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Toxic Towns

On June 2nd, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta will be airing an hour-long investigative story into the environmental health and justice problems plaguing the community of Mossville, Louisiana. Nestled amidst an alarming cluster of chemical plants, Mossville is home to more PVC chemical plants than anywhere else in the entire country, and has been dubbed the Vinyl Manufacturing Capital of America.

CNN broke a terrific story a few weeks ago profiling Mossville which you can watch in this embedded video.  Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s June feature will explore how Mossville has been polluted by the chemical industry with vinyl chloride, Dioxins, and other harmful chemicals.
A Posterchild for the PVC Chemical Industry
Mossville is not an isolated example, but instead a poster child for a broken chemical safety system.  Mossville is also a posterchild for the PVC chemical industry’s pollution, as PVC plants are disproportionately located in low-income communities and communities of color, making the production of PVC a major environmental justice concern for neighboring residents.
Community members, led by Mossville Environmental Action Now, have been fighting for a healthy community for years.  Just consider some of these alarming facts:

• A jury found one of the United States’ leading PVC manufacturers liable for “wanton and reckless disregard of public safety”, caused by one of the largest chemical spills in the nation’s history which contaminated the groundwater underneath the surrounding community.

• A 1999 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study found vinyl chloride levels in ambient air greater than 100 times the state air quality standard.
• Independent studies confirmed groundwater is threatened by liquid toxic leachate, and there are contaminated fish, vegetables, and fruit in the area
• Studies in 1998 and 2001 by the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) found alarming results — residents had more than three times the national average of dioxins in their blood, elevated dioxins in breast milk, and high cancer mortality rates.

More recently a few years ago, MEAN compiled data from the USEPA and ATSDR and found 77% of the mixture of dioxin compounds released by the Georgia Gulf PVC plant were the same dioxin compounds that made up 77% of the dioxins detected in the blood of Mossville residents. This finding shows that residents are accumulating the same mixture of dioxin compounds being released from the Georgia Gulf PVC plant and this mixture includes the most toxic forms of dioxin
Watch Toxic Towns on Wednesday, June 2nd at 8pm E.T. or 11pm E.T.