Originally published January 19 2006
Neighborhoods fight to clean the air polluted by industry
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Across the U.S., poor neighborhoods are often subjected to a greater level of pollution, but many citizens, like Lula Williams, president of South Camden Citizens in Action, are working to improve the quality of the air they live in by pressuring environmental organizations to limit pollution levels for industrial plants.
For 23 years, Williams has lived in front of that facility, around the corner from a licorice mulch plant, down the street from three scrap metal recyclers and within a few hundred yards of a radiation-contaminated Superfund site that languished for two decades before authorities cleaned it up.
Since the early 1990s, she also has seen the county's trash-to-steam incinerator move into her neighborhood, as well as a new fossil-fuel-burning power plant and a recycling facility.
"No other city or state that you go to would you find all this in it where residents live.
Williams' plight, like that of many people trapped in dirty factory air, illustrates how difficult it is to free neighborhoods from the legacy of industrial pollution, an Associated Press review found.
The city also has sued Continental, contending that emissions have left the town covered with black soot.
Williams lives in Waterfront South, the most polluted neighborhood in Camden, a former industrial center that's home to more than 100 contaminated sites.
The AP's analysis of government data found that seven Camden neighborhoods rank among the top 1 percent in the nation in the long-term health risk posed by industrial air pollution.
In the past five years, the state Department of Environmental Protection has issued more than 700 air emission permits in Camden, ranging from school boilers to a metal alloy manufacturer that annually emits hundreds of pounds of chromium, a cancer-causing metal.
"The DEP has had no qualms about continuing to issue air permits for every facility in Waterfront South, without ever considering whether there is already such a high concentration of industry that it's not safe to put more in," said Olga Pomar, the legal services lawyer who filed the suit over the cement plant.
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