EPA head tours embattled communities, says help on the way

EPA Administrator Michael Regan says a recently completed “Journey to Justice” tour from Mississippi to Texas enabled him to put “faces and names with this term that we call environmental justice.”

RESERVE, La. -- Michael Coleman's house is the last one standing on his tiny street, squeezed between a sprawling oil refinery whose sounds and smells keep him up at night and a massive grain elevator that covers his pickup in dust and, he says, exacerbates his breathing problems.

Coleman, 65, points to the billowing smokestacks just outside his backyard. “Oh, when the plants came in, they built right on top of us," he said. “We was surrounded by sugarcane, and now we’re surrounded by (industrial) plants.”

The oil company offered him a buyout, but Coleman rejected it. “I’m waiting for a fair shake," he said in an interview on the front steps of the home he has lived in for more than 50 years. In the meantime, he copes with high blood pressure, thyroid problems and other health issues that he attributes to decades of pollution from his industrial neighbors, a Marathon Petroleum refinery and a Cargill grain depot.

St. John the Baptist Parish, where Coleman lives, is part of an 85-mile stretch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge officially known as the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor, but more commonly called Cancer Alley. The region contains several hotspots where cancer risks are far above levels deemed acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.