Barbara Washington, co-founder of Inclusive Louisiana, a non-profit organization, sets out signs along the levee of the Mississippi River in Convent, St. James Parish, in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. Inclusive is party to a lawsuit seeking a moratorium against any new fossil fuel and petrochemical plants in St. James. (Antonia Juhasz/Human Rights Watch)
The latest findings on poor health outcomes along the Mississippi River’s industrial corridor, while not surprising, are indeed jarring.
A report released last week by Human Rights Watch once again links petrochemical pollution between Baton Rouge and New Orleans to higher rates of cancer, respiratory disease and other chronic health issues among the predominantly Black communities that neighbor scores of facilities.
Yet the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality refuses to acknowledge what decades of research have confirmed in the nearly 50 years since the Washington Post first referred to the region as “Cancer Alley.”
“LDEQ does not use the term Cancer Alley,” department spokesperson Greg Langley told Human Rights Watch. “That term implies that there is a large geographic area that has higher cancer incidence than the state average. We have not seen higher cancer incidence over large areas of the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.”