The petroleum smell is gone, the benzene emissions have abated and residents in nearby neighborhoods of color feel they’re finally being heard.
General view after a massive fire erupted at a crude oil refinery that triggered several large explosions at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refining Complex on June 21, 2019 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Credit: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
By Daelin Brown Inside Climate News
Dorthia Pebbles inhaled harmful pollutants and smelled noxious odors from the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery for years when she would leave her rowhome on Hoffman Street to walk to the corner store.
After losing family members to cancer, she and her neighbors who lived across the street from the massive South Philadelphia refinery, once the largest on the East Coast, couldn’t help but conclude that its emissions were giving them asthma and threatening their health in even more serious ways. But no one from the refinery or the city ever gave them any information or seemed to care.
Then one night in June 2019, the refinery exploded, creating a whole new set of hazards and issues for the neighbors to wrestle with.
“The most recent explosion woke us up out of our sleep,” said Pebbles. “But hearing that it will not be a refinery anymore is good. A lot of people ended up with cancer from the neighborhood.”
Two years after the explosion, Pebbles and other nearby residents said in interviews that relations with the site’s new owner, Hilco Redevelopment Partners, which bought the 1,300-acre property in bankruptcy court last year, have improved and led to talks involving cleanup of the site and jobs.
Philly Thrive, a non-profit that organized neighborhood opposition to the refinery well before the explosion, is part of a coalition of community groups negotiating a community benefits agreement with Hilco built upon transparency and community reinvestment. And Kenyatta Johnson, a local City Council member, has devised an economic opportunity plan with Hilco that requires 50 percent minority participation at all levels of the redevelopment, involving everyone from workers to executives.
Alexa Ross, Philly Thrive’s campaign coordinator, said the group’s recent activities around the refinery site have involved “mobilizing and educating residents about the contamination of the refinery land because there is a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding about the specifics of the toxins left over from the refinery’s pollution.”
With a massive cleanup effort underway to remove the asbestos lining from pipes and remediate soil fouled by petroleum spills, underground benzene pools, and contaminated groundwater, the site could become a test case for the Biden administration’s goal of ensuring that 40 percent of government spending on infrastructure and clean energy go to benefit so-called environmental justice communities.
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