![\"Jessica](\"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2015\/03\/MG_6443-e1426792343259.jpg\")
<\/a>Loy believes the answer is where she moved. No one knows for certain how living in the area affects people\u2019s health, but Loy and her neighbors are concerned about petroleum coke. The dusty, black, oil refinery byproduct is stored unenclosed in 30-foot piles at KCBX Terminals, Inc.\u2019s two facilities, the 22-acre North Terminal and 82-acre South Terminal.<\/p>\n
She and her husband, Carlos Gonzalez, Sr., had bought their first house in Chicago\u2019s East Side neighborhood to be closer to her parents. The spacious two-story home had enough room for her entire family including the twins, their older sister, 6; and Loy\u2019s two teenaged sons from a previous marriage. It was much more affordable than an equivalent home closer to downtown.<\/p>\n
The house sits just blocks from the South Terminal, which has been operating since 1990. KCBX is a subsidiary of the industrial juggernaut Koch Industries, owned by brothers David<\/a> and Charles Koch<\/a>. According to Forbes, the Koch brothers are each worth $41.9 billion and rank as the sixth wealthiest people in the world.<\/p>\n For the past two years, a coalition of neighborhood activists has been fighting the Kochs for an outright ban of petroleum coke, commonly referred to as pet coke. In February, the grassroots movement claimed a cascade of small victories, culminating in the announcement that KCBX will cease storing pet coke in the neighborhood by mid-2016. But the site will remain a transfer point as the product moves across the state by truck, rail and barge.<\/p>\n At Chicago\u2019s municipal elections five days after the announcement, 86 percent of residents of Chicago\u2019s 10th<\/sup> Ward<\/a> voted in a non-binding referendum to ban pet coke entirely from Southeast Side neighborhoods. Despite these victories, activists say, the fight is far from over. Residents point to\u00a0uncertainties about how long the trucks, rail cars or barges could stand at the site and whether they will be open or enclosed.<\/p>\n “We don\u2019t know if they\u2019re going to be sitting there for\u00a0a day or processed hour by hour, we just don’t know. It’s too open-ended,” said Peggy Salazar of the\u00a0Southeast Environmental Task Force<\/a>\u00a0and 10th<\/sup> Ward resident. She\u00a0pointed out that the site will continue to be a center of industry:<\/p>\n \u201cThe neighbors are still hoping it will be gone from the neighborhood,\u201d said Tom Shepherd, also of the task force. \u201cThey want it out.\u201d<\/p>\n Shepherd said that even after BP stops sending its pet coke to South Deering, current permits allow for the KCBX terminal to handle up to 11 million tons a year of pet coke from the ExxonMobil refinery in Joliet and the Citgo refinery in Lemont.<\/p>\n While the jury is out about the health hazards of pet coke, no one disputes that the three-story black piles are ugly, intrusive neighbors. When the wind blows, a peppery dust coats houses, cars and parks. Olga Bautista first started paying attention at a friend\u2019s picnic in August 2013. When the wind kicked up, she said, the hosts had to throw out any uncovered food, which had quickly become studded with granules of the black coke.<\/p>\n Bautista, who became involved with the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke after her ill-fated picnic, has said emphatically that would not be tolerated in neighborhoods with more clout at City Hall.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there are real questions,” said Josh Mogerman, deputy director of national media at the Natural Resources Defense Council<\/a>. “Is this a situation that would be allowed to occur in other areas?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInformally, we call ourselves a sacrifice zone,\u201d said Salazar. Environmental justice activists have used the term sacrifice zone to describe areas that shoulder the brunt of environmental degradation.<\/p>\n The question remains, however, whether pet coke is a health hazard. KCBX has said no scientific study has proven that the dust is harmful to human health. However, the effects of long-term exposure to fine particulate matter are well documented. The smaller the particulate matter, the more easily it enters the body, getting into the small channels of the lungs. Because of the concern for human health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency monitors the air concentration of particulate matter less than 10 microns across\u2014which can be, at its largest, 25 times thinner than a human hair.<\/p>\n \u201cThe more and more your lungs are irritated, the less you can combat because you don\u2019t have any of your natural defenses to work for you anymore,\u201d said Romona Cetnar, a registered nurse and former representative with the organizing committee National Nurses United. \u201cThey\u2019ve all been shut down by this particulate matter.\u201d<\/p>\n The EPA began monitoring particulate matter in the air at eight stations along the KCBX fence line<\/a> in February 2014. On at least 19 days since monitoring began, at least one of the air monitors around KCBX recorded 24-hour average concentrations higher than 101 micrograms per cubic meter. This ranks on the EPA\u2019s Air Quality Index <\/a>as an orange day, meaning the air is \u201cunhealthy for sensitive groups\u201d including adults with heart or lung conditions, children and the elderly. On three of those 19 days, the particulate matter in the air was high enough to qualify for a red day designation. For comparison, Los Angeles County had seven red days in 2014, according to the American Lung Association\u2019s<\/a> yearly State of the Air <\/a>report. Cook County as a whole registered no red days.<\/p>\n No long-term studies have been done, but Loy and other residents say their kids are getting ill more frequently. Recurring sinus infections, Cetnar said, are increasingly common because the dust will re-aggravate an infection before it resolves completely.<\/p>\n \u201cNeighbors are saying their children are coming home sick,\u201d said Tom Shepherd, also with the Southeast Environmental Task Force. No data is available on asthma-related hospitalizations for the past three years. However, Shepherd said most residents \u201cthink it\u2019s incumbent upon the government to prove that.\u201d<\/p>\n Bautista echoed the sentiment that it is patently unfair to ask a low-income community to prove harm. After all, she said, the Koch brothers have \u201ca bottomless pit of money. They\u2019ll have have to figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n Not knowing the health effects, Cetnar said, is a real concern for community members:<\/p>\n Environmental pollutants don\u2019t cause asthma, but it can be triggered or worsened by allergens such as dust mites or particulate matter in the air. Regardless of whether a person has asthma, living around particulate matter can lead to long-term lung issues, Cetnar explained, because it irritates the microscopic hairs toward the back of your nasal passages. These hairs, along with your mucus membranes, act as barriers against foreign objects entering the body.<\/p>\n \u201cOn windy days, kids can\u2019t be in the park,\u201d Shepherd said. \u201cWhen there was a really big dust-up, kids playing little league in the park had to flee indoors to keep the dust from getting in their eyes and their nose.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t know what kind of risk we\u2019re taking by living here,\u201d Bautista said. \u201cBut we can\u2019t go anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n The Southeast Side, stretching between the shores of the Calumet River and the banks of Lake Michigan, has long been far from Chicago\u2019s power centers, not only geographically but metaphorically. U.S. Steel\u2019s South Works plant, which had employed generations of blue-collar families in the area, closed in 1992.<\/p>\n \u201cThe steel mills were the lifeblood of the neighborhood,\u201d Cetnar said, and the area has never recovered. South Deering, where the steel mills were located and home of the KCBX North Terminal, now has a per capita income of $14,685 just over half that of the average Chicagoan, and 29 percent of households are below the poverty line.<\/p>\n \u201cThere just isn\u2019t that much work down here anymore,\u201d said Cetnar, who grew up in the area. \u201cNot the kind that would give you a middle class living.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, these lots had been home to small amounts of pet coke stored alongside coal, which was trucked to Pilsen and Little Village\u00a0 to be used to fuel the Fisk and Crawford coal-fired power plants in those neighborhoods. When Fisk and Crawford,\u00a0 among the oldest coal-fired power plants in the country, finally closed there in 2012, neighbors thought they might be free of the unsightly piles.<\/p>\n \u201cWe thought we were going to get a reprieve from something that was a blight on the community,\u201d said Salazar. Her task force continued to fight environmental battles, including a successful campaign against a coal gasification plant.<\/p>\n Then, after the windstorm in summer 2013, residents began to sit up and take notice. The community the steel mills had abandoned was left with acres of brown fields: unusable, polluted lots. The community had been \u201ccomplacent,\u201d according to Shepherd. It\u2019s difficult to mobilize community members who are struggling to make ends meet, who have a history of being marginalized and disconnected from the political process.<\/p>\n \u201cI was somewhat surprised by the way the community came together,\u201d Shepherd said. \u201cTo have retired steel workers stand up and say, hey, we\u2019ve had enough. We want to see some clean industry developed over here– it\u2019s quite remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n The community started putting pressure on the City Council<\/a> to ban pet coke, eventually joining forces with the Natural Resources Defense Council. In September\u00a02014, Beemsterboer Slag Corp. decided to remove the black piles from its terminal on 106th<\/sup> Street and sell the property. In February of this year, the Chicago Department of Public Health denied KCBX its 16-month extension request<\/a> for building the 1,000-foot-long enclosure the company had planned for completion in December 2016. It seemed the neighborhood was finally gaining ground against the system of heavy industry that had left their neighborhoods polluted and barren.<\/p>\n The February 2015 pet coke referendum became a sort of referendum, on the 10th<\/sup> Ward\u2019s 16-year alderman, John Pope. \u201cThere was a lot of anger toward the alderman,\u201d the first time Pope met with the community about pet coke, Shepherd said. They didn\u2019t understand, he said, why the alderman had allowed the petroleum refinery byproduct into their neighborhoods at all. Pope had proposed legislation to ban pet coke with 14th<\/sup> Ward Ald. Ed Burke, but the ordinance had stalled in the Finance Committee.<\/p>\n The anger continued into the election. Four of Pope\u2019s six challengers, including Bautista, had previously worked with the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Pet Coke, an umbrella organization for activist groups working on the issue. Opposition candidates accused Pope of accepting contributions from the Koch brothers.<\/p>\n According to the Chicago Board of Elections<\/a> campaign<\/a> contributions <\/a>website, Pope hasn\u2019t received money from KCBX since 2008, though he did receive money from Beemsterboer Slag Corp. and Mayor Rahm Emanuel\u2019s political action committee.<\/p>\nSomething in the air<\/h1>\n
<\/a>A community on the edge<\/h1>\n
“A beautiful grassroots movement”<\/h1>\n
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