An EPA official met a skeptical and angry crowd Tuesday night at a LaPlace meeting to discuss air monitoring around the Denka Performance Elastomer plant, with residents worried about changes to how the regulator will keep tabs on the plant's release of chloroprene.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to stop regular monitoring for chloroprene by the middle of this year, said David Gray, the agency's deputy regional administrator. It will instead have a new system to capture airborne levels of the chemical that regulators say is a "likely carcinogen" only when there is a spike in volatile organic compounds in the air.
Addressing the Concerned Citizens of St. John group, which has been critical of the Denka plant, Gray argued that the new system will help to better understand why chloroprene spikes happen in the first place, and will help with future efforts to work with Denka on reducing chloroprene emissions.
“It sounds kind of smart to me. It sounds like it will provide more information,” Gray said, adding that he expects chloroprene readings will be taken more frequently with the new system.
But he was speaking to a mistrusting audience.
“We are dying and you’re implementing new systems,” Tish Taylor, who lives near the plant, told Gray. “I’m watching my neighborhood die. We are dying waiting for more numbers, waiting for more BS.”
Chloroprene is used to manufacture neoprene, a synthetic rubber. In recent years, St. John the Baptist Parish residents who live near the plant have complained of high cancer rates in the area and have demanded that it reduce emissions of chloroprene.
The EPA has spent much of the past four years operating six monitors around the Denka facility — the only plant in the U.S. that produces chloroprene — following the release of an EPA report in 2015 that said the census tract near the plant had the highest airborne cancer risk in the nation.
The new monitors will not directly measure chloroprene, Gray said, but will instead measure other volatile organic compounds in the air. When the level of those compounds reaches a certain “spike” threshold, that will trigger a 24-hour period when chloroprene levels will be measured.
What compounds will be monitored and what the threshold will be for saying when they have spiked haven’t been determined, Gray said, and probably won’t be known for at least two months after the new monitors — called SPods — are installed.
The earliest those might arrive is March, when they will be installed and undergo an initial two-month collection sampling phase. During that time, current chloroprene monitoring canisters will remain in place.
Then — most likely in June, Gray said — the new monitors will completely replace the current six air monitors near the Denka facility, with the EPA committing to six months of air monitoring after the SPods are fully online.
But many at the gathering in Reserve — including attorneys who represent thousands of St. John residents suing Denka — took a different view, saying the end of regular monitoring makes it seem that the EPA is beginning to abandon the community.
"I feel like we're being lost in semantics," said Sylvia Taylor, a lawyer who lives near the Denka fence line. "I'm tired of the persons in charge who could do something about this sitting on their laurels, debating the science."
Hugh "Skip" Lambert — the New Orleans-based lead attorney in the suits against Denka — said that when it comes to science, though, the EPA is getting things wrong with its monitoring change. Lambert and attorney John Cummings have asked the St. John Parish Council to take up a resolution denouncing the EPA for changing its monitoring system.
“It just does it where there’s a spike — not of chloroprene, but of another volatile organic. And that’s just not acceptable,” Lambert said, while holding up a large chart showing 2017 Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality statistics for volatile organics recorded near the Denka facility.
The EPA defines volatile organics as “any compound of carbon, excluding carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, carbonic acid, metallic carbides or carbonates, and ammonium carbonates, which participates in atmospheric petrochemical reactions.”
And of the volatile organics in the 2017 LDEQ statistics, chloroprene was recorded at a higher level than all the others combined.
Gray maintained that the current system of monitoring had served its purpose, though, proving that chloroprene was present in the air in St. John and that its level had dropped after Denka installed $35 million worth of emission control equipment.
Denka has claimed the facility has lowered its chloroprene emissions by over 85% — a target it agreed to hit after signing a voluntary agreement with the state. But regulators are requiring the company to resubmit data because it didn’t follow the mandated methodology.
While Gray argued progress has been made, many others said that simply changing the collection method to get more data isn’t enough, since chloroprene levels are still regularly recorded well above the 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter of air the EPA says is the highest safe level for long-term exposure.
Kimberly Terrell of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic joined the attorneys in criticizing Gray’s description of the SPods as an improvement, especially since the volatile organics they directly monitor don’t include the most prevalent — chloroprene.
“It’s like you’re using binoculars to try to detect a fire in your house. It’s just not the right tool,” Terrell said.
Gray noted that current collection methods don’t actually detect chloroprene, either. Instead, a reading is taken from a canister that samples air over a 24-hour period once every six days. That reading is then sent to a laboratory for analysis, with the results later made public on the EPA’s website.
Monitoring initially took place once every three days, but that was changed to once every six days amid agency budget cutbacks in 2019.
The new system will also use canisters, but there will be multiple canisters along with every SPod, Gray said, in case several days’ worth of air needs to be captured after a spike.
The canisters will continue to record chloroprene levels in the air over a 24-hour period.
Before the new system was announced, it was unclear whether the EPA would continue monitoring at all in 2020.
Wilma Subra, an environmentalist who for years has given status reports to the Concerned Citizens group based on EPA data, said Gray should be thanked for giving the community at least that much.
She has previously spoken out in support of the changes to the monitoring system.
“If you don’t tell David (Gray) anything else, tell him, ‘Thank you for the air monitoring,'” Subra said Tuesday.
