Study Links Petrochemical Plants to Premature Birth

About a fifth of America’s total petrochemical production is concentrated on a stretch of land along the Mississippi River in Southeastern Louisiana. Those facilities provide many of the essentials of modern life, plastics, fertilizer, and even medical equipment, but that production also comes with serious risks. The area has also long been known as Cancer Alley because of the high rates of cancer among people who live near those plants. As William Brangham reports, a new study now documents how those risks may fall on the next generation as well.

All right.

Not long ago, Teesha couldn’t imagine making memories like this with her son, Cairo.

You sharing with mommy.

He was born prematurely, almost two months early, weighing just four pounds. He had to live in this incubator, had a slow heart rate and sometimes stopped breathing entirely.

My first time seeing him after birth, I was holding him and he looked so peaceful and I was like, oh my God, he’s so peaceful. And I took a picture and seconds later his alarms went off. He had stopped breathing. And of course, just me being new to the experience, it was very overwhelming. There we go.

Teesha, who asked, we not use her last name for privacy reasons, has lived in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish most of her life. The community sits within an 85 mile stretch of land that’s home to some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations.

Growing up, we knew nothing about how those things were affecting us. You just had asthma, you just had eczema, you just had all of these other different issues. Your grandmother had cancer. A lot of women I know with fertility issues, a lot of women I know trying to get pregnant and can’t or experiencing a lot of miscarriages or early births, and we just thought that that was normal life.

Last month, researchers at Tulane University found that in Louisiana’s most polluted areas, pregnant women had a 25% higher risk of low birth weights and a 36% higher risk of premature births. Prematurity is the leading cause of death among infants in the US. Black and low income women in those areas face the highest risks.

It’s a wake up call in terms of how we think about the consequences of industrial pollution, and what you emit today affects the health of somebody who’s going to be born in six months or nine months. It’s not decades from now.

Kimberly Terrell is a staff scientist at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic and was lead author of the study.

What was really surprising was the proportion of adverse birth outcomes that could be attributed to pollution exposure in Louisiana. So our study suggests that a third of the cases of low birth weight and about half the cases of preterm birth in the state can be linked to pollution exposure.

The Mississippi River is full of petrochemical plants as well as grain elevators because they are truly the gateway to the world.

Louisiana Republican State Senator, Eddie Lambert chairs the Environmental Quality Committee, which oversees the agency that regulates the chemical industry. I’m sure your committee has seen the number of studies that have linked living in these areas to disproportionately high negative health outcomes. You don’t accept that as a premise?

I don’t accept that as a complete truism. I mean, there may be some correlations. I’m going to tell you, let’s start looking, vaccines. We’ve had an explosion of vaccines in the last 20, 30 years, and now you have autism. Is there a connection there? I don’t know. There’s a lot of people who think there are.

There’s a lot of people who think there are, but there’s no good evidence that they are connected.

And that may be the same thing with some of the situations with the chemical plants. There’s circumstantial evidence that’s there. But you know what, let’s really dig down and see what is there.

He says there are other reasons women in these areas may be experiencing poor birth outcomes.

Is it economically depressed? Their health, what kind of prenatal care are they doing? There’s all kind of factors.

But Terrell argues those factors were accounted for in her study, and they aren’t exclusive.

They are compounding. It doesn’t make sense to say, oh, we’re just going to ignore pollution and focus on poverty or healthcare access. If we know pollution is a risk factor, and we do, we absolutely know that pollution is linked to low birth weight and preterm birth across the board, why aren’t we addressing that?

You think on balance right now, you guys are hitting that correct balance of economic development versus protecting people’s health.

We could probably be doing a little bit better on both. I would like to see no pollution. That’s a perfect scenario. Now, how much of a negative impact there is? I don’t know, but I know they also bring a lot of things to us that we could not exist without them. Would it not be for the chemical industries, especially fertilizer, you could not support the world’s population.

A recent report from Human Rights Watch found that for decades, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality or LDEQ has repeatedly failed to enforce the minimum standards set by the federal government and to protect the environment and human health. And Terrell says that agency still hasn’t acknowledged the racial disparities in who gets exposed to pollution. From 2019 to 2021 the department allowed industrial emissions of pollution that were seven to 21 times higher in mostly Black communities compared to mostly white ones. In an email to the NewsHour, the department declined to comment.

I think the key is that the DEQ needs to take an unbiased approach to environmental justice analysis in its permitting decisions. And what that means is when a facility wants to build a new plant in a community of color, DEQ needs to say, okay, what’s the existing burden of pollution here, and is this community overburdened?

Two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency opened up a civil rights investigation looking at whether state regulators here in Louisiana were allowing oil and gas and petrochemical companies to build and pollute in a way that disproportionately harms Black communities. In response, Louisiana’s then Attorney General and now Governor, Jeff Landry sued the EPA and the agency dropped the investigation. The EPA declined to comment citing pending litigation.

We are going to focus on mitigation with climate change.

In Ascension Parish, another community with concentrated petrochemical plants, Ashley Gaignard is counting on a younger generation to enact change. She founded the organization, Rural Roots Louisiana, to teach kids about environmental issues.

That creates another generation of awareness. It preserves our land. It sustains what we have because if we don’t start preserving it, the industry is going to buy out every piece of clean property that they can.

All three of Gaignard’s children were born premature and with low birth weights. She says at the time she didn’t connect her baby’s poor health with the air she breathed when she was pregnant.

My son born with an undeveloped lung and he’s had really horrible asthma all his life. And to have a kid get told he can’t take recess anymore. When you learn you got formaldehyde in the air and methylene in the air and benzene in the air, and all of those chemicals have effects on your respiratory system you get angry.

That’s it.

Back in St. John the Baptist Parish, Teesha says even now she worries about how the air could be harming her son. If you could, would you move far away from here? Is that something you thought about?

It’s something that I thought about, but I love here. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I want to be home, and I want my baby to know home and love home the way that I do. So what do you do when you need to be home and home is unfortunately where the problem is?

For the PBS NewsHour I’m William Brangham in Southeastern Louisiana.