Re:The Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip
by beeeebo on Sunday August 06, 2017 @01:10PM
(#14942174)
2 to 4 times what it ought to be or not? Maybe it's ok
Re:The Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip
by reservelanote on Sunday August 06, 2017 @01:41PM
(#14942372)
The particular situation with the neoprene plant couldn't possibly be OK, but the article is short on details. But I do think the risks of living in the general vicinity (yet outside the explosion range) of industrial facilities is oversold. For example, the east side of Houston towards the ship channel and its hundreds of refineries, terminals, plants, and other facilities shows a higher cancer risk than the rest of the metro area, but it's still less than many parts of LA, Seattle, NYC and San Francisco, due to other factors. The EPA doesn't recommend making these kind of comparisons for several reasons [1]. Also this dataset only covers air (not water / food / lifestyle) risks.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics-assessment/nata-freq...
Additionally, the second paragraph of the article contains a misleading statement about the risk of cancer in Reserve -- "800 times the national average". The data [1] is still shocking and generally backs up the article: there is a lot of chloroprene being dumped in the air in John the Baptist Parish, and the cancer risk there is the highest in the nation. But the 800x metric is only a summation of specifically enumerated, mostly chemical "point sources". If you sort by total cancer risk (most notably including emissions from cars and trucks), some of the tracts in the parish are only 2-4x the cancer risk of tracts in Manhattan and San Francisco.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/national-air-toxics-assessment/2011-nati...