar impacts that you've been seeing maybe less, maybe not as severe, but similar on their communities who are in the same place now that you were maybe a decade ago. What can they do? How can they push for change? Sort of what was them? Can you bestow upon them? Well, first of all, they have to become educated and informed about the exposures and those sources in their community. And then they have to be willing to engage other people in saying that, hey, this is wrong. We shouldn't be subjected to this. One of the big arguments that I give to people is that being a former plant worker, I knowingly accepted that risk, but I've worked in such a way and the company worked us in such a way to mitigate a lot of that risk, yet still people who worked in the plant are dying from cancer and from other illnesses. But the people that lived outside the fence line did not sign up for that. They did not sign up to have to breathe polluted stinky air. And once you come to Port Arthur and I invite all of you to take a trip down there, we'll take the toxic tour. I'll let you see what, see it for yourself. That they didn't sign up for that and they shouldn't have to be exposed to it. Or as we said, once in my plant when we were about to go on strike, you shouldn't have to die to make a living. Well, you're not even making a living there, but you're still being exposed to something that can kill you. And that simply isn't right. So you have to start to educate the community to engage other people in asking those questions and holding your elected officials as well as those companies accountable. And then you start working with your county officials, your state officials and others. Keep working your way up the food chain. Use people like ProPublica and others to get in touch with people who can make a difference even with the EPA. And it's good that you said that, Kendra, because a few weeks ago at the CeraWe conference, I met Michael Reagan. And one of the first things I told him was, I said, you know, you guys came all the way from St. James, Louisiana to Houston. You passed through Lake Charles, which is a cancer cluster, didn't stop. You stopped in Mossville, which is a smaller area, but it's relatively new to that. And you had to go nearby or through Port Arthur and the Golden Triangle to get to Houston. You didn't stop there either. I mean, why was that? We matter and that we have a high concentration also. We're not as big as Houston, but on the map and the scheme of things and our impact on the industry and all, we are big players. We're major players like Charles at Houston. I mean, in Port Arthur. So he said that the tour was going to continue. And I gave him a standing invitation to come to Port Arthur. That's what I'm doing with you. You take the toxic tour and see for yourself and smell it for yourself and see how concentrated in such a small area, all of this is at how virtually across the street, less than 50 feet from people are tank farms with substances that are, as they say, highly flammable and volatile, some of which are carcinogenic like gasoline and naphtha and benzene and butane. And these are very close proximity to people. But yet nothing's been done about that and from by the city or by industry. And that's not good. So people have to become concerned and get involved and keep working to find a way to make a difference. Cause if you do nothing, that's exactly what you're going to get nothing. Thank you. I think we want to open up to Q and A from the audience, they can put that in the chat box. One of the questions that has been, we've been getting a lot of questions about the map and the EP database in the question box. Just wanted to let folks know that they can access it at propublida.org slash tips slash pollution. So you can look up the place where you live. One other thing I just kind of want to maybe get John to tee that a little bit more is what is a toxic tour? It sounds, it doesn't sound like the thing most people generally do on vacation. No, it's basically a toxic tour takes you by a lot of these facilities I talk about. A lot of times what we do, we start out at the Port Arthur City Hall because there's an observation deck on the fifth floor and you can look out and see virtually everything. You can see it's far away, 16 miles into Beaumont and parts of Orange. And you can see the immediate environment surrounding Port Arthur. You can see the ship channel which separates Port Arthur from Pleasure Island and, well not Pleasure Island, from Lake Sabine. And then just right across the way from there, you can see one of the two LNGs that are located in Port Arthur's immediate environment, the Cheneer LNG in Louisiana and just right across the way from it, almost in walking distance is the Exxon Mobil Golden Pass LNG. Then there's a third LNG just a little ways less than three miles up the ship channel that Semper Energy of California is proposing to build a third LNG. And then you have the Port of Port Arthur. You have Oxwell Calcini, probably the worst serial polluter of SO2 and SO3 and in particular matter in all of texts. They made over 11,000 tons into the air and this is regulated. 11,000 tons and this is regulated. You can see it at night. Just go to my Facebook page or our Environmental Justice of Cons Facebook page and you'll see pictures of it. It looks like a cloud of fog of plume going across the sky. And then you also have Valero who had in 2014 to 2019 over 600 unregulated air quality violations and the state of Texas is great about policing that sort of thing. Out of every 100 incidents only three are actually investigated and the fines are absolutely ridiculous. So there's no deterrent. Then you go and see the largest refinery in the country and large tank farms, which are as large as some entire communities and how it's basically degradated the landscape. And as you said earlier, decreased home and property values. One thing a lot of people don't know that we discovered because in the last 15 years, by the way, Port Arthur's been hit by over five major hurricanes and at least that many smaller hurricanes that have done substantial damage. And in the course of working in terms of helping people hurricane recovery, we discovered that property value in the entire city because of the environmental degradation has been reduced by 40%. So when you get ready to serve your home as I would if I decided to move with mine, I'm not gonna be able to get enough money to even be able to pay off the mortgage, much less be able to buy another home somewhere else because the property values are so low. The home values are low. The average home value in Port Arthur's $60,000 or less. The average in the area is over 150. How are you gonna make that up? So there are a lot of problems but the toxic tool will get you up close and personal with a lot of what we go through, what we see every day. And you'll even get to talk to some people like Ms. Edda Hebert. Edda's a cancer survivor who's only recently found she's had another the cancer cancer. Edda's husband as of December has only recently come from under hospitals after spending the previous year being treated for cancer. That man now weighs Roy Hebert, less than a hundred pounds. Edda's daughter Angela is a cancer survivor and Edda's brother Eddie Brown, the beloved barber and also founder of the Youth Boxing Academy in Port Arthur died two years ago of cancer. Then you have people like Ms. Annette Mitchell who's retired school teacher that's COPD so bad that she can't go out in her yard and tend to her flowers as much as she would like to her garden. And she lives within one half mile of the German pellets facility, which if you all don't know, as I said earlier takes that beautiful East Texas forest and turns it into wood pellets to sell to Europe. But this time almost be soon five years ago, 2017 the weekend of Easter, one of the silos caught fire and burned in the community for 102 days. So imagine the smell of wood outside and inside your home for 102 days. But it's not just wood because the substance is used to break those pellets, one of which is formaldehyde. So essentially we're breathing in bombing food for 102 days and it's a five years. Now nothing has been done to compensate or help those people that were affected in the West side community by that. Go on our page, you'll see pictures of that too. So we're surrounded by a lot of degradation, a lot of problems. And I couldn't say exactly if it's racism, but I say this much that if it were a white community this would not be happening. And much greater attention would be focused on it. But because it's mostly poor black people, it's not a lot said about it. One of that sometimes when we do post these things about these incidents, we're told by people, well, if you don't like it, why don't you move? My response to them is why don't you trade places like the movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackbar trading places? Why don't you trade places with us? Let us live where you live and you come here and live for a while and smell this air. And hear the noises and hear the shock waves and the explosions and stuff like that and be exposed to the fires. I don't wanna cut you off because your experiences are so important I think for people to hear, but we're starting to get questions and we've only got about 10 minutes left. And so the first question is also from a similarly impacted community. I believe Kimmy Gordon from Gary, Indiana wants to, or she's from Northwest Indiana and leads the Gary, a number of groups in Gary and she wants to know sort of how to get the city engaged in any further studies and analysis of air quality and how would they find out where they rank for air quality and cancer risks? And I feel like this might be a question for Al, but anyone who hasn't answered can step in. I mean, you can look it up on our map and you can put in your address and see what the cancer risk is in your area. It's not, the application does not show all air quality issues. It's specifically targeted to industrial emissions from certain industrial facilities. So it's not a kind of a catch-all application that shows you your cancer risk from road emissions and certain other pollution. It's kind of very highly targeted to industrial air pollution. So I do encourage you to seek out other sources. There are other databases that take a more expansive view of air pollution, including particulate matter and other sources of pollution that do affect health but may not be specifically industrial emissions. It's kind of a very targeted database to that specific slice of emissions. So people in communities, if you look it up on the map they shouldn't necessarily think that they're not implicated by other forms of pollution. It's just they may not have a significant amount of industrial pollution. Exactly, and there are other databases that you can use to compliment our app. There's a database called the National Air Toxic Assessment for example that the EPA puts out that does take a more expansive view and the methodology is a little bit different and the data is not as up to date as our app but that does include for example road emissions and other sources besides just industrial facilities. Thank you. We have another question and anyone can feel free to answer this one from Peter Bella. And he said, Cascade aside, is there any way for consumers to avoid supporting companies that ruin communities with pollutants or is a problem too expensive to avoid implicating yourselves? And I guess or maybe Maya can you give us that tip on how to wash your hair with banana? That's a great question. So while we were working on this thing with Cascade I tried to avoid the product and then I was also looking at other dishwasher detergents and saw similar chemicals also labeled on them. So I think the supply chain is really reliant on these industrial facilities. I mentioned shampoo because I had been talking to a worker out of Sea Drift, Texas who said that he made the chemicals that go into like the containers for shampoo and makeup and everything. And so I still shampoo with it and I think our takeaway has been that there's ways that there's additional controls that industrial facilities can put on to reduce the amount of these air pollutants that go into the air and increase excess cancer risk. And so I think just trying to do a part of, my part is journalism and that's just getting reporting accurate information and trying to ensure it reaches people. And so thinking about what your lane is and what your work is and what brings you pleasure and how you can think about taking things that you're good at and maybe creating ways to push the conversation forward in that way. Are you sure you don't secretly work for how to save a planet? Because that sounds like a very- Okay, I listened to you guys a lot and I might have spilled that for you. Because I was like, that sounds like a very how to save a planet answer, which is generally individual action has limits. And so what kind of systemic changes can you push for? Maybe a question that Peter can ask himself. And yeah, another question. We have, sorry, okay. So this is from Hamad Razik and apologies if I misfinancing your last name. How many pro-publica reporters worked on this story or these stories, the series, I think he really means, or they really mean? Al, do you want to take that one here? I don't know off the top of my head. I don't want to get it wrong, but quite- A rough estimate. Six or seven, maybe? I was going to say two dozen. Okay. No, I meant like individual reporters, but yes, there were quite a lot. So somewhere between six and two dozen, got it. Scrolling through, let me just check in. And while Kendra's checking into, I can speak a little bit to that six to two dozen number. Is that just, you know, we do investigative accountability journalism at ProPublica and that often can take a long time. I took Al and his colleague, Laila Unis, I think a year and a half or two years to just do the data analysis that got us to the point of being able to understand where these toxic hotspots are in the country. And then for all those six to seven reporters, we all have individual managers and editors. We also hired some engagement reporters freelance to help us ensure that we were reaching community leaders in these hotspots, including calls with pastors to interview them and say, hey, can you get the word out, et cetera? So there were a lot of people who had their hands on this and that's pretty common across a project here. Thanks. Another question is that new research has shown historical redlining has persisted today and that there are the areas with current pollution. Could there be an overlay analysis of historical racism that may line up with your findings? And I think this is for everyone. Yeah, for sure. And in our analysis, we did find that areas, predominantly areas of color were more burdened than white areas. In the analysis, we found that people of color experience about 40% more cancer causing industrial air pollution than white areas. And obviously that's a product of redlining. So when you line it up with census data, it definitely, that is the pattern that you see. Thanks. John, one question, and I think this is the last question that we have for you, which is what strategies for holding industry accountable have you found most effective or is there anything sort of you kind of just want to kind of get out there for people who are in, yeah, to out there. Yeah, sorry. That was not super articulate. Apologies. Sure, the key thing you have to remember is if you don't engage them and educate people about what's going on and inform them, they don't know. Ignorance can be not necessarily bliss in this case. You have to become educated and self-aware and then you have to engage other people. And I believe that this is awarded. You fight hand-to-hand and heart-to-heart door-to-door block by block. And you have to have some concern about it because of how directly it affects your life. And then you have to hold these companies accountable to be good neighbors. Matter of fact, the EPA is doing something with regard to having a good neighbor policy. So I suggest you check with your regional EPA because they're going to be some workshops with regard to that and taking public comment on what that looks like and how it should be done. And I plan to definitely submit some information to the EPA on that. But I urge people wherever they are to actually get involved and do the hard work. It's not going to be easy if it was easy for everybody to do. And matter of fact, you wouldn't have the problem. But the only way you're going to change it is to be directly involved and to engage people. It doesn't have to be hundreds of people. It can be just a handful. But if you have the data that ProPublica has, if you have information, if you have very available public data on the health effects, talking to various health agencies and others that work in the cities and in counties, then you have the ammunition you need to go after them and approve it. Someone asked earlier about the emissions model. The EPA has that program. But also, my organization received the grant to purchase over 1,800 indoor air models. It's not just the outside. Sandside is bad too. And these monitors detect volatile organic compounds, which are offshoots from petrochemical companies and their emissions, as well as their products, but also mold. And given the rainy weather and all of the damage from the storms that we've had, mold is a big problem. So this is one way we help people to do these things. So you have to really just dig down and get to work. And for those of you who want to get touch free, you can through ProPublica or through our Facebook pages and other sites. And we'll be glad to partner with you and to talk with you about it and give you our take on it and also connect you about organizations that can make that possible. But nothing is ever going to be accomplished if you sit back and just accept that this is the way it is because this is the way it's always been. Change has to happen. Port Arthur can, you can too. We can make a difference. Thank you so much, John and Al and Maya. I'm going to turn over to Rocia to close. Thank you. That is our time for today. I want to thank all of our panelists for this engaging conversation. And of course, our lovely moderator, Kendra Pierre-Lewis. If you enjoyed this program, I encourage you to follow Gimlet Media's How to Save the Planet podcast, Spotify. And thanks again to McKinsey and Company for its support of today's event. Thank you so much to our audience for joining us and for all of your thoughtful questions today. Again, this event has been recorded, so you'll receive an email with a full video of today's event. We'll also post this recording on the ProPublica YouTube channel. And from all of us at ProPublica, thank you for joining us. Have a great rest of your afternoon and we will see you very soon. Take care everyone.