New report lists part of east Alabama as ‘toxic hot spot’ for cancer risk
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WBRC) - It’s not just Christmas cards you may soon find in your mailbox. It could be a card from ProPublica with a message from the nonprofit investigative news organization decidedly not cheery.
The card says you live in an area that has an elevated cancer risk, and folks living in a section of east Alabama stretching from Anniston back towards Lincoln can expect to see one of these soon.
“We were able to put together an interactive map that lets people look at their own cancer risk around the country,” explains Al Shaw, Deputy ProPublica Editor.
ProPublica built the map using EPA data that’s never been assembled this way before.
“This is data the EPA has collected for years and had in hand for years, they just haven’t done the kind of analysis on it that we have done,” Shaw explains.
What they found is more than 1,000 what ProPublica calls “toxic hot spots” with higher levels of cancer risk from air pollution than the EPA says is acceptable.
In the top 20 most toxic? An area stretching from Anniston back past Lincoln covers about 80,000 people - with the highest risk right around the Anniston Army Depot.
“So if you lived at that fence line for your entire lifetime, the risk of getting cancer specifically from living there would be about 1 in 270,” Shaw explains. “There’s already a high risk of getting cancer in America, this would be a risk on top of that of about 1 in 270 over the course of a lifetime.”
This isn’t the only hot spot in the new analysis - there are smaller spots of increased cancer risk in north Birmingham and near Leeds.
“A lot of times these chemicals are odorless and people might not know what the chemicals are in their areas, so our project aims to give people the knowledge to go to their local officials, go to these facilities, go to their communities and kind of ask around and seeing what they can do about it,” says Shaw.
“You have to look at that and say ‘is it acceptable for me to continue to live in this environment?’,” says environmental scientist Wilma Subra. “And if not, what can we do to get those community members relocated out of harm’s way?”
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