cancer alley

On Wednesday, Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw told a Senate hearing he was “terribly sorry” for February’s fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The train was loaded with poisonous chemicals. The most notable was vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen. The resulting spills and plumes sickened many residents, killed 40,000 fish, and caused a temporary evacuation of many of the town’s 4,700 residents.

St. James Parish residents are suing the Louisiana parish over its approval of multiple polluting petrochemical facilities in two Black districts there.

The U.S. filed a complaint last week against two companies behind a highly polluting petrochemical plant in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.”  The Pontchartrain Works facility makes neoprene, a synthetic rubber used for everything from laptop covers to wetsuits. But to do this, it releases chloroprene, a likely carcinogen that is the main reason that the majority […]

Two studies by researchers from the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic have confirmed that “Cancer Alley,” a 184-mile region in Louisiana along the Mississippi River with a high number of petrochemical plants as well as high cancer rates for residents, is not only real, but that government officials helped create it.

A state court has struck down permits for a massive petrochemical plant that would have doubled or tripled the emissions of cancer-causing chemicals polluting the already beleaguered Cancer Alley.  Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court ruled September 14 that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) failed to protect the public when it issued air permits […]