Higher Pollution Risk For Blacks

Study: Blacks, Poor More Likely To Breathe Unhealthy Air

(AP) 
Unemployment was nearly 20 percent higher than the national average in the neighborhoods with the highest risk scores, while residents there were far less likely to have college degrees.

Research over the past two decades has shown that short-term exposure to common air pollution worsens existing lung and heart disease and is linked to diseases like asthma, bronchitis and cancer. Long-term exposure increases the risks.

The Bush administration, which has tried to ease some Clean Air Act regulations, says its mission isn't to alleviate pollution among specific racial or income groups but rather to protect all populations facing the highest risk.

"We're going to get at those folks to make sure that they are going to be breathing clean air, and that's regardless of their race, creed or color," Deputy EPA Administrator Marcus Peacock said.

Peacock said industrial air pollution has declined significantly in the past 30 years as regulations and technology have improved. Since 1990, according to EPA, total annual emissions of 188 regulated toxins have declined by 36 percent.

Still, Peacock acknowledged, "there are risks, and I would assume some unacceptable risks, posed by industrial air pollution in some parts of country."

In Louisville, Kentucky, Renee Murphy blames smokestack emissions in the "Rubbertown" industrial strip near her home for the asthma attacks her five children suffer. Her neighborhood, which is 96 percent black, ranks among the nation's highest risk from factory pollution.

"It's hard to watch your children gasp for breath," she said.

The Murphy family lives just a few blocks from Zeon Chemicals, which released more than 25,000 pounds of a chemical called acrylonitrile into the air during 2000. The chemical is suspected of causing cancer, and the government has determined it is much more toxic to children than adults.

Tom Herman, corporate environmental manager at Zeon, said the plant is reducing its emissions and is talking with area residents concerned about air quality to show that "there are real people working here concerned for them as well as our own health."

Air pollution "works with many other factors, genetics and environment, to heighten one's risk of developing asthma and chronic lung disease, and if you have it, it will make it worse," said Dr. John Brofman, director of respiratory intensive care at MacNeal Hospital in the suburban Chicago town of Berwyn.

"Evidence suggests that not only do people get hospitalized but they die at higher rates in areas with significant air pollution," he said.

Environmental experts say most pollution inequities result from historical land use decisions and local development policies. Also, regulators too often focus on one plant or one pollutant without regard to the cumulative impact, they say.

Citizens in high-risk neighborhoods have little legal recourse. They can file lawsuits under the 1964 Civil Rights Act but must prove intentional discrimination. And while some federal agencies ban environmental practices that result in discrimination, the Supreme Court says private citizens can't sue to enforce those rules.

Citizen complaints have had little effect. From 1993 through last summer, EPA received 164 complaints alleging civil rights violations in environmental decisions and investigated 47. Twenty-eight were dismissed; 19 are pending.

"Any time our society says that a powerful chemical company has the same right as a low income family that's living next door, that playing field is not level, is not fair," said Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.