In 1991 three Houston Chronicle reporters traveled to Corpus Christi to determine why cancer rates were soaring in communities along the Texas Gulf Coast.
The year before, which saw the passage of the last major amendments to the nation’s Clean Air Act, Texas suffered 28,483 cancer deaths. And nearly one-quarter came from a stretch of the coast that home to, the Chronicle reported, “more than 100 chemical plants and refineries, 3.3 million motor vehicles, 17 Superfund toxic-waste sites and untold other sources of air and water pollution.”
Among the reporting team’s findings was that Texas authorities had done “relatively little” to grapple with the pollution and other factors thought to be the chief causes of the problem.
This year, nearly two decades later, Jim Morris, a member of the original reporting team now with the Center for Public Integrity, returned to the area to see what had changed. The answer that he found: very little.
The reporting expanded into a series, Poisoned Places, that teamed reporters from the center and NPR. Eventually, it determined that hundreds of communities are still exposed to pollutants that can cause cancer, birth defects and other serious health issues
The reporters also uncovered an internal “watch list” kept by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that named more than 400 facilities, including some serious or chronic violators of the Clean Air Act that have eluded enforcement by the agency.
Separately, the EPA classifies about 1,600 polluters around the country as “high priority violators” of the Clean Air Act — sites regulators believe need urgent attention. And the series notes that regulators largely rely on an honor system easily manipulated by polluters, which report their own emissions.
As reported in one story from the nine-month investigation, “Congress targeted nearly 200 chemicals in 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which the first Bush administration promised would lead to sharp reductions in cancer, birth defects and other serious ailments. But the agencies that were supposed to protect the public instead have left millions of people from California to Maine exposed to known risks — sometimes for years.”
ROBERT T. NELSON
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