Neighborhood coalitions from two different areas of the city took aim at officials this week, demanding action to protect air quality and address the pollution in their communities.
In Little Village, community groups are calling for the public release of the Chicago inspector general’s report into the botched Hilco smokestack demolition that left parts of the neighborhood and surrounding areas coated in ash and dust during the early days of a respiratory pandemic. On the Southeast Side, residents denounced city health officials for ignoring their concerns about the potential move of a metal shredder to the heavily industrialized neighborhood where people already breathe some of the city’s dirtiest air.
Ald. Michael Rodriguez, 22nd, joined the Little Village community groups at a news conference Wednesday.
“My constituents and my neighbors deserve accountable and transparent government,” he said, calling the implosion a “terrible incident.”
Though the full smokestack demolition report has not been made available to the public, the inspector general’s quarterly report released last month noted the office had recommended “discipline against two Department of Buildings officials, commensurate with the gravity of their violations,” and “discipline up to and including discharge against one Department of Public Health official.”
“It was totally gray,” one local photographer who shot the Hilco demolition told the Tribune at the time. “It looked like something out of the movies.”
Kim Wasserman, executive director of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, said Wednesday that community members still face uncertainty over what they were exposed to following the demolition, and what the short- and long-term effects of such exposures might be.
“It is clear to many Little Village community members that not only was Hilco ill-prepared, but the city departments who had never handled a smokestack demolition in their history were also ill-prepared,” Wasserman said.
“From negligence in the emergency planning to the city’s inability to sample property for dust and air contamination, the city of Chicago is just as much at fault as these corporate polluters in allowing one of the worst environmental and public health disasters in Chicago history to take place in our neighborhood,” she said.
The mayor’s office declined Thursday to comment on Little Village or the Southeast Side.
Last year, Hilco and two subcontractors were required to pay a settlement of $370,000 in response to the implosion. At the time, Little Village community organizers said that settlement wasn’t enough.
The groups say they want the city and Hilco to pay for air filtration systems for residents, schools and local institutions affected by the implosion, and for soil sampling and the installation of permanent, publicly accessible air monitoring systems near and around Target’s Exchange 55 warehouse.
This summer, community members protested the opening of the Target warehouse on the site, citing concerns about increased particle pollutants in a neighborhood already inundated with diesel trucking.
On the Southeast Side, residents and advocates at a Thursday news conference called on Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city’s Department of Public Health to deny a permit for the relocation of a metal-shredding facility owned by Ohio-based Reserve Management Group to the Southeast Side, and they criticized the city for excluding community voices during the permitting process.
RMG bought the Lincoln Park metal shredding operation from General Iron Industries before it was closed in December 2020. The proposed move from predominantly white and wealthy Lincoln Park to the predominantly low-income and largely Black and Latino neighborhood on the Southeast Side has prompted ongoing protests from concerned residents.
Gina Ramirez, board president of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, said the group was calling for the denial of the RMG permit and the initiation of a community-led process “in order to prevent communities of color from being sacrifice zones for industry.”
“The city of Chicago and the Chicago Department of Public Health should be ashamed of what they’ve had residents of the 10th Ward go through,” said Yesenia Chavez, a member of United Neighbors of the 10th Ward. A third-generation resident, Chavez was one of the participants in a monthlong hunger strike in opposition to the shredding facility’s proposed move earlier this year.
This May, U.S. EPA Administrator Michael Regan called for the city to conduct an environmental justice analysis before making a decision about the RMG permit. In a letter to Lightfoot, Regan noted the Southeast Side already ranked at the highest levels for numerous pollution indicators, such as fine particulate matter, respiratory hazard, air toxics cancer risk, and hazardous waste proximity.
“Because of these well-known degraded environmental conditions, the siting of this facility in Chicago’s southeast side has raised significant civil rights concerns,” Regan wrote.
After Regan’s May letter, Lightfoot initiated a more thorough investigation into environmental health risks on the Southeast Side, though her office had already been aware of points raised in Regan’s letter due to a study by the health department the previous year that determined Southeast Side residents breathe some of the dirtiest air in Chicago.
On Thursday, 10th Ward residents and allies criticized the city for not including community members in the health impact assessment process until last week and said data that the city’s health department presented at the community meeting last Thursday was misleading.
Members of both the Little Village and Southeast Side coalitions emphasized that the issues of air quality and pollution in their neighborhoods were issues of environmental racism in a city where Black, brown and low-income communities bear the brunt of environmental harms.
“The city’s own air quality data shows that the Southeast Side lies within the worst decile of air quality and health,” said Joanna Tess, a public health practitioner and a member of the Collaborative for Health Equity Cook County. “Adding additional pollution will worsen present environmental racialized inequities in segregated Chicago. That alone should justify denying the permit.”
November 12, 2021 at 06:24AM
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/environment/ct-little-village-southeast-side-clean-air-20211111-xjd3iramfbb7xl26hm7mpvbqru-story.html
Little Village and Southeast Side residents demand the city take action on polluters - Chicago Tribune
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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