“I’ve been doing this way longer than Erin Brokovich,” says 65 year-old grandmother, professional chemist, and spitfire activist Wilma Subra. With her short blond ponytail and bangs, Capri pants and sandals, she looks twenty years younger than she is—and has the energy of a teenager. That’s lucky for the people of New Orleans because Wilma has made it her mission to provide low-cost testing of water and air quality to ensure she and her neighbors have a healthy place to raise their families.

Today, Wilma is taking the Expedition team around to show us the impact of pollution on local communities. We drive just twenty minutes west of New Orleans past the airport to Norco, a town sandwiched between two massive oil and gas refineries. While Norco sits along the banks of the Mississippi River, you would never know that as you drive past because the grass-covered levee reaches twenty feet high, blocking the view. In fact, when we try to drive up the levee, we get chased off by an oil company security truck. “Private property,” the sign reads.

With its towering steel structures sending flames and fumes into the atmosphere, and pipelines filled with crude oil remnants, we jokingly nickname the area “Mordor,” after the treacherous home to the Dark Lord in the Lord of the Rings books and movies. But the region is more infamously known as “Cancer Alley.”
Wilma and other local residents claim that cancer rates along the industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge far exceed the national average. There are at least three recorded cases of a highly unusual form of childhood leukemia, as well as a few other rare cancer clusters. Wilma has been testing the air and water here for years; she knows both have high levels of toxic chemicals from the plants. Cancer is not the only result, she says. Asthma rates also have skyrocketed.

However, controversy rages over whether or not the neighboring industries are responsible for the increased cancer rates—or if the rates are even higher here in the first place. Wilma says she has the data proving that they are. She explains that statistics are easy to throw off: exotic cancers end up getting treated in Houston, where better facilities exist, and so those cases don’t count towards Cancer Alley numbers. Furthermore, statisticians lump together numbers for the entire parish, or county, rather than separating out just the neighborhoods near the industries.

Regardless of the cancer debate outcome, the question remains: why would anyone choose to live here in the shadow of these industrial monstrosities? Wilma says, “Some people, mainly those employed at the oil and gas companies, like living here. They say it’s safe — which it is, there’s a very low crime rate in Norco — and close-knit. Those people have even lied outright about the negative health impacts they’re experiencing, denying their asthma and cancer. That is, until someone close to them dies. Then they come to me and say, ‘Can you tell me what killed my wife? Or grandson?’”

“However, a lot of people wouldn’t want to live here. They just don’t have a choice. I helped out the community of Diamond [in Norco], where about 1,000 people were stuck. It was a poor, mostly African-American neighborhood. Many of them had owned their land for generations so they had no mortgage payments, and couldn’t get jobs at the oil and gas plants. So they just had to stay here, even though they and their kids were getting sick. The refineries were burning their waste right behind the schools! People from other parts of the parish would have to come here for little league games every so often, and they would complain about how the air stank, they got headaches and sore throats from spending just an hour here.”

Wilma didn’t think that was fair. So she worked voluntarily for years to conduct tests to prove the air and water were polluted, and to get the people living in Diamond out. Eventually, she won her battle. She convinced the oil and gas companies to buy out four blocks of real estate and relocate the 1,000 residents.

“People got angry about that,” Wilma says. “I’ve been shot at. I’ve had threats made against me.” But none of this has intimidated her. She keeps on fighting.

It’s easy to point fingers and blame the oil and gas companies for the degradation of our water and air. But while many of them could be engaging in more environmentally sound practices, we, as average citizens of the world, must also hold ourselves responsible. We contribute directly to this problem by creating demand for oil and gas in the first place. All the more reason to not buy a gas-guzzling car, to take public transit or ride your bike to work, to recycle, to install solar panels and water catchments on your roof, and to turn off your air conditioning.

Our visit to Norco serves as yet another reminder that every aspect of our environment is interconnected: land to air to water, and all is connected to us through what we eat, breathe, and drink. We must take better care of our planet in order to take better care of ourselves, our families, our communities and our environment.