East Baton Rouge highest in industrial pollution

(The Advocate) - East Baton Rouge Parish ranks highest in the state for industrial pollution risk to human health, according to a report from the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Compiled by Wilma Subra, a consultant with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and owner of Subra Co. in New Iberia, the report uses information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Model.

Subra pulled Louisiana-based information from the computer model to provide a more local perspective, she said.

For years, the federal release of Toxic Release Inventory information has given communities an idea of what the industries around them are releasing into the environment, she said.

The new model takes that information and considers additional factors to come up with a number that allows an individual facility to be compared with another in terms of chronic human health risks.

The rankings don’t say how bad a particular area might be for human health, but instead allows a comparison to say one area is riskier or less-risky than another, according to the EPA Web site.

“This is a mechanism to tell the different parishes where they stand on the national level,” Subra said.

The new computer-model tool from EPA is important because it gives additional information to communities near industrial facilities, Subra said. For years, the Toxic Release Inventories helped communities know what was coming out of the industrial facilities near them, she said.

“We were able to get reductions (in emissions) over the years,” she said.

She said the awareness about specific industrial pollution seems to have quieted down, but this new EPA model could help spark interest again.

“It’s mostly asking the facilities to do more emission reductions,” Subra said. “Then if that doesn’t work, then let’s start talking about relocation of communities.”

The Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Model takes the amount of pollution released and adds in factors such as how toxic those chemicals are to human health, how close communities live to those facilities and how people can get exposed to the pollution — through air, water or soil.

Those “weighted” pollution numbers allows parishes and facilities to be ranked and compared to other areas in the country, Subra said.