Imagine you send your child to school one morning when a large plume of black smoke moves toward your neighborhood, carrying toxic emissions from a nearby factory.
Your community doesn’t receive any evacuation orders. Not because the smoke isn’t toxic, but because the air monitor designed to measure pollutants is located miles away from the facility where the fire starts.
Fifteen hours pass before an evacuation order is officially released. In the meantime, your community is exposed to naphtha—a flammable liquid that causes dizziness, headaches, and nausea. Around 30 people are sent to the hospital.
This is a common reality for the people of Louisiana.
Toxic factories, no air monitors
Louisiana is home to regions with some of the highest cancer rates in the country, yet its public air quality system is intentionally faulty.
A new analysis by Floodlight found that the public air monitors meant to measure the amount of pollutants in the air are placed miles away from the very facilities they’re meant to measure.
Worse, they don’t track ethylene oxide, chloroprene and formaldehyde—three dangerous, cancer-causing chemicals responsible for elevating the state’s cancer risk.
Louisiana is already an uphill battle for holding polluters accountable: the state passed a law in 2024 that limited what data can be used to enforce limits on air pollution. Industry lobbyists pushed for the law—the very polluters responsible for making people sick.
As a result, the health of the predominantly Black communities living closest to the facilities are entirely in the hands of the corporate owners who profit off pollution.
This strategy is unfolding across other U.S. states.
Lawmakers in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia have also introduced legislation designed to protect polluters.
By placing air monitors miles away from facilities, residents face even more difficulty accessing data to prove that there are high rates of pollution in their neighborhoods and hold companies accountable. Journalist Ames Alexander reports calls it a fight “over who gets to measure toxic air.”
But there are groups working on the frontlines to democratize air quality in the state, like RISE St. James and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. They’ve created their own platforms and tools for recording community health data and measuring air quality.
So while the industry tries to hide its skeletons, the people find new avenues to win back the right to breathe clean air—one they have long been denied.
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