Alex Wagner talks with Rachel Maddow about her reporting on residents of a stretch of Louisiana called "Cancer Alley" who are fighting to address concerns about pollution from a petrochemical plant after a lawsuit filed by the Biden Justice Department and the EPA was dropped by Donald Trump.
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#MSNBC #EPA #Louisiana
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#MSNBC #EPA #Louisiana
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NewsTranscript
00:00This is an elementary school. It's called the Fifth Ward Elementary School in Reserve, Louisiana.
00:06Fifth Ward Elementary was a predominantly black elementary school in this part of Louisiana.
00:12I say was because last year the local school board voted to shut down that elementary school at the end of this school year.
00:18They voted to shut it down because that elementary school, look what it's right next to.
00:23It sits about a quarter mile away from a big petrochemical plant.
00:27One that the federal government said was putting people in the surrounding community at an unacceptable risk of cancer.
00:34There's an 80-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that has earned the terrible nickname Cancer Alley.
00:45It's earned that name because of more than 200 petrochemical facilities along that stretch of river
00:51where the EPA has repeatedly found that residents are exposed to more than 10 times the level of health risk
00:58from hazardous air pollutants than people living elsewhere in the state.
01:02That's according to a report from Human Rights Watch.
01:06When Joe Biden was president, the Justice Department and the EPA decided they were going to take some action there.
01:11The Biden-era Justice Department and the EPA brought a landmark lawsuit against that big petrochemical plant,
01:19that one that's just down the road from that elementary school.
01:21It's called the Denka Performance Elastomer plant.
01:25They make neoprene.
01:27In its lawsuit, the Biden administration alleged that the Denka facility was releasing unsafe levels of a toxic carcinogenic chemical called chloroprene into the air.
01:38They said in the lawsuit, quote,
01:39The increased cancer risk that the communities near the facility are currently being exposed to because of Denka's chloroprene emissions presents an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and welfare.
01:50In the aggregate, the thousands of people breathing this air are incurring a significantly higher cancer risk than would be typically allowed.
01:57They are being exposed to a much greater cancer risk from Denka's air pollution than the majority of U.S. residents face.
02:08That action was taken under the last president, Joe Biden.
02:12Now, new president, radically different story.
02:18Donald Trump's Justice Department has just announced that they are dropping the lawsuit against that chemical plant.
02:23And they say they are dropping it because DEI.
02:29Huh?
02:31Seriously, they said that dropping this case, quote, fulfills President Trump's day one executive order, ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.
02:44Because it's mostly black people who live nearby.
02:46Is that what you're saying?
02:50My colleague Alex Wagner traveled to southeast Louisiana this week to see the plants, to meet the people who live nearby.
02:56I should say before I show you this next part that it is impossible for anyone to know what exactly caused any particular illness in this community.
03:04But what you're about to see reflects how things feel in the community of that plant.
03:09You'll also hear references to another chemical company, DuPont.
03:12That's because this facility used to be owned by DuPont.
03:18How many of you feel like you know people either in your family or your circle of friends who are suffering adverse health effects because of the proximity of this plant?
03:30So everybody.
03:31My dad and I have experienced several generations of illnesses.
03:36My mother died of breast cancer.
03:39My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and my grandmother died of breast cancer.
03:43And my fraternal grandmother died of pulmonary disease.
03:47And so on and so on.
03:48Other family members, ovarian cancer.
03:51So we are directly affected in this community.
03:55I've also had genetic testing for breast cancer.
03:59My mother, my sister and myself.
04:01And all of them came back negative.
04:03Wow.
04:04So it's not a DNA gene?
04:05It's not a DNA.
04:06Correct.
04:07It's environmental.
04:08Wow.
04:09I have several family members that have died, passed away of cancer.
04:13Some of them are still living.
04:15One of my family members, she's on the list for heart transplant.
04:18Two of them.
04:20One family member on the West Bank of the River from Lucy in Edgard.
04:25He just had his lungs.
04:26He had a lung transplant about a year ago.
04:31My mother, she passed away.
04:34A lot of people are going to dialysis centers.
04:38A lot of people have brain cancer.
04:42My prostate cancer is high throughout the parish,
04:45not just on the West Bank of the River.
04:47Chloroprene is in the whole parish.
04:51I grew up on East 30th Street.
04:53I've lost everyone in my family because of it.
04:55And I'm the oldest living relative on my father's side at the age of 67
05:00due to DuPont-Denka.
05:02Wow.
05:03You've lost everyone in your family?
05:04Everybody.
05:05I remember growing up on East 30th Street.
05:07And you remember the days we could sleep with our windows open?
05:10Well, a lot of mornings we woke up with this awful smell in the house.
05:14We didn't know what it was.
05:15Oh, it was just a release from DuPont.
05:17We didn't know what chemical we were breathing while we were sleeping.
05:20It was in the bed sheet.
05:21It was in your closet, in the clothes in the closet.
05:24My mom couldn't get it out the house.
05:25She aired the house out all day long.
05:27We smelled that all day long.
05:30We went to school with it on our uniforms.
05:32Was it all cancers?
05:33Cancers.
05:35Everyone?
05:36Yes.
05:38MSNBC has reached out to Denka for comment.
05:43We've not heard back.
05:45Denka did stay in a statement published by the Washington Post
05:48that the dismissal of this lawsuit represents a long overdue and appropriate end
05:52to a case lacking scientific and legal merit from the start.
05:56The company said it, quote, remains committed to reducing chloroprene emissions
06:01at the plant.
06:04But for members of that community, that kind of promise, as you might imagine,
06:07just isn't nearly enough.
06:11The five parish area that's called Cancer Alley, it is now 92% black.
06:17Wow.
06:18And it's got about 250 petrochemical plants in that one little 80-mile area
06:25of that river, the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
06:29That's called Cancer Alley.
06:31What do you think is going to happen under Trump with the Denka plant
06:34and all these other industrial plants in your neighborhood?
06:40Well, I don't know.
06:41That's going to depend largely on the people here.
06:45If we let them have their way, they will kill us all.
06:48We will die here.
06:50We are now trying to regroup so we can find out exactly how we have to deal
06:54with this situation.
06:56What is obvious to us is the destruction.
07:00The government has now officially abandoned us,
07:05has officially thrown us to the wolves.
07:08That's what they have done.
07:12Joining us now is Alex Wagner.
07:14Alex, this is incredible reporting, and this is an amazing trip.
07:17Thanks for being here to talk about it.
07:19Thank you for airing it, Rachel.
07:21I think so much of what Trump is doing right now, they're betting on the abstract.
07:25They're betting that shutting down the Environmental Justice Department
07:28of the EPA doesn't alarm people.
07:30We don't think about the human cost of all that.
07:33And I've covered a lot of stories in the field, Rachel.
07:35This was one of the hardest I've ever borne witness to.
07:38I mean, this is a community of people who have borne undue,
07:43they have borne tragedy like I think almost no one else.
07:47A lot of these people, you know, one of the men I talked to,
07:50he grew up on a former plantation.
07:53These are the children of sharecroppers,
07:55and those sharecroppers were the children of slaves.
07:57A lot of these plants, Rachel, most of them in fact in the area,
08:01are on the grounds of former plantations.
08:04There's nowhere else in Louisiana that has that stretch of land.
08:07And it's been cleared to make way for plants that the Biden administration
08:11believed was poisoning the community.
08:14And I just for a moment thought deeply about not the irony,
08:18but the symmetry of what were, you know, former institutions
08:22that visited trauma upon communities of color.
08:26And these plants that are now reportedly, and again,
08:28according to the EPA under Joe Biden, visiting a different kind of trauma
08:32to the current population of Reserve Louisiana.
08:35I want to play a little bit of sound where we talked about that,
08:38if I could, that legacy of slavery to petrochemical industries.
08:47I'm so struck by the fact that the Denka DuPont plant
08:51is on the grounds of a former plantation.
08:55What does that tell you as people of color in this country?
08:58We meant nothing then, and we mean nothing now.
09:01I think Trump is doing exactly what Trump said he was going to do.
09:04And I don't think we have enough money here for him to care about
09:06what's going on with us.
09:08He cares about the wealthy people, the people that paid,
09:11I mean the people that were elected to these positions that he put in place.
09:16And if there was some way that we could make money off environmental justice
09:20for him, he would prioritize it.
09:23They do not care. It's about what they can make money off of.
09:26And they can't make money off of this.
09:29And DEI has nothing to do with the facts and the fact that this company,
09:34Denka, was actually breaking the law.
09:38They are guilty of breaking the Clean Air Act.
09:40They put us in jeopardy.
09:43We are burying family members every week.
09:46People are suffering 20 and 30 years before they pass.
09:51That's real. That's real.
09:53We live a life every day wondering what's going to happen at our next doctor's visit.
10:00Alex, can I just ask you, Alex, that when you're talking to these folks,
10:04did they see this coming from Trump?
10:08Obviously this lawsuit was filed.
10:10The plant was on a very different trajectory under Joe Biden
10:14with that previous DOJ and EPA case.
10:16Did they see this coming?
10:18Did they have time to prepare for it?
10:20They're starting to talk to you about what they're going to try to do to organize in response.
10:23Yeah, I will say, I mean, they have been grappling with this for decades.
10:27And they have been going to local and state officials and federal officials,
10:30even under Obama and early Biden.
10:33They felt like their cries weren't being heard,
10:35that there was not a level of concern that matched the threat they were facing.
10:38And so when Michael Regan, who is the EPA head under Biden,
10:42who is also black, came down and met with Robert Taylor,
10:45the older gentleman that you saw in that earlier clip,
10:47and said, we're going to do something about this.
10:49I think they reluctantly believed him, right?
10:52They finally felt like, OK, we've reached a threshold at which they can't ignore this anymore.
10:57At the same time, you know, I think you can talk to many people of color in this country
11:01who don't take any advancement for granted.
11:04And so I don't think there was, and from the conversations I had,
11:07a ton of surprise that Trump was going to reverse it.
11:10But at the same time, Rachel, there is a tenacity and a resilience in this community.
11:15I mean, Robert Taylor, the man that we just talked about, is 84 years old.
11:18He picked me up in his red pickup truck and he drove me all around the town.
11:22The police came after us at one point.
11:24They are unafraid of the consequences here because they got nothing to lose.
11:29They admit it on this panel.
11:30They're like, most of us won't live to see this, the conclusion of all of this.
11:34But they're fighting for the next generation and they're not giving up.
11:39Wow. Incredibly important reporting.
11:41Amazing and absolutely horrifying story.
11:44Alex Wagner, God bless you, my friend.
11:46I really appreciate you doing this and bringing it here.
11:48God bless you for doing this, Rachel.
11:51All right. Thanks, Alex.