- "Cancer Alley" is an 85-mile stretch of land in Louisiana dotted with petrochemical plants.
- Black residents living in the area have a disproportionate lifetime cancer risk.
- The EPA closed an investigation into the state's treatment of Black residents there after one year.
When Sharon Lavigne was in school in the 1960s, the residents of St. James Parish in Louisiana proudly welcomed the first petrochemical plant in the neighborhood, she said.
"We all thought it was wonderful," Lavigne told Insider. "People say they're going to have jobs."
But that plant gave way to another, and then another, and then another. In the decades since, the area has been environmentally devastated by the rise of petrochemical plants, which have brought with them unprecedented levels of pollution.
Today, Lavigne said, she estimates she knows 40 to 50 people who have had health complications due to what she believes are the effects of the heavy industrialization.
"Once, I began writing down all the names in one place, but I stopped because there were so many," Lavigne said. She remembered a classmate with liver cancer and a friend with stage 4 bone cancer.
The region Lavigne lives in, which has been given the moniker Cancer Alley, is part of an 85-mile stretch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans dotted with petrochemical plants and other industrial operations. In parts of the area, residents' lifetime cancer risk is up to 47 times the US Environmental Protection Agency's acceptable standard, ProPublica found.
And this risk is disproportionately higher for the region's Black residents.
"We are being poisoned, and it's genocide," Lavigne said. "We die slowly."
A dangerous precedent
Last year, as the founder of the advocacy group Rise St. James, Lavigne filed a complaint with the EPA regarding Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, alongside the local organizations Inclusive Louisiana, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, and Stop the Wallace Grain Terminal. The complaint alleged that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality discriminated against Black residents by issuing permits that authorized new industrial facilities.
Title VI prohibits the federal government from providing funds to any program that has been found to discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Historically, these complaints have been ignored — in 2015, the Center for Public Integrity found that 95% of Title VI complaints were rejected, dismissed, referred to other agencies, or informally resolved without an investigation.
But the current EPA leadership has pledged to enforce Title VI as a way of advancing environmental justice, going as far as launching an Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.
For a while, it seemed like residents' complaints were finally being heard. Last year, the EPA announced a critical civil-rights investigation into Louisiana, looking into whether the state had violated the rights of Black residents in Cancer Alley. EPA Administrator Michael Regan, the first Black man to head the agency, had traveled to Louisiana in 2021 to see life in the region firsthand, in a trip the EPA referred to as a "journey to justice."
"I distinctly remember standing on the grounds of a school that was a stone's throw away from a facility that manufactures toxic chemicals," Regan said in April of this year, recalling his 2021 visit. "The children who attend that school, who study at that school, who eat lunch at that school every single day, look just like my son Matthew."
His visit brought renewed hope to residents, including Lavigne.
"I feel like he is trying to help us," Lavigne told Insider. "I have faith in him trying to help us."
By October 2022, the EPA released the damning results of an initial investigation, which said the agency found "significant evidence" that the state's actions or inactions led to adverse effects on its Black residents.
But in June, only weeks after Louisiana's attorney general filed a lawsuit against the agency, the investigation was unceremoniously closed before it could be completed.
"It's such a dangerous precedent that conservative states can basically sue the EPA and the EPA will cave," Deena Tumeh, a senior associate attorney with Earthjustice who helped file the complaint, told Insider.
In court filings, the EPA said they would "fully and finally" close investigations surrounding the Title VI complaints, but that they would take a series of "significant actions" to reduce the impacts of emissions, including ordering some facilities to improve their waste management practices, proposing new rules to limit pollution, and conducting an assessment to look at the health risks associated with emissions.
The EPA and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality declined to comment.
A historical lack of research
The region was given the nickname Cancer Alley in the 1980s by the Sierra Club and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union.
"There probably were some adult beverages inhaled that night, and we were trying to think about how to talk about the reality that we were seeing up and down the river," Darryl Malek-Wiley, a senior organizing representative with the Sierra Club who helped popularize the label, told Insider.
"Once we came up with Cancer Alley, industry hated it, and they've been trying to prove that it's not a reality," he said. "One of the problems with understanding issues is you have to be able to name it before it's real."
For decades, there was a lack of research into cancer and pollution rates in the area, which meant that some residents often felt like their lived experiences were dismissed. But last year, two novel studies found that air pollution was linked to higher cancer rates among Black communities in Louisiana and that Black neighborhoods in the state experienced seven to 21 times the emissions as white communities.
"What I've heard from the communities over and over is a sense of relief that, finally, somebody is looking at the data in a scientific way, rather than weaponizing the data against them," Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist who worked on these studies at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, told Insider.
Before this research, local officials often relied on cancer rates from the Louisiana Tumor Registry, which doesn't measure pollution. The registry also did not make cancer incidence rates on the neighborhood level available to researchers until 2018. Older studies that focused on Cancer Alley often didn't account for pollution or relied on small sample sizes. (One of the earliest studies on the region, from 2004, claimed the mortality rate there was no different from the rest of the state. It was funded by Shell Oil Co.).
The dearth of data was what inspired Terrell to focus on the region.
"I'm not the first person to arrive at this idea," Terrell said. "The community members know when they're having abnormally high rates of health problems, and they experience firsthand the effects of this pollution."
Defined by history
The fifth district of St. James Parish, where Lavigne calls home, was 89% Black in 2020. Like Lavigne, many of the neighborhood's Black residents are descendants of enslaved people who labored on sugarcane plantations in the area. (Louisiana is broken up into 64 parishes which operate like counties do in other states, each with its own local government).
Those old plantation grounds are now home to large industrial facilities. Lavigne believes her grandmother is buried in a grave on the proposed site of a Formosa Plastics plant, she said.
Understanding this history is critical to understanding the region today, Pamela Spees, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Insider. In the aftermath of the Civil War, white planters and politicians were able to "completely lock out Black communities from any decision-making," Spees said.
Spees said this history persisted as local officials disproportionately approved permits for new industrial plants in Black communities.
In March, local advocacy groups, including Rise St. James, Inclusive Louisiana, and the Mount Triumph Baptist Church, filed a federal lawsuit against the local government asking for a moratorium on building new petrochemical plants in the predominantly Black districts of St. James Parish.
The lawsuit says that the parish has granted nearly every request by industrial corporations to build facilities in majority-Black neighborhoods, while no new facilities have been allowed in majority-white neighborhoods in over 46 years.
"The land-use plan that was finally adopted is a racial-cleansing plan because it actually said that these residential areas were designated future industrial," Spees said, referring to a 2014 plan that changed the fifth district from "residential" to "existing residential/future industrial."
"They don't intend for those communities to exist at a certain point and are literally wiping them off the map," she added.
Slow violence
Because of the time it takes for cancer to develop in the body, the effects of these petrochemical plants may not be fully understood for decades. Terrell said that's an inherent obstacle with this line of research. While her studies show the influence of historical pollution, the effects of current pollution won't be known for years.
Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club referred to this by the sociological term "slow violence."
"The concept is something happens to you 10 years ago, but it doesn't impact you until 10 years in the future. You don't connect the two," Malek-Wiley said. "You don't connect the exposure 20 years ago to what's happening to you right now. And that's what we have in Cancer Alley."
This phenomenon relates to Lavigne's own lived experience; though she has lived in St. James Parish her entire life, she didn't know about the reputation of Cancer Alley or the influence of the pollution until she started working with a local humanitarian organization in 2015.
"It's really hard for somebody not living in the shadow of one of these petrochemical plants to understand the physical and psychological impact of having all the noises, sounds, smells, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day," Malek-Wiley said.
Local advocates, including Lavigne, continue to fight for their home and their future in the face of adversity.
"I've lost friends doing this work, but I don't care," Lavigne said. "The important thing is to breathe clean air and drink clean water and go back to planning a garden."