Carlyle and Credit Suisse Asset Management didn't respond to requests for comment on the refinery's benzene emissions or how they could affect the sale. In June, PES sent local and federal regulators a plan for how it aimed to cut benzene emissions, which the company mainly blamed on leaks and a neighboring facility. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Children in the neighborhood could be at even greater risk of developing certain cancers, Sonawane estimated, citing research published after 2003, when EPA last reviewed the health dangers posed by benzene. Charles and Tammy Reeves outside their home in the Grays Ferry section of South Philadelphia. Next to the words “it is with deep sorrow, that we regret to inform you of the passing of our beloved Sharon E. Johnson” superimposed over a rose, Sharon looked off to the side, her lips pursed as if she were whistling a song. Though Black communities bear disproportionate hardships of the environmental crisis, they historically have been left out of the environmental movement. In mid-June, the Philadelphia City Council voted 13 to 4 in favor of developing the gas plant. “The compounded effect of racism is really showing up in the interlocking systems of structural inequality operating in this moment to increase exposure, transmission, severity and the likelihood of death from Covid-19 in communities like Grays Ferry, which have already experienced such devastating environmental racism for so many years,” says Barber, who is the daughter of the Rev. in 1953, and continued to expand. Pruitt proposed gutting the agency’s budget by 25 percent, to just under $6 billion from $8 billion. Her house was shaking, too, and she had lost power and was sitting in the dark holding tight to her two young children. A smaller fire erupted 11 days earlier at the refinery, but the heat this time was so intense that the National Weather Service was able to capture it on satellite from space, using infrared imagery. That legacy also remains in their bodies. Public housing filled the void. The E.P.A. Weeks after the disaster, as PES filed for bankruptcy and wound down operations, another air monitor in the network that rings the facility quietly registered the same sky-high reading for benzene. Grays Ferry is located southwest of Philadelphia’s Center City and is bound by the Schuylkill River to the west, 25th St to the east, and Washington Ave to the north. So we’d love to see that remain as a refinery.”. "So they should be on the hook, too.". Across the highway from Grays Ferry, the immense P.E.S. Local people have grown used to the poor air quality. As a result, lending institutions issued fewer mortgages in these areas than in other parts of the city, creating entrenched segregation, disinvestment and decay. “My wife said, ‘For this lawsuit, I need somebody who can find out and put on a map where all the landfills, solid-waste facilities and incinerators are in the city,’” recalls Bullard, 73, a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at T.S.U., who is now regarded as the father of the environmental-justice movement. In 1978, North Carolina residents noticed dark streaks along the shoulders of more than 200 miles of roadway. The Industrial Revolution and the invention of cars drove an insatiable hunger for oil, which became the dominant fuel of the 20th century. “By ensuring that there is equal protection and enforcement in these communities, E.P.A. “What do we have to do to get anybody to pay attention? The evening news featured video of Black leaders, flanked by highway-patrol officers, marching arm and arm with the local organizers and singing “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” to the tune of the old protest song “Which Side Are You On?”. But the danger has long been apparent. The catastrophic blaze provided a stark illustration of the hazards the refinery has long posed for Philadelphians. Schaeffer was also critical of his former agency. “This is a way to advance the energy-policy agenda, the economic-policy agenda and the national-security agenda. “He died of liver cancer; left behind eight kids.” Russell’s sister Sandy also died of cancer, at age 42. I had to retire early for my health.” Rodney Ray, a former worker at the refinery “You can’t understand environmental racism without understanding the legacy and the history of residential segregation, which created the disinvestment that has happened in communities in Philadelphia like Grays Ferry for decades,” says Sharrelle Barber, an assistant research professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health in Philadelphia. “Communities have shared with me over the past two decades how important the enforcement work at the Agency is in protecting their often forgotten and overlooked communities,” he wrote. had released the cancer-causing chemical benzene into the air at 21 times the federal limit, though the city failed to let the public know. A 2018 survey conducted by Dorceta Taylor, a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, found that white people made up 85 percent of the staffs and 80 percent of the boards of 2,057 environmental nonprofits. At the third meeting of the city’s advisory group in late August, convened to address labor issues, Philly Thrive members found themselves outnumbered by recently laid-off P.E.S. The homes that their parents bought or that they bought, and the families they raised in them, all this is their legacy. The legacy of 150 years of pollution from heavy industry has mounted. For refineries whose average annual emission topped the action level of 9 micrograms of benzene per cubic meter of air, the regulation required operators to determine the cause of the refinery's excess emissions and create a plan to reduce them. For the baby that cannot speak, for the senior citizen who cannot speak. dovetailed with the growing environmental-justice movement on the ground. He added that refinery workers had "told us to move.". A 2017 report from the N.A.A.C.P. “Look, these are great jobs for Philly,” Peter Navarro, the president’s director of the office of trade and manufacturing policy, told The Philadelphia Inquirer in January. Derek Hixon joked that the South Philadelphia High basketball team “always has home-court advantage because opposing players find it hard to breathe.” More ominous are the disturbingly frequent accounts of cancer. A hazard summary he worked on while at EPA warned that anyone exposed to air with more than 0.45 micrograms per cubic meter of benzene over their lifetime would have a greater than one in 1 million chance of developing cancer "as a direct result of continuously breathing air containing this chemical." "I belong to a social club in South Philly. and the negative health impacts in the surrounding community. “The chemicals that they use, it’s, like, really killing us,” Johnson told a reporter from a local radio station. IE 11 is not supported. The Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery. When the rule took effect, PES was planning to go public and warned potential investors that the "fenceline monitoring requirement may lead to corrective action measures, including the installation of additional pollution controls, even if the refinery is otherwise in compliance with its air emissions permits.". “I started thinking, What was I doing with this?”. The Tasker Street Homes Project was one of Philadelphia’s Housing Authority’s earliest public housing projects. A 2017 report from the N.A.A.C.P. Statement in Response to Auction Results of PES Refinery. “You doing all right, Kilynn?” they would ask the quiet little girl. administrator, Scott Pruitt, was a climate-change denier and an ally of the fossil-fuel industry who, as Oklahoma’s attorney general, sued the E.P.A. That information could also come into play for investors eyeing the South Philadelphia site. It gets hot in Houston. "The numbers that you're saying are very, very high, like some things happening in China, India and many other places.". Her parents had good, stable jobs: Troy as a mechanic for SEPTA, the city’s public-transportation system, Elizabeth as a custodian for the school district. Please help us.”, Johnson’s prayers were interrupted by the phone. The Trump administration made one last lobbying effort to restart P.E.S.’s oil-refining business. Each increased microgram of this kind of pollution per cubic meter of air is associated with an 8 percent increase in death from Covid-19. "The residents of South Philadelphia bear the environmental cost of the refinery and get almost none of the benefit," said Peter DeCarlo, an atmospheric scientist who spent the last eight years at Philadelphia's Drexel University. Johnson was 46. “Racism is a root cause of your inaction around addressing environmental problems in our communities,” they wrote, demanding that the organizations increase staffing of people of color to 35 to 40 percent (the demand was not met). as tanker trucks passed in and out of the facility’s gates. The urgency of this environmental crisis has been hastened by climate change and has now gathered speed and attention as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the current racial-justice movement. Troy Johnson’s brother Robert and his wife also bought a home nearby. “Between the cancer and the Covid, the loss is crazy,” Russell, who recently finished chemotherapy treatments for her lung cancer, said in June. Bennett, 76, a retired behavioral-health specialist, had raised five children in the tight-knit community of Grays Ferry. “It’s just a lot of people who have died. Between the two of them, Johnson and Bennett knew two dozen family members, friends and neighbors, a number of them under 50, who’d had cancer. Grays Ferry Oral Histories . After the refinery closed, some 1,000 employees were dismissed without severance pay or extended health benefits; P.E.S. “I knew I couldn’t be a part of what was happening.”, In March 2017, Ali resigned, just short of 25 years at the agency, forfeiting his full government pension, and now serves as vice president for environmental justice, climate and community revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation. A local nonprofit in Spartanburg, S.C., leveraged an initial grant of $20,000 in 1997 into $270 million to clean up and revitalize three neighborhoods near an operating chemical-fertilizer manufacturing plant, two Superfund sites and six brownfield sites. About 60 percent of those residents are minority, and nearly 45 percent live below the poverty line, according to census data. Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former head of EPA's enforcement office, cast doubt on the refinery’s attempt to explain away its high benzene readings. Clean air!” the Thrivers held up traffic for a half mile in either direction. Huge collection, amazing choice, 100+ million high quality, affordable RF and RM images. Kilynn Johnson outside her home. The government also established a multimillion-dollar grant program to support grass-roots organizations working on environmental-justice issues. “That made me more aware of how the refinery is making our people not just sick — but killing our communities all over a dollar.”, She asked the crowd to join her in a chant: “We’re fired up! Many of those who attended that January meeting may not have realized that they were joining a long tradition of on-the-ground environmental activism. Black communities like Grays Ferry shoulder a disproportionate burden of the nation’s pollution — from foul water in Flint, Mich., to dangerous chemicals that have poisoned a corridor of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley — which scientists and policymakers have known for decades. "There's an idea out there that we weren't good neighbors. A study of more than 3,000 U.S. counties released in April but not yet published shows a statistical connection between death rates from Covid-19 and long-term exposure to air pollution. That risk increases to more than 10 in 1 million at the level set by the federal refinery rule. Garrow, the health department spokesman, said the city didn't receive the PES document until three days after the June 21 refinery disaster. Her son George, named after her brother, developed lymphoma in his late 20s and survived. This dirty air is associated with lung disease, including asthma, as well as heart disease, premature death and now Covid-19. Most painful for Ali, the proposed budget eliminated the small-grants program. But moving, he said, is not an option for many people in his neighborhood. “It’s the refinery.”. Asiya Reeves, 2, at her grandparents home in Grays Ferry. Bullard and his students combed state and city records on paper and microfiche and walked through neighborhoods using census-tract maps to locate the waste facilities in the city. The study revealed that three out of five Black and Hispanic-Americans, or more than 23 million people, resided in communities blighted by toxic-waste sites and found that while socioeconomic status was an important correlation, race was the most significant factor. “They didn’t know if I was going to make it,” Johnson said. “What the data showed was a pattern of racist decisions over years and years by city officials,” Bullard says. The Tasker Homes were demolished in 2004 and replaced by what is now Grays Ferry Estates. By droves. Opened in the late 1800s and long operated by Sunoco, the refinery was temporarily saved from insolvency in 2012 by a group of investors led by the Washington, D.C.-based private-equity giant Carlyle Group. explosion released more than 5,000 pounds of hydrofluoric acid. “The pollution and chemicals, they have been here 150 years. On top of pollution from the refinery, the predominantly Black communities living on the fenceline of the site in Grays Ferry and across the Schuylkill River … "It's bad government and bad corporate management.". Large chunks of debris tumbled through the air, landing heavily on city streets as sirens sounded throughout Grays Ferry and the city’s emergency-management department issued a shelter-in-place order for residents living near the refinery. Bringing together Penn students and faculty, neighborhood residents, artists, climate activists, public health advocates, Philadelphia area students, and other individuals concerned with lives, land, air, and water long contaminated by the oil refinery, this experiment includes a related series of public initiatives including community events, fenceline neighborhood tours, school workshops, and a publicly available … Her home sits across the street from Stinger Square Park, where Johnson passed long days of her childhood playing alongside her siblings and cousins and friends. PES first filed for bankruptcy in 2018 to shed debt it blamed on EPA's ethanol mandate for gasoline. That monitor, on the edge of this 1,300-acre complex of steel and pipe, is across an expressway from schools, parks, a strip mall and hundreds of homes. The Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery was — until last year — the largest and oldest gasoline refinery on the East Coast. executives received $4.5 million in retention bonuses. The death of P.E.S. The company would receive an advance of up to $65 million in bankruptcy financing in order to wind down current operations and potentially access $1.25 billion in insurance coverage. The plan also doesn't appear to be working. Episode 09: Environmental Justice in Gray's Ferry This episode of Data Remediations features the voices of residents of South Philadelphia, long home to what was, until it blew up last year, the world’s longest continuously operating petroleum refinery. As more research established such disparities, frustration grew with the mainstream environmental movement. This included more than a thousand additional units in South Philadelphia. Three nights later, she began vomiting uncontrollably. Kilynn Johnson joined Alexa Ross, Sylvia Bennett, Carol White and others to distribute hundreds of fliers throughout Grays Ferry for the protest they organized for that day, two weeks before the City Council vote. African-Americans are 75 percent more likely than others to live near facilities that produce hazardous waste. Public health and the environment are a top concern for EPA, the agency said in an email, and it has worked to reduce emissions from all types of facilities, including refineries. By the last week of December, she was able to leave her house on the corner of Dickinson Street and South 32nd Street, in the Grays Ferry neighborhood of South Philadelphia, only once, to drag herself to church on New Year’s Eve. South Philadelphia is bounded by the Delaware River and Broad St. Carol White, a retired mental-health worker who lives in Wilson Park, the South Philadelphia public-housing complex adjacent to I-76 and P.E.S., was the first to share. The Delaware bankruptcy court that's overseeing the refinery sale has granted his administration a consulting role during the auction. Despite the data, it’s difficult to link individual cases of cancer to the documented dumping of carcinogenic substances into the air and soil in the community adjacent to the refinery. The researchers, from the Harvard T.H. Though accidents at liquefied-natural-gas plants are infrequent, a 2009 report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service warned that spills can release combustible vapor clouds and trigger fires or explosions. Labor unions, on the other hand, want to see the refinery back up and running. “Father, Lord, God,” she said out loud. Picture taken November 1, … Jennifer Zayas, 37, poses for photo on Grays Ferry next to PES Refinery Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 1, 2020. But even as they pray for the sick and count their dead, they have stayed. Alarmed and angry community members began raising concerns about the placement of facilities that contaminate the air, water and soil — including incinerators, oil refineries, smelters, sewage-treatment plants, landfills and chemical plants — near communities of color and, as in the case of Grays Ferry, placing housing that would be mainly occupied by Black citizens close to such facilities. When Donald Trump’s administration arrived in 2017, his new E.P.A. In March 1990, more than 100 grass-roots activists, almost all of them people of color, signed an accusatory letter to 10 of the most prominent environmental groups. The “hazardous” label the government stamped onto the Johnsons’ and Bennetts’ community 86 years ago now has a different meaning. In Grays Ferry, that means residents, over a lifetime of exposure, may have been breathing air of a quality that the EPA estimates could be linked to an incidence of cancer of more than 100 adults out of a population of 1 million.
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