My name is Cynthia Gordigua, I'm ProPublica's Marketing Director, and welcome to We Answer Your Questions about Poison in the Air, and thank you for coming. So at the top of this month, ProPublica reported on how air pollution from industrial plants is elevating Americans' estimated cancer risk to levels deemed unacceptable by the federal government. And this analysis also included a map that revealed more than a thousand hot spots of toxic air across the country. Subsequent stories over the past week have also shown how the law doesn't require industrial polluters to know how much hazardous air pollution is billowing into neighborhoods, often leaving residents to fight for themselves. So today we'll hear from members of our reporting team about this analysis, and I'll introduce them to you in a moment, but they're mostly here to answer your questions. Thank you everyone who submitted in advance, and if you'd like to submit a question live during the webinar, just click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to type it in, and we'll try to answer as many of those as we can. So with that, I'll introduce our reporters. First, we have Maya Miller, who is an engagement reporter who works with journalists across the country on community-centered investigations. Next we have Al Shaw, who is a deputy editor on the news apps team. He uses data and interactive graphics to cover environmental issues, natural disasters, and politics. Layla Eunice is a news apps developer and reporter who works on data-driven environmentally-focused investigations. And Lisa Song is a reporter covering the environment, energy, and climate change. Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining. I'm going to start us all off before we get to the reader questions. I'm going to start us off with a few openers. So I'll start with you, Al. Can you just walk us through the map and tell us what it shows about some of the regional hotspots that you all identified. Thanks. My name is Al. Let me share my screen real quick so everyone can see this map. So this is the news app that we created that lets you see toxic air pollution across the country. If you scroll down through this kind of interactive story, down here at the bottom is a map of these hotspots that we've identified. All of these places are places where the cancer risk or the additional estimated cancer risk we found is above 100,000. These are kind of these boundaries of these hotspots and you can click on one of these hotspots or search for an address to find what the risk looks like near you. So the app is kind of broken into a couple of different layers. If you click on one of these hotspots, you'll find some summary statistics about the overall hotspot. For example, in this one, you can see the population, what the average risk is across the hotspot. Now remember that everything within this boundary here, the risk is over 100,000. It also tells you what the highest risk is and some of the facilities that contribute to the industrial cancer risk here. And then once you're in this view, you can actually click anywhere within the hotspot for a kind of microanalysis of an individual area within the hotspot to find more specifically what the risk is in that area. It's broken down into these 810 by 810 meter grid cells. So it's super high resolution. You can see kind of on a micro level what the risk, how the risk has changed over time, which facilities have contributed to that risk and what chemicals they have admitted. You can also see that you can search for an address or a zip code. So for example, if I search for a zip code in New Orleans, it'll redirect you to kind of the closest hotspot around New Orleans. So if I click this C hotspot, it'll direct me here to this hotspot around Cancer Alley. There's a lot of different ways you can kind of cut through this database. There's also this permalink function if you want to share links to specific areas on the map or specific hotspots, you can do that and copy that link over. Pretty much it, that's kind of the high level overview of the map, but we can get into more specific ways to cut through the data if you have specific questions. All right, thanks Al. Okay, so since coming out with this analysis. I'm going to direct this question to Lisa. What reactions have you all been getting from environmental regulators and what about the industries themselves. We've gotten some pretty great reactions. Our colleague Ava Kaufman interviewed the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, as he was on this environmental justice tour of a bunch of states in the south. He visited some of the hotspots we featured, including part of Cancer Alley. You know, he has said that he is aware of our project. The EPA is looking closely at it and they are thinking about ways to incorporate some of this data and analysis as they think about how to regulate hotspots and cumulative risk. In order to do that though, there's going to be a lot of change that's going to happen. So one thing we know for sure is whatever reforms the EPA might want to do, it probably will take them a long time to do it. It might be sort of difficult politically or logistically at least some of it. We've also heard from some local regulators. There have been some local community meetings that have been called in some of these hotspots, where residents and the local officials have talked about our map and what the data means to them. What they might want to be able to do moving forward to try to get local and state regulators to act. So we're really thrilled to see that kind of response and hoping to see even more going forward. Thank you, Lisa. And by the way, I just shared the actual map in the chat for those who haven't reviewed it yet or played around with it yet. So Leila, my next question is for you. What were some of your most surprising findings in doing this research. And some of them when you started, I think that our top line findings I found really fascinating the fact that there are over 100, I mean, it's sorry, a thousand hotspots that we were able to identify across the country and not just in the places that you would necessarily expect not just, you know, in South Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast of Texas, but sort of across the Midwest, you know, pockets in the Chicago suburbs and and so there's just interesting to see sort of how widespread this problem really is. So like you said, we found about approximately 256,000 Americans are estimated to be exposed to cancer risk at levels that the EPA considers unacceptable. But the EPA has another threshold, which they say that they strive to protect the greatest amount of people possible and 74 million Americans, we estimate are exposed above that threshold and that's roughly a fifth of the population so I found that number to be pretty staggering. And then we also did an analysis of sort of how this problem bears out demographically and the strongest finding that we had there which I also found quite staggering was that when you sort of aggregate this pollution at the level of a census tract and you compute the estimated cancer risk at the census tract level. And if you sort of divide all the census tracts in America into two groups, census tracts that are majority white and census tracts that are majority non white, the majority non white census tracts have we estimate on average 40% more cancer risk from toxic air pollution as the majority white tracts and that the disparity is even stronger for census tracts where the majority of people are black. In majority black census tracts we found that residents experience an estimate will their estimated to experience more than double the amount of cancer risk from toxic air pollution as majority white tracts. So, that sort of combination of top line findings I think sort of underscore to us the importance of this work. And for Maya, along with the map you also published a post helping people understand the actual risks of toxic air pollution. So what do you think is the most important thing that people need to know about the risks. Yeah, that's a great question. I think that people probably come at this wanting different information like I'm seeing already questions from like Nancy William Arnold in the chat asking really good stuff so keep them coming but I think one of the main things to understand is that this is information I guess this is population level information and this is also a specific type of toxic air pollution. So, this doesn't encompass like all pollution that is across our country. This looks at facilities that meet a certain reporting requirement threshold. And then they self report these industrial facilities to the EPA to the government and what allow Alan Leila spent two years doing is analyzing the data that they report through a model of that like is based on the data they report to understand how the estimated cancer risk is across a population and so earlier when I was showing the map, and he said kind of this is encompassing everything that's one in 100,000 cancer risk. That means that for every 100,000 people who live there, one, at least one additional person will get developed cancer, because there will be toxic air pollution from that industrial facility over a lifetime, and then doesn't include other types of cancers that people just have you know from hereditary or lifestyle so, and then just to frame the conversation a little bit more. The EPA has decided that everything above one in 10,000 risk or anything below one in 10,000 risk is not acceptable, and that they strive to protect the greatest number of people from a cancer risk greater than one in a million and so the work that Alan and Leila did to really analyze this and understand kind of the situation we're in as a country when it comes to toxic air pollution really helps us be on the same page be able to talk about this inform ourselves of this and then decide kind of what the next best steps are depending on the community Thanks Maya. And I also in the chat shared the service piece that we were just talking about. So, in the chat you'll have the service piece on knowing about the risks, as well as the math itself. And now we're going to move to your questions. Again, if you'd like to ask a question live during webinar, just type it into the Q&A I kind of the bottom of your screen. But yeah, the biggest question that we got from the advanced questions was just like how do we address this how do we fix this. And so, just to kind of consolidate all the different questions I would ask, what can be done from the individual to the big corporation to the government to help improve air quality. So I'll just throw it out to everyone. I can start there are so many answers to this question, but one of the ones that we point out in our story that we think is really important is sort of the way that the federal government assesses or computes cancer risk and communities is sort of fundamentally flawed. The EPA when they conduct cancer risk assessments of chemical plants, they only look at one particular type of facility at a time in some cases they look at one type of equipment at a time but if you live in, you know, an area with multiple sources of pollution as is the case in many of our hotspots that we've identified, you know, you're actually getting a cumulative risk much greater than the individual risk from the one plant that the EPA is considering in its risk assessment so that's just one of the reasons that, you know, we feel that this is a problem and one thing that I would like to address it is to actually sort of create a new framework for conducting these risk assessments so you know actually dedicating the resources to creating at real cumulative assessments that take into account all the different sources of toxic air pollution in an area. And like, and so that the actual regulators and the permitting authorities have a full picture of what's going on, you know, on the fence line of a chemical plant before they sort of check and sign, you know, and approve a new permit. Another problem is that the data that we rely on the data that you pay relies on is based on self reported data from the facilities themselves so the, what we know about these toxic air toxic air pollutants in the country come from what the facilities themselves are telling us and telling the EPA, and there are many flaws with that coming down to what formulas they use how they estimate their emissions. The EPA collects them and then how they make their way into federal databases and to experts around the country. A paradigm shift would be to move towards actually monitoring around these facilities rather than trusting the facilities to report their own emissions accurately. And that's that's kind of one thing that could be done to really increase the quality of the data that we're working with. And I'll say that air monitoring is super important because a lot of the pollutants come out in very intermittent spurts. So you may have, you know, hours where not much is coming out and then suddenly five minutes where there's this kind of gigantic belch of a ton of toxic air pollutants. And unfortunately, our laws don't force our regulations don't force continuous air monitoring of these pollutants from the smokestacks of these facilities. So, you know, in many cases we actually do have the technology that would allow you to do that real time continuous tracking. So if the EPA were to somehow clamp down and and start forcing more of these new regulations to require more direct air monitoring, that would help a lot with this kind of figuring out where the hotspots are and maybe doing some enforcement. And then I'll just add one more thing from the individual level so it's a systemic issue if you're living in a hotspot there are some things that other people and other hotspots have done to try to lower their individual risk. And that includes looking at some filters for the homes people have looked at air filters. Other people have kind of organized and applied for grants to do some air monitoring in their communities. And then, yeah, unfortunately, some people have like moved, which is something that's not feasible for a lot of people, but these are some individual steps that some people have taken to try to lower their risk. And Maya, just a follow up to that because we have also seen a lot of questions from people who want to know like, is there how can people influence state regulators to lower permitted toxic emissions so in terms of the individual getting involved in like civic participation. Are there any pointers or examples that you can look to for them. Yeah, that's a great question and I want to open it to the group of panelists as well here and also if anyone has environmental groups that they're a part of who are here with us tonight. Also probably drop that in the chat. But I think there are some local environmental groups that have formed around these issues in the past so if some in the like other people what they've done in some of these hotspots is put together and organized and thought about how they can kind of take the next steps. Again, on an individual level there isn't that much to do because of the scale of this issue but to mitigate that your own risk. You can get air filters and put them in your home and we talked a little bit about that in the service post. I think people really be at the forefront of pushing for more attention to this and to try to mitigate risk and push for air monitoring in their communities. At least I'm actually thinking a little bit about Barbara. I don't know if you want to talk about that in Mississippi. Yeah, the, the story that just came out yesterday. I interviewed some, some folks in a town called City called Pascagoula in Mississippi, and they had been complaining about the air quality there and the pollution and odors for, for something like nine or 10 years. And unfortunately for them, it has taken this long nearly a decade to get sustained attention and investigations from, from, from federal regulators in this case. And I'm able to drum up enough publicity and attention to get the EPA to do some really more detailed air monitoring near those facilities and for the EPA to then kind of go in and do a thorough look to try and figure out which plants are responsible for the odors and the pollution. And the results of that are still pending, but that just shows one example of where, you know, this community has been trying to get the state environmental agency in Mississippi to truly act and help them for many, many years. And finally, it was the federal government that has agreed to step in. So they are still waiting to see the results of that. But it is their work is moving forward now in a way that it hadn't before. And while you mentioned earlier that the map is based on self reported industry statements, a lot of a lot of conversation about that in the chat. Can you just maybe explain like why you chose the sources you used and, you know, this is you use this for a reason so let's talk about that. You chose to use the Rezzi the Rezzi database because it was the highest resolution look at cancer risk in the country. And it was a very it was a database that wasn't well known and wasn't well used. It was kind of toiling in obscurity inside the EPA. And even though the data is self reported it is really valuable and that it is the highest resolution and best look we have at where this risk is. And, and that's why we wanted that's why we wanted to use it and kind of surface it from from within the depths of the EPA. We did notice that because the data was self reported there were some errors, we reached out to over 200 facilities to try to correct some of the errors that these top emitters put in their TRI submissions. And so, in that sense, we tried to compensate as much as we could for the faculty data is inherently flawed. But we still believe that this is probably the best look at where cancer risk is in the country. And if we did rely on simply air monitoring data, we wouldn't have nearly the same look that that we could have if we by using the Rezzi database so you know even with these flaws, we believe that it's really kind of an unprecedented look at cancer risk across the country. And we're also seeing a lot of questions just like still staying on the data and the scope of the map. So like why does the map only involve air pollution from industry and not from other sources such as easel from roads and trains used to ship their products. We had a comment here without without these other sources the map makes most of us look like a very low cancer risk from industrial air pollution. Yeah, absolutely and that's a great question. The answer is that you know the EPA regulates different types of air pollution differently, and we fully agree that vehicular traffic diesel trucks. And among other sources are our major contributors to air pollution and cancer risk across the nation, and that just because an area does not show up on our map does not mean that there is no, you know cancer risk from air pollution there. But the EPA the database that the recent model is based off of it's called the toxic releases inventory, and it only includes emissions from major sources of toxic air pollution. And the story was really about this one particular type of air pollution and the way that it is regulated, because we, we, you know, can't. We would take many more stories to write about all the different ways that all the different types of air pollution are regulated so ultimately this investigation is really only looking at what I would say is like one slice of the air pollution pie and it is a very substantial place in many places. However, you know, there are other resources and other tools that exist for understanding, for example, PM 2.5, and, and, and other forms of pollution that are not, you know, cancer causing toxic industrial air pollution which is what our investigation is about. So you also received a lot of questions from people who were concerned about industrial pollution in their communities, but they did not see their town or city featured on public map. So there's a lot of anxiety about how bad is the pollution from the smoke and, you know, these factories near where they live. What's in the air, how might that affect their health. So if they weren't sort of one of the hotspots on our map, what are the best resources where they can get more information. I'd encourage you to take a look at a database called NATO, the National Air Toxics Assessment, which is a map that the EPA puts out that combines all kinds of pollution from the kind of pollution that we wrote about to PM 2.5 and other on-road and mobile sources to give you kind of a different view of air pollution across the country. One difference between NATO and what we did was NATO operates on the level of census tract. So in certain rural parts of the country, the areas will be much larger, won't give you as high resolution and detailed a view as our map does. But it does include some of those other sources that our map doesn't. So it's something worth checking out. And I'm going to direct this one to Lisa. What is the impact of state versus federal government regulations on this problem? So like, is there some conflict on the state and federal levels that's preventing closer regulation? There actually isn't any kind of inherent conflict. The basic rule is that the EPA sets air pollution standards or rules or policies for the entire country, and those national federal policies are supposed to be a kind of baseline. After that, states are allowed to set rules that are more stringent than the EPA's policies if they want to. And so that's why you have some states like California that regulate these air toxics in certain ways that are more stringent than the EPA's baseline rules. Other states stick to exactly what the EPA has done and they don't want to add additional policies.  And that's because they're the ones with the boots on the ground. They're the ones with the regulators and staff closest to the areas where you live, where the industries are. They're the ones doing onsite inspections and reviewing the air permits when these places get permitted or they expand. But at any point, the EPA has the power and authority to swoop in and say, we see you have a problem here, we believe you're not, you know, you haven't done enough to investigate it, we will take over. There's nothing to prevent the EPA from doing that in any community, but keep in mind that the EPA also doesn't, they oftentimes have very limited staff. So I discovered when reporting on Mississippi, the EPA region in charge of Mississippi, they're in charge of eight states and they only have 25 employees in the air pollution enforcement division. And that's about that. That's, you know, a few staff to to handle air pollution issues for each of eight states. And so there's no way that the EPA can really keep track of and handle all of these problems. And that's why the state agencies are so important. Thank you. Sorry, there's so many questions going. Okay, so there's there's a pretty specific question here. I've never noticed a facility that was listed on the map that to their knowledge does not have any smoke stacks or air release equipment. So how is it that it was still accounted for on the map. So there are many different types of possible sources of emissions in facilities. Facilities can have what are called stacks which are those tall industrial chimneys that you typically associate with chemical plants, but facilities can also release toxic air pollution through events through sort of like if you have an oven that's cooking coal then toxic pollution can escape from sort of the sides of the oven. Right. So there are many different sources of like or possible ways that toxic air pollution can escape a facility. So, you know, our do not include the actual industrial chimneys that you typically would associate with the chemical plant. One thing I'll just quickly add there too is. So like, so one of industrial facilities like Laila were saying there's a span, like they span a wide range so everything from like a company that sterilizes medical equipment to petrochemical chimneys can be included in an industrial facility. And some of them look like the ones that are obvious others look like very squat buildings. I know someone meant is here from like the Lake County, Illinois area where there is a medical sterilizer saw them in the chat and that kind of looks like just a squat building. There's no like big smoke stacks from it. And some of the chemicals that are being released into the air are not visible so there's like invisible and odorless chemicals so you're not necessarily always going to know and that's why Alan Laila's work on this was so incredible too. All right, so this is a pretty nitty gritty question. So, industrial pollution would have to be in what concentration and what duration to cause cancer that can you answer that any specificity here. Yeah, I'm looking at how I don't know if Al you want to take it. Okay, so, so it depends on the chemical is sort of the answer. The EPA assigns what is called a cancer potency value to each chemical that it deems to be likely known or likely to cause cancer. So, you know, one gram of one toxic chemical could be, you know, bad but not terrible whereas one group of a different toxic chemical could be, you know, could really do a lot of damage or at least really heighten the cancer risk in an area. And so you sort of have to look at the the actual chemical it's cancer potency value and then the concentration of that chemical in the air to truly answer that question so it's very chemical specific. So what it basically did was it sort of computed the cancer risk from each individual chemical concentration and added all those risks together to arrive at an overall cancer risk for a particular area. Okay. So this sort of question sort of on how granular can you really get. So given the time, the different time periods between exposure and the diagnosis of a particular type of cancer, and all the variabilities among people exposed. Can you reliably say whether someone getting cancer can be attributed to a company's emissions. Not really. No, it's, it's virtually impossible to prove that one specific cancer case was caused by, you know, emissions from a particular facility.  It's also possible that if the person works in an industrial facility, they may be exposed to additional toxic pollutants in their workplace that are different from what they're exposed to at home. So for all of those reasons, you know, our data cannot be used to prove that one specific cancer patient has gotten cancer from the facility near their home. That's just that's just not possible. Next question, are you going to add to that. Oh yeah I was just going to say that the the metric we're using is called the incremental lifetime cancer risk so what it basically says is if you live in this area for your entire lifetime. What's your incremental risk on top of the risk that you already have just from living in America. So that incremental risk, just from these industrial facilities, and we take all of the various chemicals that all the various facilities are emitting around you, waiting them by each individual cancer weight for that particular chemical, then flattening it out to this one incremental lifetime cancer risk number so it makes a lot of assumptions, basically you being in that one place for your entire lifetime. So that's, that's kind of the incremental risk on top of your, you're already admittedly higher risk of cancer in America. The next question is either other mass such as and 95 that can eliminate a significant amount of the air pollution that you're all discussing. That's a great question. I'm not sure about masks specifically but in the service post that city had posted, we did speak with Wilma Subaru who's an environmental advocate and she's been working for decades, mostly a crop across the southern United States with residents who live in hotspots about how to reduce risk, kind of working between communities who are concerned and state agencies and companies and local officials. And she suggested some air filters that you could put in your home if you live in one of these high risk areas, they're like carbon filters that can help funnel out some of the risk of this toxic air pollution from entering and in the service post there's a link of one of the California state agencies put together kind of a list of different air filters and kind of the cost, etc. So you might want to check that out. Thank you. So, next question is what are the zoning walls why is it okay to put houses near such food in the first place. Sure, yes. So, so, yeah, so the US sort of had there's we have kind of a dark history in this country of, and this gets back at the question that or what we basically found in our demographic analysis that I was describing earlier. We sort of have a history of zoning neighborhoods of color as mixed use industrial areas, which sort of opens them up to unbridled development and bridled industrial development in many cases and that's been the case. And many different parts of the country I'm thinking particularly about cancer alley right now communities, especially communities that are unincorporated or not official cities are designated as official cities therefore city places that don't have their own local zoning boards are not able to sort of be represented in the body is making those critical decisions about what chemical plants get to relocate in their neighborhood so that's sort of a second point of how these plants end up ultimately sort of in these places is because, in many cases state governments that have pretty cozy relationships with industry. They're sort of making decisions about communities without necessarily consulting without the requirement that they actually consult those communities first before building the plants there. And to the third point, you know, different states have different permitting processes the Clean Air Act leaves a lot of its implementation up to the states. The federal EPA really is sort of the last stop in line for a new for the permit of a major new source of toxic air pollution, the sort of critical decisions are happening at the state level, and certain agencies have far less protective methods for approving permits than others, for example, in the state of Louisiana and the state of South Carolina. The those cancer risk assessments that I was describing earlier are broken down even more than the federal EPA breaks them down. So instead of only looking at instead of looking at facilities in isolation, the state of Louisiana looks at chemicals and so if you're permitting a new chemical plant, you're only you're sort of basically looking at each of the different chemicals it plans to emit by itself instead of looking at the cumulative cancer risk from all the chemicals that that plant, you know, wants to emit. And so once you put together all those different factors you end up with places like Cancer Alley Louisiana and Port Arthur Texas, where you have sort of dozens of plants clustered together. And you have residents sort of right up against the fence lies of these sort of mega facilities. This might have been answered by the broader analysis that Laila just provided but we are getting a lot of questions about Texas in particular. No of the 20 hotspots that you all identified at the highest levels of cancer risk, a quarter were in Texas. So why Texas what, like what are the conditions and the differences that make that state the home of so many of these problem areas. I can start off on this and then I'll pass it to you Laila I've been working for the last half year or so with our partners at the Texas Tribune and particularly an environmental reporter who's on our partnership. Tia, and she has reported extensively on environmental issues in Texas and her reporting has showed in the past that yeah the TCEQ the Texas State Agency responsible for ensuring the protection of public health and environment has had more impacts, regulatory laws, then the other parts the other state environmental agencies in the country. Also historically, the Texas is located in an area with ample access to natural gas supplies, kind of shipping and so in the past it's been an attractive place for industrial facilities to kind of set up shop so that kind of a combination of geographic location access to natural resources and then an agency that has historically been a little bit in terms of the spectrum of like very strict regulations and not as strict it's been more on the side of not as strict. Thank you. So we have a question from a chronic asthma patient, and they want to know where should they retire so in other words like what which part of the country has good air the best holiday air. Can you guys speak to that at all, or is it only only the bad stuff. Like we said before the, our map is not exhausted when it comes to air pollution and particulate matter PM 2.5 and other criteria pollutants can be just as harmful as these hazardous air pollutants for conditions like asthma. So I would check out some of those other databases like NATO. There's also a database called DJ screen that the EPA puts out, I would check out the American Long Association state of the air report that they put out every year with a rank metro areas for quality. And that looks specifically at PM 2.5 and ozone to be biggest biggest chemicals for for asthma that affect asthma, and some of the biggest metro areas on in those databases are not the ones that show up in our database because all of the different industrial areas are much worse for PM 2.5 and they offer hazardous air pollutants. Okay, thank you. So I have a very straightforward question here. I'm going to direct this one to Lisa. Why don't polluters go to jail. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that part of it is just, it's hard to prove that a company is in violation. Like we said earlier, you can't know what someone is doing wrong if you don't measure it. So if we don't have good air monitoring, which we do not have, then it can be really hard to prove that a particular company is violating its air permit. And even when you are proving that company X is violating its air permit and you know putting out 20 pounds of benzene per hour when their permit only allows them to put out 10 or something like that. So sometimes what usually happens is they might get a fine. There might be some sort of maybe consent decree and then they have to agree to install certain technology or do a little bit more monitoring, but having actual criminal consequences is a very, very rare thing. And that's something that we've been working in many communities, particularly even getting to the first step of why, of how do we even prove what's in the air and then who is responsible for putting that chemical into the air. That's often the hardest step that can take many, many years, even just to get there. So kind of related to that. I have a question about people who have strong opinions about protecting industry. So how can, how can people share this information without alienating people. So I guess, you know, my question is like, have you found resistance in trying to share your work with people and how do you navigate that sort of tension between, you know, industry and sort of public health. That's a great question I can start and then I'd love, I'd actually love to get everyone's thoughts on this too and I'm sure people who are with us tonight have had their own experience with this in their own work so I'm curious to hear stuff in the chat too. But yeah, I think that we've been very, you know, careful as we've been sending this information out to just say like, you know, this is what we know we're not advocating for anything we're journalists we are just trying to inform people and ensure that people are aware of this and have an estimated risk around them. And I think also pointing to kind of past steps that people in other states have taken when learning about this information, either things that people have done to learn more terms of like asking elected individuals about it or have like we've talked about a little bit like Lisa, Lisa's story in Pascagoula how people kind of organized together and push for some air monitoring so I think that just, yeah, focusing on that. We're all just trying to make people aware of the situation so that then we can have again be on the same level playing field and have a conversation about it has really been our approach. And so we've, yeah, that it has worked pretty well and people kind of in every camp people who work in industrial facilities people who live by them. People who used to work their regulators etc have all kind of gotten in touch with us just to share their experiences and it's really helped us as we do this reporting so yeah, I'm curious if other messaging has worked for the other reporters on this call though. I mean, I would say that I haven't gotten a lot of resistance. Some of the folks I've talked to and at least one of the people, you know, featured in my recent story on Mississippi. Her father worked in industry, you know he had worked in various shipyards and shipbuilding facilities throughout his life. People who live in these communities. A lot of them work in these facilities where they have family members and friends and neighbors who do. And it's not that they want those people those business, those places to go out of business. They want to have a livable life and livable salary while also being able to breathe air that doesn't give them cancer. So, you know, it's, it's not an either or situation. I think we've also seen clearly the pattern of our map will also show that there are states that do have plenty of industry, but have fewer hotspots. California, for example, they have a lot of expertise and more investment compared to other states on certain aspects of environmental health, and have managed to have a pretty robust, you know, industrial facilities and business there, while just not having the type of hotspots that you see in places like Texas or Louisiana. Okay, so we've gotten a lot of very specific questions, sort of like, you know, does this cause this. So, I'm just going to do a series of those and we'll see if you're able to answer them. So the first one is what is the most toxic and exposing the largest number of people to its effects. We can answer that. So that would be ethylene oxide. We are analysis found that it is sort of driving the most cancer risk of any toxic chemical polluted, emitted by American industry and one of the reasons is because it actually disperses in the air very far and it has a very high cancer potency value, the value I mentioned earlier. So it's just sort of a small amount of it can really elevate cancer risk in an area by quite a lot. All right, thank you. So, you know, you all focused on cancer causing chemicals but we're getting a lot of questions about the relationship between air pollution and Parkinson's dementia and other in your neurological disorders. Is that something that you can speak to you. I can, I can speak to that a little bit. There is much more research on how other types of air pollution in particular particulate matter is implicated in increasing the risk of dementia and other sort of long term neurological diseases. There has been less research linking these air toxics that we write about to those kinds of diseases. And I just saw though that it looks like it looks like there is some evidence now linking one of one air toxic called trichloroethylene to Parkinson's disease. So there is some emerging evidence. And I would say that there's more readily available evidence on more short term neurological problems like like dizziness and headache and nausea and symptoms with balance and stuff like that those kinds of more acute short term neurological symptoms are linked to a bunch of the air toxics we write about including things like Benzi. Thank you. So is there any correlation between air pollution hotspots and COVID-19 deaths. Well, we did actually publish a piece last year, and we partnered with some researchers at university in Syracuse, New York, and we did find a correlation between toxic air pollution and COVID-19 deaths that is a separate story I'll put it in the chat right now, but we have found that there's a correlation between elevated hazardous air pollution and COVID-19. And just make sure you send that to everyone, not just the panelists. Let's see. How far does the air pollution travel from the sources so it's like, you're not right next to the facility, are you safe, or can we speak to the distance. That depends on each chemical so chemicals like ethylene oxide do travel quite far can travel quite far facilities while other chemicals don't travel as far. The model itself has a maximum about 50 kilometers from sources so it only models 50 kilometers out from from the source. So that's the limitation of the model but it does incorporate all different chemicals that travel different different ranges. And one of the reasons ethylene oxide is so prominent on the map is because it disperses so far from from the source. Okay. So, I'm going to turn this over to some of the responses that you've gotten from regulators. So any of you believe that the response at EPA will be adequate with Louisiana's cancer alley being known about since 1987 for example as one of your mentions, can the EPA be trusted to suddenly change their approach. The EPA has said to us that that it's going to take many years of work across multiple administrations to actually sort of tackle the problem of overburdened communities.  And so the, I mean, and he also told us that if he was from a place like Mosville Louisiana one of the places we highlighted in our main story he probably wouldn't trust the EPA to do the right thing given what that community has actually gone through. So he said, this administration has sort of demonstrated in a way that other administrations haven't previously a commitment to really sort of reassessing the way that overburdened communities and cumulative risk actually exist on the ground in in areas that are not just real. And so, in his first week of office President Biden made three new communities on environmental justice so we are seeing certain things happening that we haven't before from the federal government but I think at this point I'd like to hear my colleagues have to say to, I would say it sort of remains to be seen what exactly comes next and, and I think that, you know, it would be silly to assume that, you know, the Biden administration will be able to just solve this problem. But thank you if there's no other thoughts on that I'll move on to the next question. The question about military bases, what makes military bases so extremely polluting the insights into that and what's going on. Sorry, I can jump in again. I hear my voice. So at military bases, often the army is either manufacturing equipment that that's made with heavy metals, which when released into the air are pretty heavy drivers of cancer risk, and they're also often burning old machinery and old arms and old bombs and things of that nature which, as you might imagine, also include a lot of toxic chemicals in them so those are the two reasons I can think of off the top of my head why you might sort of have some serious problems in in and around military bases and not not even just in the air but also in the soil, also in the water. Thank you.  Can you sort of talk about sort of the unprecedented nature of this and, you know, I have a question for you if you ask, would you consider this information to be a watershed moment in the understanding of cancer and cancer risk in the United States. Let's say that this is information that the EPA has been working on for a long time they've maintained the Resi database for years if not decades they've had this information inside the EPA. They just have chosen not to look at it the way we've looked at it. So whether or not it's a watershed moment really depends on who decides to act on it and actually pick up the information that's been sitting around, you know, in their warehouses. It's not it's not new data it's data that's been around and we chose to analyze it and look at it in a specific way. So it really it really depends on the EPA and states to take this and run with it. And this is another EPA question. Our state and federal EPA agencies as slow and backlogged as they seem and why is it why is it takes so long to update data. Well a lot of a lot of these agencies are seriously under resourced and that includes the federal EPA and the state agencies. I believe it was. Maybe Lisa you'd remember the name of the organization that published the report which includes the input all the data on how much state environmental budgets have been slashed over the past 10 years. But you know some states that, you know, really could use a very strong environmental agency because they have so many polluters operating within their jurisdictions are slashing their budgets by 1030%. So, so I think that's something that you'll hear, additionally from state agencies and from the federal EPA is like we would love to conduct these cumulative risk assessments so we don't have the money to do it. The federal government isn't giving us the budget to do it and so, you know, I think that that's probably every resources, every agency is strapped for resources and I think that's no different for for environmental agencies.  And there's a call out where you're inviting people to share their stories if they live near industrial facilities and I'll find that link and get it to you all in a second. Are there particular things that you're looking for certain regions certain kinds of stories and you know what kinds of things can people share you that would be really helpful to your reporting. Yeah, I can I can take this one and pass it along but yeah we are actively wanting to hear from as many people as possible who live in these hotspots. We really just want to listen and understand the common experiences throughout. Like, I've kind of mentioned before, I think one of the powers of this map and this information is that it kind of has put all the people living in a hotspot in this community of one whereas otherwise it would necessarily know that you were part of this group and so we really are just trying to understand. If you live in a hotspot, what your experiences are and listen and learn from you. We've heard people talk about cancers in their families we've heard people talk about seeing and smelling the facilities nearby and what's that's like for them. We've heard people talk about their considerations around moving if they're trying to move homes or you know they don't want to move what that kind of wrestling with that means other health elements they've had and then, you know some like Leila mentioned there there's a racial justice component to this in which people who are black and predominantly black zip codes have been disproportionately harmed by this toxic air pollution so that's also something we've been hearing a lot about. So yeah please send us your experiences we would love to read about them and maybe we'll follow up with you for a phone call as well to learn more about that but yeah Leila, Al or Lisa anything else you all want to hear from specifically. I think you I think you covered everything Maya. Right here's another question from the QA was, was there any accounting for agricultural pollution, such as hog confinements. No, so those would not. Those would not be considered major sources of toxic air pollution under the regulatory program that reports to the toxic releases inventory so that would not be in our map. And then I have a question from about like in your reporting for the story how cooperative was the EPA and in developing your research. We were very fortunate that the individuals who work on VC are not. They are actually contract workers so they contract with the agency to produce the model and they've been contracting with the agency for 30 years. And that sort of gave us a wider avenue, like an easier access we didn't really have to go through, you know, a spokesperson we were able to sort of email the creators of the model and sort of have an open dialogue and, and they were really instrumental in this whole thing we wanted to make sure since it was such complicated data that we were doing everything right.  And so we sort of amended our analysis and so we really had an open channel of dialogue and they're very cooperative very help helpful people who really believe very strongly in the model they've dedicated so many years of their lives building. So, in that way we were, we were very happy and then towards the end of the investigation, the EPA, you know, sat with us and we discussed our findings together and we were able to hear their thoughts they've, you know, obviously that that was at that point they were helping us create methodology but you know they were willing to speak with us about what we had found. Thank you. So that's about our time for this evening but to everyone who's on the call understand I'm going to be emailing everyone with all the resources that we've discussed tonight, as well as a video of this entire discussion that you can share and watch that with pleasure. But I want to thank our panel for this excellent conversation and thank all of our participants for joining us today and your wonderful questions. And again, the video will be up online tomorrow at ProPublica.org events and email to you. Until next time. Have a great evening everyone.


Friends, I understand that an ambitious New Delhi Declaration is being considered. We are all aware that the sustainable development goals have to be achieved by 2030, of which attainment of islanding is also a part. I wish you well as you deliberate further towards proposing a global strategy for land degradation neutrality. I would end by saying a very popular prayer from one of our olden scriptures, Om Dayo Ho Shanti, Antariksham Shanti. The word Shanti does not only refer to peace or the antidote to violence. Here it refers to prospering. Being has a law of being, a purpose, and everybody has to fulfill that purpose. The fulfillment of that purpose is prosperity, Om Dayo Ho Shanti, Antariksham Shanti. So it says, May the skies have an in-space prosper, Pruthvihi Shanti, Apah Shanti, Aushadaya Shanti, Manaspataya Shanti, Visvedeva Ha Shanti, Brahm Shanti, May Mother Earth Prosper. This includes the flora and fauna with whom we share our planet. May they prosper, may every drop of water prosper, may the divine gods prosper. Shravah Shanti, Shanti Revah Shanti, Samesh Shanti Redai, may everybody prosper, may I also be placed with prosperity, Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, Om Prosperity, Prosperity is Prosperity. The thought and philosophy of our ancestors was all embracing and filled with a great thought. They realized the true relationship between me and we. They knew that prosperity of me can only be through prosperity of we. When our ancestors said we, they did not just mean their family or community or even just humans, it includes the sky, water, plants, trees, everything. It is also very important to know the order in which they are praying for peace and prosperity. They pray for the sky, the earth, the water, the plants, these are things that sustain us. This is what we call the environment. If this prosper, then I prosper. This was their mantra. Even today, this is an extremely relevant thought.