Environmental Justice Revisited: Community Pressure and Frequency and Severity of U.S. Chemical Industry Accidents

Objectives: Studies in “environmental justice” consider the possibility that hazardous and/or poorly operated industrial facilities may be disproportionately located in poor, minority, and politically disenfranchised communities. Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 requires that chemical facilities in the U.S. that had on premises more than specified quantities of toxic or flammable chemicals file a five-year history of accidents. This paper reports on the accidents reported under 112(r) and their relationship to community characteristics as captured in the 1990 Census. Methods: This study is a retrospective analysis of the association between the demographics of counties in which the facilities are located and the risk of accidental toxic or flammable chemical release at those facilities. We consider “location risk” (the risk of a facility will have large volumes and/or large numbers of hazardous chemicals being located in a community) and the actual “operations risk” (the risk of an accident itself). Results: Larger and more chemical-intensive facilities tend to be located in counties with larger African-American populations and in counties with high levels of income inequality – that is, counties with both higher median incomes and higher levels of poverty. Adjusting for location risk accounts for the association between income inequality and actual accident risk, but substantial residual risk of accidents remains for facilities in heavily African-American counties (OR of accident=2.0, 95% CI=1.6-2.5).