Industry Groups Keep Louisiana Residents From Knowing What’s in Their Air

Kimbrelle Kyereh lives just a few hundred feet from the massive chemical storage tanks in St. Rose, in southeastern Louisiana. Oily fumes sometimes drift into her home, bringing headaches, nausea and insomnia. On one such night, she grabbed her son at 3 a.m. and fled to an all-night IHOP.

In 2023, after years of coping with the noxious odors, Kyereh began collecting air samples in her yard for a local environmental justice group. But soon after, Louisiana passed an industry-backed law that sharply restricted how that kind of data could be used.

So she stopped.

“I shut my mouth like they wanted me to,” Kyereh said.

Along the 85-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — where cancer rates from toxic air pollution are among the nation’s highest — many residents live in the shadows of heavy industry with no idea what they’re breathing.

Turns out, that’s by design.

A Floodlight analysis found that Louisiana’s public air monitors are often located miles from major industrial polluters and fail to test for some of the most dangerous chemicals.

The analysis identified the state’s top 25 industrial air polluters using emissions data that companies self-report to the EPA. Then we used state data to calculate each plant’s distance to the nearest public air monitoring station — and to determine which pollutants those monitors actually test for. We found:

• Ten of Louisiana’s heaviest air-polluting facilities operate without a single public air monitor within five miles.
• Dow Chemical’s plastics factory in Plaquemine is one of Louisiana’s biggest air polluters, releasing an array of toxic pollutants including ethylene oxide, a known carcinogen. The nearest air monitoring station is about eight miles away and measures only ozone.
• No public monitors measure ammonia — despite CF Industries’ Donaldsonville plant emitting more than 7 million pounds of it in 2024, making it one of the nation’s top toxic polluters, according to EPA data.
• The three chemicals that researchers have concluded “together account for the large majority of total cancer risk” in the area — ethylene oxide, chloroprene and formaldehyde — aren’t monitored by the state at all.

Industry groups have spent years fighting proposals that would require better monitoring around manufacturing plants. They also helped draft a 2024 law that sharply restricted how community air monitoring could be used in enforcement.

Lawmakers later introduced similar legislation in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia, suggesting Louisiana is one front in a broader fight over who gets to measure toxic air.

What the Monitors Missed

On Aug. 24, 2023, a leak at Marathon’s southeast Louisiana refinery exposed the limits of the state’s air monitoring system.

At 6:50 p.m., the Coast Guard fielded a report that naphtha — a highly flammable liquid — was leaking at the Garyville facility. More than six hours passed before the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality began monitoring the air.

Around 7 a.m., the leak ignited a massive fire, sending a plume of black smoke into the air. Two nearby schools opened anyway. Residents within two miles weren’t ordered to evacuate until 10:15 a.m. — more than 15 hours after the leak began.

Naphtha exposure can cause dizziness, headaches and nausea, and a Guardian investigation found at least 29 residents were later treated at area hospitals.

The nearest state air monitor measures ozone — but not the toxic pollutants, including volatile organic compounds, released in the fire — and the plant’s own monitors track just one chemical at its fenceline: benzene. The company’s Los Angeles refinery, by contrast, continuously monitors more than 15 pollutants — as California regulations require.

Wilma Subra, a decorated environmental chemist from Louisiana who examined the fire’s emissions, said better air monitoring likely would have prompted faster school closures and evacuations.

The state’s monitoring network, she said, is “not adequate to protect the health of the community living in close proximity to these industrial facilities.”

“Emergency Waiting to Occur”

Community advocates and environmental researchers have spent years pressing for expanded monitoring — especially in predominantly Black communities near industrial facilities.

Adrienne Katner, an associate professor at Louisiana State University and a former state environmental health scientist, concluded in 2022 that roughly 400 high-emission facilities in Louisiana had no public air monitoring. Communities only learn about toxic releases when there’s a shelter-in-place order or an evacuation, she said.

She called the situation “a public health emergency waiting to occur.”

Today, Katner says the lack of air monitoring data serves as a shield for polluters. “The theme is, if you don’t look for it, you won’t find it,” she told Floodlight.

Families living near polluting facilities bear the burden of that uncertainty, Katner said: “It’s taking years off their lives.”

The following year, researchers from Johns Hopkins University drove a mobile laboratory through Louisiana’s industrial corridor to measure pollution firsthand. In 14 of the 15 locations they studied, cancer risks from toxic emissions exceeded EPA figures — in some areas by more than 11 times.

Peter DeCarlo, an atmospheric scientist at Johns Hopkins who co-authored the study, said regulators miss much of the region’s pollution because too few air monitors measure too few chemicals.

“If large emissions from these facilities are happening far away from the air monitors, they’re often going to go unnoticed,” DeCarlo said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not gonna have an effect on the people who live there.”

Even the EPA has raised concerns.

In 2023, the federal agency urged state regulators to create a permanent monitoring station in New Orleans’ Irish Channel neighborhood. The area sits just across the Mississippi River from BWC Harvey, a 48-acre storage terminal that handles hot asphalt and other toxic chemicals and has drawn hundreds of resident complaints about noxious fumes.

A temporary state monitor there had previously recorded elevated levels of harmful particulate matter. But in 2022, Louisiana regulators shut it down.

The Irish Channel wasn’t the only community where the state retreated from monitoring. Louisiana’s 2022 monitoring plan included a section titled “Environmental Justice Considerations,” describing monitors in communities such as St. Rose and the Irish Channel. A year later, the section was gone, as was the St. Rose monitor.

When the EPA urged the state to keep considering environmental justice, LDEQ replied that such considerations were “beyond the scope” of the plan.

LDEQ operates 35 permanent air monitoring stations and says that it maintains “a robust air monitoring network that meets and exceeds all regulatory requirements.” But the agency acknowledges that the network is not designed to monitor pollution in fenceline communities.

Jason Meyers, who oversees the agency’s 35-person air monitoring team, told Floodlight: “We run our sites well. We have good operators, and [the network] provides very high-quality data.”

The agency has two mobile monitoring vans that respond to incidents, monitor air quality in parts of the state without permanent stations, and fill in when major storms knock out power.

The department also measures toxic air pollutants at 19 sites around the state, but that equipment doesn’t monitor continuously. Most of those monitors sample every sixth day — on a fixed, publicly known schedule — meaning plant operators know when the air will be tested.

“Financial and technical constraints limit full monitoring coverage” of all toxic air pollutants, LDEQ acknowledged.

While community advocates have pushed for more air monitoring, Louisiana has moved in the opposite direction. Since 2020, the state has lost four air monitoring stations. Expenditures for the LDEQ division that oversees air monitoring fell nearly 15% between 2020 and 2026. Adjusted for inflation, spending dropped by more than one-third.

Louisiana’s challenges are not unique. Across the country, state monitoring agencies have faced years of stagnant federal support even as equipment and labor costs climbed. The number of operating air monitors nationwide fell by nearly half over the decade ending in 2021, the last year for which EPA has published figures.

“Your dollars are just not going nearly as far,” said Chet Wayland, who led EPA’s Air Quality Assessment division for 18 years. “The bottom line is that more money is desperately needed for monitoring.”

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The EPA does monitor toxic air pollutants at 26 stations nationally — but none are in Louisiana or Texas, two of the states with the largest toxic emissions volumes.

How Industry Got Its Way

For years, former Louisiana Sen. Cleo Fields, a Democrat from Baton Rouge, returned to the Capitol with the same proposal: Require major industrial polluters to monitor toxic air emissions at their property lines and report what nearby communities were breathing.

Each time, the bill died.

“I got so frustrated because every year this was opposed by industry for no good reason,” Fields, now a member of Congress, told Floodlight. State regulators, he added, “were working totally in concert with industry … and the citizens just had no voice.”

Fields said he repeatedly heard from the petrochemical industry that his proposed bills would cost industry too much. “Well, what is it costing people?” he asked. “It’s costing them their lives.”

After Fields’ failed attempts, state Sen. Royce Duplessis tried again this year with a bill requiring perimeter monitors at facilities emitting toxic pollutants. That measure also failed.

The Louisiana Chemistry Association and other groups have repeatedly fought these efforts, helping to kill bill after bill in the state legislature. The powerful trade group represents 70 chemical industry companies that operate more than 100 sites across the state.

The association has found a legislative ally in Republican state Sen. Eddie Lambert, an attorney from Ascension Parish who chairs the state Senate environmental committee — the same committee that repeatedly killed the bills.

Campaign finance records show Lambert received more than $28,000 in political contributions from petrochemical, oil and gas and other polluting industries since 2020. He has also reported investing in major oil companies.

He told Floodlight that neither his investments nor campaign contributions from industry have influenced his decisions in the legislature. “I don’t take that into consideration at all,” he said.

Lambert added that he was surprised oil and gas companies had donated to his campaigns because he consistently backed lawsuits filed by Louisiana parishes seeking to hold the industry accountable for coastal damage.

In opposing one fenceline monitoring bill in 2021, Lambert contended that “air moves around” and that pollution readings near industrial plants could be skewed by other sources — an argument also made by the chemical industry. An LCA staffer told a state Senate committee that year that requiring industries to conduct fenceline monitoring could “create unnecessary paranoia on the part of the public” and expose companies to lawsuits “based on false readings of air monitors.”

Air quality scientists, however, have found that properly designed fenceline monitoring systems can isolate a facility’s emissions from other sources.

In 2024, Lambert sponsored the Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act (CAMRA), which prohibits the use of air pollution data for enforcement or regulatory actions unless it’s captured by EPA-approved monitors — equipment that typically costs tens of thousands of dollars, far beyond the reach of most community groups.

The LCA helped draft the bill, Daniel Bosch, an attorney representing the group, acknowledged at a state Senate committee hearing in 2024.

Speaking in favor of the CAMRA law, Brian Landry, the LCA’s vice president of political affairs, told the Senate committee that his group had noticed private and public funds flowing to community groups to do their own air monitoring.

Community air monitors can reveal pollution hotspots that distant government monitors miss. In some communities, the data have prompted regulators to investigate pollution complaints and helped residents push for stronger oversight.

CAMRA, Landry said, was intended to ensure that any community monitoring data given to LDEQ “for any future purpose is accurate and definitely correct.”

In a statement to Floodlight, LCA president David Cresson defended the law, saying it ensures “data used to enforce our state’s environmental protection laws complies with minimum U.S. EPA standards” and doesn’t stop residents from monitoring air quality for their own information — only from using unregulated methods for enforcement purposes.

A top EPA regional administrator at the time, however, called the bill “inconsistent with federal law.”

Despite the EPA’s letter and widespread community opposition, the state legislature passed the bill.

Critics say the law has stifled community air-quality reporting efforts, which typically rely on low-cost monitors. It’s what stopped Kyereh from her own monitoring efforts in St. Rose.

After CAMRA became law, legislators in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia introduced similar bills, also using arguments promoted by industry groups. That legislation failed in West Virginia but passed in Kentucky and Ohio.

CAMRA had been law for just two months when Lambert traveled to the Henderson Beach Resort in Destin, Fla., to speak at a conference hosted by the Louisiana Chemistry Association. The group paid his $450 hotel bill.

“I wouldn’t consider that a big deal,” Lambert told Floodlight.

He said it isn’t reasonable to expect state senators —whose base salary is $16,800 a year plus a $6,000 expense allowance — to cover such costs themselves.

The Louisiana ethics code allows lawmakers to accept lodging and meals from industry groups, as long as they’re tied to a public speech and the gifts are disclosed.

Asked whether Louisiana needs more public air monitoring stations, Lambert said industrial plants already collect emissions data.

“If we already get the information from the plants, why would we want to spend our resources there?” he asked.

Under EPA rules, however, some plants are allowed to report emission estimates rather than direct measurements — and those estimates can be wildly off base.

A 2025 ProPublica investigation found that when the EPA required temporary physical monitors at industrial sites, 97% of facilities were underreporting emissions. At a Dow Chemical facility in Plaquemine, for example, emissions of vinyl chloride — a carcinogen — were more than 150 times higher than the company’s estimates.

Left to Wonder

Tish Taylor lives less than a mile from the Denka Performance Elastomer plant in St. John the Baptist Parish, which made neoprene, the synthetic rubber used in wetsuits. Chloroprene emissions there posed what federal regulators called an “unacceptably high” cancer risk to surrounding communities.

Denka suspended production in 2025, but DuPont continues to operate on the same campus and has faced its own EPA penalties for emissions violations.

The two closest public monitors — each about five miles away — measure only lead and ozone.

Taylor loves working in her garden. But when the wind blows on a sunny day, she knows that there’s something toxic in it, she said.

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“I just have to wonder how much.”