Increasing flooding poses the additional risk of toxic pollution along the Eastern Seaboard. In our weekly series with the Bay Journal Delmarva Public Media's Don Rush talks with reporter Jeremy Cox about the implications of a new study for the Chesapeake Bay region.
RUSH: There may be a toxic brew of chemicals coming your way. This is Don Rush. The increasing flooding along the eastern seaboard has raised concerns about industrial waste that could contaminate the water. In a weekly series of Bay Journal, we talked with reporter Jeremy Cox about what a new national study has found.
COX: So this is a study by some researchers with a nonprofit nonpartisan group called Climate Central and looking across the country to see what toxic facilities would be at risk at the 2050 timeline or the 2100 timeline from rising seas and flooding.
RUSH: So what kind of toxic "soup" is it that we're talking about?
COX: This looked at your typical industrial sites and your manufacturing facilities and Superfund sites, but also things that are a little bit closer to home like wastewater treatment plants and industrial scale farm operations. The chicken CAFOs that we have concentrated animal feeding operations that we have here on the shore. So any matter of chemicals, oils to manures.
RUSH: So in terms by the way of these toxic chemicals getting into the water, what does that mean in terms of potentially affecting the population itself?
COX: When it comes to health, one-time exposure is obviously not great. So if it's a toxic chemical, you could suffer things like rashes if you come into contact with it, or if it becomes aerosolized and you breathe it in, you could have some breathing problems. And certainly if it infiltrates your groundwater through one of these channels, then you could be exposed to it over a long period of time. And then you're talking things like certain cancers and issues with your liver, that kind of thing.
RUSH: The other thing you point to is that communities of color, in particular along the coast, that they perhaps are not as prepared to deal with this.
COX: They also looked at, okay, so who does it happen to? And many different social and environmental vulnerabilities lit up when they did that. So places that had higher percentages of people without a college degree, areas that were tended to be more African-American or linguistically isolated. These tended to be a higher proportion of those areas that were impacted by toxic facilities being flooded.
RUSH: One of the things you mentioned is this, they do not necessarily have the resources in terms of exposure and trying to deal with this.
COX: Many of these households just have one car, let's say, or no vehicles like we saw with Katrina a number of years ago. People were like, well, why didn't everyone just evacuate? Well, easier said than done in many cases. And this report reminds us of that.
RUSH: So what kind of facilities are we looking at in terms of our area?
COX: Yeah, on the lower shore, I mean, the vast majority are those chicken operations that I mentioned. So, so-and-so's family farm out on the road to Crisfield or out toward Deal Island or Nanticoke, those kind of areas. But also some well-known more industrial type facilities like the Purdue processing plant in downtown Salisbury. And the Vienna power plant are the ones that showed up on this list. So if you live near one of those, I mean the danger is not imminent necessarily, but in the coming decades you were to take this report at face value, it should be the kinds of facilities that our governments and private sector should seek to protect.
RUSH: Bay Journal reporter Jeremy Cox, on the potential impact of toxic chemicals being released by flooding waters. This is Don Rush for Delmarva Public Media.
