Read this story in The Intercept.
Energy Company Plotted Gas Plant in Small Pennsylvania Town — But No One Told Residents
Lawmakers helped with a plan to put the natural gas export facility in already-polluted Chester, Pennsylvania.
Chester, PA has become the target location for many industrial polluting facilities: a trash incinerator, a sewage treatment plant, and an oil refinery among other polluters. There is now a proposal for a new $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facility to come to Chester.
Margaret Brown has had bronchitis since elementary school, often deals with nose bleeds, and all three of her children have asthma.
Rail cars carry materials to the Trainer Refinery between the Covanta incineration facility and the block of local activist Zulene Mayfield’s abandoned house.
Zulene Mayfield speaks at an action highlighting the dirty investments in polluting facilities in Chester.
An action outside of the Covanta incineration facility hosted by Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living and Earth Quaker Action Team.
A mother of five walks with her children near the Covanta incineration facility. All of her children have asthma.
Because Darlynn Johnson’s three older children have asthma, she says of her 1-year-old son Darriel, “I’m pretty much sure he’s going to have asthma.”
Founded before Philadelphia, Chester, Pa., is a historic town that was settled in 1644.
1.7 miles from the Covanta incineration facility, the Trainer Refinery contributes to the air quality concerns of the surrounding towns all within a few mile stretch along the Delaware River.
Margaret Brown says that 11 out of 17 homes on her block had residents who died of cancer, primarily lung cancer.
Margaret Brown frequently wipes down the surfaces in her home because of the dusty air.
Demonstrators participate in an action outside of the Covanta incineration facility.
Quotes from The Intercept:
“The proposed facility could have terrifying consequences for a city already burdened with intense health and economic disparities brought on in part by other energy facilities like the Covanta incinerator, Mayfield said. ‘This thing is so scary to me,’ she said of the LNG proposal. ‘Out of all the things we’ve ever fought outside of the incinerator, the safety issue for this thing is dangerous to me.’ ”
“ ‘Many of these projects are sited in and have disproportionate impacts on environmental justice communities and communities that already face disproportionate burdens with industry,’ Morgan Johnson, staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Intercept. ‘It’s certainly problematic, given the administration’s expressed goals on climate and environmental justice, when these projects have impacts that are so significant on those fronts.’ ”
‘My community, where I still reside along with my children and family, has been promised economic salvation each time an industrial plant is proposed,’ Kazeem said, mentioning Chester’s incinerator and its old paper plant. ‘It has happened a dozen subsequent times.’
What Chester did get, Kazeem said, was a 27 percent childhood asthma rate, a 19.3 percent infant mortality rate, an increase in health risks and illness among seniors, and loss of jobs and corporate investment. ‘What we didn’t get was the promise of permanent jobs, and also financial emancipation,’ she said.”