The project outlined three major hotspots: Wilmington, Richmond, and Oxnard, California. “When these toxic facilities flood, they will release even more toxins into our air, water, and land.” The same big polluters that are destabilizing our climate and driving sea-level rise,” Raval said. The hotspots they found were unsurprising, Raval told Grist, but nonetheless damning. In all, the coalition created a series of searchable maps and databases to weave together California’s flooding hotspots, which industrial facilities face particular risk, and how lower-income communities of color would be disproportionately impacted. “We’re equipped and supported now with the data and the research to legitimize our community concern and our vision for a just transition.”ĬAUSE, based in Ventura County, and APEN, based in Richmond and Oakland, along with three other environmental justice groups and academic researchers, spent three years combing through federal toxic landmark databases in addition to interviewing community members throughout the entire state to produce the new maps. “It adds to the urgency,” Raval, policy director at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, or APEN, told Grist. The Toxic Tides project is a first-of-its-kind look at the consequences of sea-level rise on California’s historically neglected environmental justice communities in hopes of urging more federal and state officials to address the expected crisis and transition away from the use of these toxic facilities. The Reliant power plant on the wetlands of Ormond Beach is one of more than 400 toxic facilities in California at risk for severe flooding events before 2100. The study outlines more than 400 hazardous facilities that will face major flooding events by the end of the century, exposing residents to elevated levels of toxic water and dangerous chemicals. These two environmental justice activists, whose communities are nearly 400 miles apart, represent a group of California residents in predominantly Black and Latino communities that are five times more likely than the general population to live within half a mile of a toxic site that could flood by 2050, according to a new statewide mapping project led by environmental health professors at UC Berkeley and UCLA (including Grist board member Rachel Morello-Frosch). And those swaths would be home to majority Black and Latino communities, who are no strangers to the effects of pollution and toxic chemicals. “You would see huge swaths of the coast that have been primarily used for heavy industry, commercial shipping, and toxic military bases,” he explained. But, Zucker says, if you actually took the 840 mile trip along the coast, you’d see a different reality.
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