Thread by @theintercept

Ten years ago, at the age of 42, Dodie Harrington was the first of her group of friends to develop breast cancer.

“‘She said that, if one of us had to get it, she was glad it was her and not any of us,’” Jill Pierce remembers. theintercept.com/2021/03/18/epa…

Harrington and Pierce are part of a tight circle of eight friends who met in elementary school.

“We called ourselves the Lucky 7 because each one of us was lucky to have seven best friends,” said Pierce.

Then another member of the Lucky 7, Christie Trahan, was diagnosed with breast cancer. The following year, as the friends were turning 50, Lori Thibodeaux was struck with the same cancer.

The Lucky 7 were only vaguely aware of the chemical plant that served as the backdrop for their youth.

Stacks of the factory, owned by Huntsman Corporation until last year, framed their high school football field where all but one practiced on the drill team.

It wasn’t until last fall that Jill Pierce and her sister first read about ethylene oxide and discovered that the area where they grew up and raised their own children had an elevated cancer risk due to ethylene oxide.

Chemical companies use ethylene oxide to produce other chemicals that are the building blocks of a wide range of products, including brake fluid, antifreeze, cosmetics, food additives, and several kinds of plastics.

In gaseous form, even tiny amounts of ethylene oxide are extremely dangerous. Acute exposure can cause skin burns, twitching, convulsions, and coma, according to the CDC. The cancers are thought to come from long-term exposure.

Pierce and her friends were likely exposed to massive amounts of ethylene oxide while growing up in Port Neches, Texas.

There are no public records of emissions from the plant when they were in school.

Lake County, Illinois, is also home to two industrial facilities that release ethylene oxide. Medline in Waukegan uses the gas to sterilize medical equipment.

And Vantage Specialty Chemicals in Gurnee uses ethylene oxide to make other chemicals and consumer products.

Local residents began gathering in the basement of a local church to see what they could do to stop the pollution.

Stop EtO in Lake County was founded to limit the cancer-causing gas, and it also became a way for members to trace their troubling cancer “coincidences.”

But while the community group was plumbing the public records on ethylene oxide, companies that release the chemical were quietly conducting their own campaign, changing those records to make their emissions appear smaller and less harmful.

Around the country, other companies responsible for large amounts of ethylene oxide emissions were making similar changes.

Almost 270,000 pounds of ethylene oxide pollution vanished from the public record.

What’s worse, in at least some cases the companies appear to have done so at the invitation of the EPA, which, under the leadership of former chemical industry executives appointed by Trump, aggressively rolled back air pollution safeguards.

While environmental advocates have questioned both the EPA’s failure to address ethylene oxide pollution and its explanation for that inaction, the agency was right about one thing: It’s hard to know how much of the gas has been released.

One night in January 2019, community activists in Lake County discovered that the numbers they had downloaded and copied to a spreadsheet a few months ago from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory were no longer there.

“At first we thought, wait, did we pull that wrong? The data is completely different,” said Sarah Crawford, a member of Stop EtO in Lake County who was gathered with the rest of the group that night.

Unbeknownst to them, on October 18, 2018, Vantage had revised its previously posted reports of ethylene oxide emissions in the TRI for every year starting in 2016 and going back to 2010.

Altogether, by changing seven years of TRI reporting, the company had eliminated the record of more than 64,000 pounds of ethylene oxide emissions.

In the case of ethylene oxide, the EPA has done worse than nothing in recent years, taking steps that benefit the companies using the chemical at the expense of the people who breathe it.

Read the full story: theintercept.com/2021/03/18/epa…