Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

The Smoke Comes Every Year.

Sugar Companies Say the Air Is Safe.

by Lulu Ramadan, The Palm Beach Post, and Ash Ngu and Maya Miller, ProPublica. July 8, 2021
https://projects.propublica.org/black-snow/

To harvest more than half of America’s cane sugar, billion-dollar companies set fire to fields, a money-saving practice that’s being banned by other countries. Some residents say they struggle to breathe, so we started tracking air quality.

In the fall of 2019, brothers Donovan and Jayceon Sonson spent eight weeks lying in hospital beds, struggling to breathe.

The young boys, then 5 and 6 years old, had developed upper respiratory infections on top of the severe asthma they’d had since they were toddlers.

Anytime they left their apartment, they took their “medicine box,” a plastic bin filled with red inhalers, prescribed steroids and a pink nebulizer shaped like a kitten. When the hospital released the boys just before Thanksgiving, doctors sent the family home with guidance on how to protect the boys from future episodes.

Among the instructions: “Keep your child away from secondhand smoke.”

Thelma Freeman, the boys’ grandmother, stared at the note. She didn’t smoke. Neither did anyone in her home. The problem was all around her, she thought, coming not from smokers but from an industry that provides thousands of jobs in her town: sugar.

Freeman and her grandkids are among the 31,000 people who live in the towns that dot the Glades, an agricultural region in Florida defined by its vast cane fields that produce more than half the nation’s cane sugar.

Nearly every day during the winter and spring, sugar companies set fire to dozens of cane fields across western Palm Beach County. These burns are a harvesting method that rids the plant of its outer leaves but releases harmful smoke. Locals call the resulting ash that blankets their community “black snow.”

Each burn lasted less than an hour, but an average of 25 fields were burned every day in the four months analyzed by The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica. The practice disproportionately affects residents in Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay, where about a third of the population lives in poverty. The smoke rarely reaches wealthier, whiter cities like West Palm Beach.

For years, residents in Florida’s heartland have complained about the smoke and ash that blanket this patchwork of mostly Black and Hispanic communities.

And for years, state health and environmental officials have said the air is healthy to breathe. So has the sugar industry, the largest employer in the region, with more than 12,000 workers during the six-month harvest season.

That battle has now escalated in federal court. In perhaps the largest challenge to the multibillion-dollar industry in years, Glades residents are suing sugar companies, alleging that pollution from cane burning damages residents’ health. The industry denies those claims, arguing as recently as November that a government-run air monitor in Belle Glade showed the area is in compliance with the Clean Air Act, the landmark 1970 law aimed at protecting the public from harmful pollution.

The problem? State officials found that the monitor was malfunctioning as far back as eight years ago, and, as of last week, it was still not fit to gauge Clean Air Act compliance. Documents obtained through public records requests show that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection flagged the faulty monitor in 2013, telling their federal counterparts that it didn’t meet strict accuracy standards and wasn’t suited to determine whether the air quality meets the requirements outlined in the federal law.

The monitor could cost the state as much as $35,000 to replace. But even if it were working properly, the state and federal framework for measuring air quality fails to capture the impact of sugar cane burning, an investigation by The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica found.

That’s because federal regulators rely on 24-hour and annual averages to track a type of particulate matter — an inhalable mixture of pollutants and debris tied to heart and lung disease — that is emitted by cane burning. These averages sometimes obscure short-term pollution, a defining feature of Florida’s harvesting process.

The Post and ProPublica set out to see what the air is like in the Glades during the burns. The reporters analyzed cane burn permits and plume data from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which projected where smoke would travel. They also worked closely with six experts in air-quality and public health from universities across the country, including three in Florida, as well as with residents, to place outdoor air sensors that measured particulate matter. The measurements were not intended to assess compliance with the Clean Air Act. Rather, the goal was to see if residents were being exposed to pollutants in ways that current monitoring systems would miss.

They were.

The sensors captured repeated spikes in pollution on days when the state authorized cane burning and projected that the smoke would blow toward them, our analysis found. While particulate matter can come from a variety of sources, air monitoring experts said the findings suggest the pollution is likely coming from cane burns. These short-term spikes, lasting less than an hour, often reached four times the average pollution levels in the area. Health and air-quality experts added that this exposure poses health risks both in the short term and over the course of the monthslong burn season.

Other major sugar-producing countries are moving to end or sharply limit cane burning, acknowledging that the practice is harmful because it subjects those nearby to many of the same pollutants that come from smoking tobacco, albeit with less intensity than inhaling from a filtered cigarette. Brazil, which produces more than 20% of the world’s cane sugar, has been phasing out the practice for more than a decade after researchers there raised concerns about particulate matter emissions.

Each year in the United States, tens of thousands of people die prematurely from exposure to particulate matter. People of color are disproportionately exposed, according to research published in April.

Palm Beach County emits more particulate matter from agricultural fires than any other county nationwide, according to Environmental Protection Agency emissions estimates from 2017, the latest year for which data is available. Those emissions are almost entirely byproducts of cane burning: 98.5% of the agricultural acreage burned in the county since 2010 has been for sugar cane, according to data from the state agriculture department.

The experts who reviewed The Post and ProPublica’s sensor analysis said the findings suggest policymakers should bolster air monitoring in the Glades, begin considering shorter-term spikes in pollution that are not currently built into federal air standards, and study community exposure to these pollutants.

As residents and the industry battle in court, federal officials also have been eyeing changes. Under former President Donald Trump’s administration, the EPA considered — and rejected — strengthening regulation of particulate matter, which could have included a lower threshold for 24-hour averages or requirements for measuring in shorter durations. In June, President Joe Biden’s EPA announced that it would review that decision, acknowledging that evidence shows long- and short-term exposure to particulate matter can harm people’s health, “leading to heart attacks, asthma attacks, and premature death.”

But while the federal agency weighs more protections for public health, Florida lawmakers moved in a different direction this spring, passing legislation to protect farmers from legal challenges over air pollution, with some elected officials arguing that there’s no evidence of poor air quality in the state’s sugar-growing region. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in April.
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https://projects.propublica.org/black-snow/