EA

Yes, and it’s unlike anywhere I’ve ever seen in America. It’s called fenceline because there’s the fence of your home, and then there’s the refinery and the chemical plants.

I met a woman who lives in a house that’s sandwiched between two huge simmering tanks of molasses-like chemical. So to the question that you asked, what dangers do they face? My reporting was about the chemical plant shutdowns, which most people don’t know are huge emission events. If a chemical plant or a refinery have to shut down or stop production, they release a lot of chemicals into the atmosphere. Whether or not that’s carbon monoxide, which takes a lot for that to be deadly in an outdoor environment, or carcinogens. But when all of that is happening at the same time and the plants are close to the fence-line communities, that poses a health risk.

Now, what I point out in the article you’re citing is that most of the shutdowns happened during the hurricane, which means there’s a lot of rain, there’s a lot of wind, there’s a lot of clouds. The pollutants that those plants were releasing were probably not going to harm those people’s health more than their health was already being harmed by living next to it. What we’re worried about now is the fact that they all have to restart and they’ll probably all restart at the same time. And restarting is just as big of an emission event as shutting down. With all of them restarting at the same time with the sun out — with the rain not falling, with the no clouds — then we’re going to have a potential problem.