How West Virginia polluters want to undermine citizen efforts to better monitor the air we breathe

INSTITUTE — Harvey Silas recalls how the air in his community once stung.

“It used to be at five o’clock in the evening when they did whatever they did down at the plant, your eyes would burn,” he said. “I thought it was awful.”

Outside the sliding glass doors that lead to Silas’ balcony is a small, white dome-like air sensor fastened to his railing. Close by, another one is fixed to the side of a brick house and a few miles away, across Interstate 64, one hangs on a carport. The sensors are all part of the effort to measure the amount of pollution in the air in Institute —- a major concern in the community given its vicinity to the Union Carbide plant.

Perched on the banks of the Kanawha River, the sprawling facility looms over the neighboring majority-Black community, casting a long shadow of pollution and fear decades after a devastating chemical leak. Nearly forty years ago, a cloud of hazardous chemicals leaked from Union Carbide, injuring several employees and sending dozens of nearby residents to seek medical help.

The Institute leak came less than a year after a Carbide plant in Bhopal, India , leaked methyl isocyanate, or MIC, a toxic gas that burned the eyes and lungs of thousands of families living nearby and killed as many as 15,000.

Silas says the past has colored his fears of what could happen in Institute, and the unknowns about what’s in the air have prompted him and his neighbors to participate in a local effort to monitor the pollution.

“Anything that goes on now, especially if you went through the leak, you’re all for,” he added.

Across West Virginia, several communities are starting their own air monitoring programs. The efforts focus on areas surrounded by chemical plants, natural gas operations and coal mines and in communities historically overburdened by industrial pollution.

But as communities seek to arm themselves with better information, industry lobbyists are working to undermine their efforts.

Chemical companies are pushing legislation to bar air quality data collected by communities from being used as evidence in government enforcement actions and citizen lawsuits.

Bill Bissett, president of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, said his member companies are concerned about the quality of the data that citizens — often working with organized environmental groups — are collecting.

“It’s about the data,” he said. “We feel the data has to be collected from an objective source and whether that’s used in a court of law or that’s used for enforcement actions by a state or federal agency.”

In an email response to questions, Tomm Sprick, a spokesperson for Institute plant owner Union Carbide, did not say if Carbide supported legislation to curb community air monitoring, but said the company “takes the responsibilities it has to the communities in which it operates very seriously and believes in the importance of measuring and modeling air emissions using the best available science and technology.”

These communities have long lacked access to quality information about the pollution in their air, largely due to the limited air monitoring networks. However, the Biden administration is looking to change that by giving money to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to help support local air monitoring efforts .

So far, the agency has awarded money to over 100 projects across 37 states, including a project led by the environmental group Appalachian Voices. The group has partnered with local organizations across five states, including West Virginia, to monitor air quality in communities that are overly burdened by pollution.

“The reason Appalachian Voices launched this project is because this has been such a consistent problem,” said Willie Dotson, the group’s central Appalachian field coordinator.

A patchwork network of air monitoring

Currently, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and EPA operates a total of 15 air monitoring sites across 13 counties to broadly measure the air quality in the state and compare against federal air standards. None of the sites are located in the southern coalfields.

The only other source of information related to air pollution is by industry itself, as most air and water pollution permits require companies to self-report their emissions to agencies to determine whether they’re complying with their permit, according to Michael Gerrard, the director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

However, companies don’t measure air quality levels but rather the amount of pollution that is coming from its site, typically the amount coming from its smokestacks. But some emerging standards will require companies to measure the pollution at their fence line, added Gerrard.

Residents beyond just Institute are also working together to add enhanced air quality monitoring in other industry-burdened communities. Miles south, several other air sensors are spread throughout the Coal River Valley — from Comfort to Arnett. They’re also part of the Appalachian Voices effort through a partnership with the local nonprofit Coal River Mountain Watch. The area’s deep ties to the coal industry made for another community interested in monitoring their local air quality.

“If you live near these coal mining operations, it’s pretty obvious that the environment around you is being impacted,” said Junior Walk, who works for the group and has helped set up the air sensors. “If you’re trying to pay attention and look for these things, and you’re not getting a paycheck to ignore them, it’s hard to miss them.”

The Northern Panhandle’s industrial legacy has also prompted locals to launch local air monitoring efforts . The Follensbee-based Ohio Valley Environmental Advocates, through a partnership with several environmental groups and funding from the EPA, is working to place air sensors throughout the Ohio River Valley in both West Virginia and Ohio.

“It just stands to reason that we should monitor and test the area to help protect ourselves and to help learn about what’s going on here,” said Frank Rocchio, a Follansbee native and the group’s co-founder.

Amid the fierce backlash surrounding a push earlier this year to limit community monitoring, including criticism that the measure was meant to prevent such programs, Bissett and other backers have been adamant they aren’t against these efforts but are worried about the data’s use and objectivity given the involvement of environmental groups.

“Our concern is that it essentially makes the NGOs or whatever group collecting this data almost a de facto enforcement agency,” Bissett said. “We believe they are a subjective group when it comes to my member companies.”

Environmentalists have disputed that characterization, arguing that they’re just looking to help increase the amount of air quality monitoring and data availability, especially in communities overly burdened by pollution.

“We’re just filling gaps that we aren’t seeing regulatory agents do,” said Morgan King, an environmental advocate with the Climate Reality Project.

“We really just want to make sure citizens are equipped to protect themselves and just have that transparency of the air they’re breathing,” she added.

Despite Bissett’s concerns, the DEP’s General Counsel Jason Wandling has said that, under its current policies, the agency wouldn’t use data collected by community air monitoring programs for regulatory or enforcement actions. Instead, state regulators would collect their own data if community members notified them of a problem.

The air sensors commonly used in community monitoring efforts are “mainly used to inform communities about local air quality and to screen for possible impacts,” EPA spokesperson Jeff Landis said in an emailed statement.

Inside the debate

By the end of January, industry-backed HB 5018 had moved out of its original committee and was on its way to be considered by the full House of Delegates. Before that, however, lawmakers held a public hearing on the bill.

In the morning of that early February day, lifelong Kanawha County resident Suzanne King took to the chamber floor to oppose the measure and urge lawmakers to reject it.

“I thought little about air quality,” King said during the public hearing. “Until both my parents were diagnosed with liver cancer in the very same year. Then I learned about many others in that very same community who were diagnosed with and died from cancer.”

Despite the public opposition to the bill, the House overwhelmingly voted to advance the measure. But that’s as far as it went.

The measure stalled in the Senate’s Energy, Industry and Mining Committee as a handful of senators expressed concern, asking committee chair Sen. Randy Smith, R-Tucker, not to run the bill.

“The constitutionality of it was what most of them had a problem with, saying you can’t tell court what evidence they can and cannot use or hear,” said Smith, who is a coal company safety director , adding that he also wasn’t a fan of the bill.

While handling lawmakers’ concerns about the bill, industry asked Smith to move the bill forward. A request from leadership to work out a compromise prompted Smith to rework the measure, producing an alternative version of the bill — much to the dismay of the chemical companies.

In a March 5 email exchange obtained by Mountain State Spotlight, Bissett shared the revised HB 5018 with several people, including chemical company advocates, adding that it “neuters” the original bill. He also laid out two options: move forward with the bill as is and try again to get a stronger measure passed next year, or tell Smith the bill is “now toothless” and there is no need to run it.

Smith’s version removed the original language barring data collected from community air monitoring programs from being used in court proceedings and by the DEP, according to a photo of the revised bill .

The updated version also changed the language to allow state regulators to consider community air monitoring data if it met the manufacturer’s requirements. Jeff Fritz, the government affairs director for the Delaware-based Chemours Company, rejected that language.

“I do not like this draft,” Fritz replied to Bissett, noting that the section “essentially codifies what we are trying to prevent/turns our purpose upside down.”

Fritz declined to comment. In an emailed statement, Chemours spokesperson Cassie Olszewski said the company uses “numerous advanced technologies to monitor air emissions” and works with a “broad group of community members” to discuss concerns in the areas where they operate.

Once they saw his version of the bill, industry lobbyists had little interest in moving forward with the bill, Smith said.

In his email, Bissett cautioned that trying to force the industry’s preferred language might anger Smith, ultimately hurting their efforts in the future.

“As I am new in this role, building a relationship with Smith makes sense and a much lesser victory in a chaotic session might be better than nothing,” wrote Bissett.

“As I’ve said a lot in the last two months, ‘I’m not selling anything good here.’”

How West Virginia polluters want to undermine citizen efforts to better monitor the air we breathe appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight , West Virginia's civic newsroom.