It was the week before Christmas, and it was below freezing in Niagara Falls, New York. The kind of cold that makes most people retreat inside. But Don’t Waste New York volunteer Anne Rabe made her way up and down 59th Street in the LaSalle neighborhood.
At each door, she tore off her gloves in the bitter cold to pull out a map.
“There is new information that was just released, that shows this toxic plume, or toxic cloud,” Rabe said to a resident, as she pointed at the map. “It’s temporary, there’s a simple solution to it, but it’s covering your area, and it’s above the state air standards.”
To Rabe, this toxic plume cannot wait. Not until the weather warms. Not for another year and a half to two years, the amount of time the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company told the state Department of Environmental Conservation it would take to install technology that would reduce its emissions of a cancer-causing chemical. Rabe wants the federal Environmental Protection Agency to step in now.
“We've gone to the Environmental Protection Agency – ‘we’ as in four organizations and a number of residents – asking them to issue an emergency order under the Clean Air Act because there's an imminent endangerment to public health,” Rabe told WBFO’s Emyle Watkins, as they walked down Kies Ave, which sits at the southernmost edge of the plume.
“So we're going around trying to get folks to sign the petition. We did 56th Street and the side streets on Friday and today’s Saturday, we're doing 59th Street.”
That imminent danger is a chemical called ortho-toluidine, or O-T. It’s a known bladder carcinogen. Within the Goodyear factory alone, at least 78 employees have been diagnosed with bladder cancer since the mid-1980s. Niagara County has the second-highest rate of bladder cancer in the state, and the 21st-highest in the country.
Since September, WBFO and our partner, Public Health Watch, have reported on how the Goodyear chemical factory continues to release O-T in potentially harmful amounts, despite over a decade of problems with its pollution-control devices.
Goodyear operates under a 2009 state permit, which allows it to release O-T into the air in amounts far higher than what is currently considered safe to breathe. Goodyear applied in 2018 for a new permit, which has yet to be issued. The state limit for OT was tightened significantly in 2021.
Earlier this month, WBFO and Public Health Watch published a computer-modeled plume map, created by the DEC in September, which models how far O-T could be traveling in the air. The map shows that the neighborhood around the plant is exposed to the chemical at levels up to seven times what the state now considers safe.
“This is yet another case of an environmental injustice in Niagara Falls, and it's very sad that our state agencies allow, basically, the corporations who pollute illegally to continue to do so,” Rabe said. “The lack of accountability, the lack of enforcement, the lack of public information, it’s as bad as it was in the 1980s, when I first started working on toxic waste issues with Lois Gibbs at Love Canal.”
As Rabe knocked on doors, some residents seemed reluctant to speak with her. One resident admonished her for knocking. Another resident said the effort was too little, too late, as they already had cancer. Some, seemingly resigned to the situation, simply signed the petition asking the EPA to issue the emergency order. Few seemed shocked.
“They know the Goodyear plant is near them,” Rabe said. “And some of them talked about the black dust [from the plant].”
Still, news of the plume map shook some residents, including Alexandrea Korkuc, whom Rabe met while canvassing.
“I am horrified that I found out that way, to have a knock on my door and some random people show up to my house,” Korkuc told WBFO, standing at the end of her street and looking at the factory. “Granted, they were there for good reason, but hearing the bad news that they brought with them terrifies me.”
Korkuc and her family have lived about a fifth of a mile from the plant’s stacks for the past four years. On the map, their house sits in an area potentially exposed to O-T at levels two to three times what the state considers safe.
“We were in the process of even buying this house, so me hearing this, and in the process of buying, it makes me not so comfortable with buying in the area, even though it's a great area,” Korkuc said.
Korkuc’s daily life is centered in her neighborhood. Her kids’ school is nearby. She works at the Home Depot around the corner. Both are not far from where the plume depicts the worst pollution.
“The toxic map, just what she [Rabe] showed me alone, is terrifying, because it goes right over the school. It goes over my work. It goes over my home,” Korkuc said. “I mean, there's a couple houses where my kids' friends live at and it's going over there. I just spoke with one of my friends, my kids’ friends' moms, I mean, and they didn't even know about this.”
Korkuc worries - for her health, for her kids' health, and, most of all, for her grandmother’s health. Her grandmother, who spends a lot of time at the house, has been living with cancer for six years.
“My grandma's got uterine cancer, and it terrifies me, because it's easier for me to get it, more so than other people,” Korkuc said. “So hearing things like that, it's terrifying. And then I have two kids. I got, a 10-year-old and a five-year-old that play outside all day. And, I mean, they even go outside in the snow and they're breathing this in. It's not fair.”
Don’t Waste New York and its partners are urging residents to sign the petition calling for the EPA to issue the emergency order - also known as a Section 303 order under the Clean Air Act. The petition asks, among other things, that the EPA require Goodyear to install interim pollution controls immediately and permanent controls within two months; force the DEC to finalize the new air permit; and begin on-site and neighborhood testing for contamination and possible cleanup.
“We have an imminent public health threat,” Rabe said. “Now that we have this community plume map, we're no longer going to stand by. We're not going to watch and pressure the DEC and the Department of Health. Governor [Kathy] Hochul has clearly, you know, set her policies and that agency [the DEC] is being industry friendly. We're going to the higher-ups. We're going to EPA.”
On December 17, WBFO asked a DEC spokesperson about the request for EPA intervention. The spokesperson said the DEC is “requiring the Goodyear Chemical facility in Niagara Falls to quickly implement state-of-the-art pollution control technology to meet current air toxics standards … DEC's ongoing oversight will ensure that the facility complies with all applicable environmental laws and protects public health.”
Pressed to explain what “quickly” means, the spokesperson would say only that there is no firm timeline, and it could take more than a year to put in place the new control technology. In an August letter to the DEC, Goodyear said it “may require approximately eighteen months to two years to complete…” those upgrades.
When WBFO followed up with Goodyear regarding the DEC’s new technology requirement, a spokesperson responded: “Goodyear and DEC are actively working on a schedule to install new equipment.”
In a December 21 email to the EPA, and in a press conference, Rabe said she talked to Niagara Falls City Council Chairman Jim Perry about the Goodyear plant. She said Perry would write a letter of support to the agency. In an email to WBFO three days later, Perry wrote:
“Ms. Rabe had told me Goodyear was not complying with DEC regulations. I told her, I had worked for Goodyear, for over 30 years and they were always a good corporate citizen. I had a hard time believing they were ‘dragging their feet’ and wanted to understand the reason they were not complying. If that was the case, I would write a letter in support of her cause,” the council chair said.
“After I did my own investigations, I am more than satisfied that Goodyear is doing everything they can to meet and even exceed the requirements of the US and NY State requirements,” Perry added.
WBFO followed up with Rabe regarding Perry’s statement, to which she replied: “Mr. Perry has been seriously misinformed” and added that she will reach out to him to provide additional information.
Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino told WBFO in September that it’s up to the state and federal government to regulate emissions from Goodyear. “Local government, we may be the first face that residents might express frustration to, but we have so little to do with how these companies are regulated, and so what we're left to do is, you know, pick up their fight.” he said. “It's always [the] local government's responsibility, I think, to at least alert [the] state and federal government about these things.”
