"Calvert City, Kentucky, has long had what people in other toxic hot spots have been begging for: monitors to prove they’re being exposed to toxic industrial air pollution. Regulators have years of evidence, but the poison in the air is only growing."
"One summer night last year, air began flowing into a steel canister across the street from the Little Bo Peep Child Development Center in Calvert City, Kentucky. The pollution monitor hummed into the morning as parents dropped off their toddlers and later into the day as the kids played outside. Within a month, a lab analysis would reveal that the canister had captured a troubling concentration of ethylene dichloride, which has been linked to pancreatic and stomach cancers and leukemia.
No one, however, raced in to warn parents or alert nearby residents that the air they sucked in with every breath was laced with a poisonous chemical. No one took immediate steps to stop the stream or sue the offending polluter into compliance.
In fact, that Calvert City monitor had been running all year, along with two others around town. Each of them had registered more ethylene dichloride than any of the 123 other monitors nationwide designed to detect the chemical. The results had been logged by Kentucky regulators and uploaded to a database managed by the Environmental Protection Agency."
Lisa Song and Lylla Younes report for ProPublica with photography by Kathleen Flynn May 18, 2022.
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