FLICKR/PAUL SABLEMAN
St. Louis has long been an industrial town — and we have the air pollution to show for it.
A new report in the Guardian has St. Louis ranking highly — but it's not something to brag about: The British publication says swaths of the metro area are among the 10 most polluted in the U.S.
The paper boasts that it used "cutting-edge modeling" developed by researchers at institutions including the University of Washington. It reveals something that anyone who paid attention to Wash U's "For the Sake of All" report already knew — that race is a huge predictor of health due to the inequalities that plague neighborhoods with a significant minority population, and that, in America, "neighborhoods burdened by the worst pollution are overwhelmingly the same places where Black and Hispanic populations live."
So in this segregated region, Black neighborhoods experience bad air pollution. White neighborhoods? They're doing just fine.
The map published by the Guardian says it all. Note that the darker the black/red, the worse the conditions:
"Overall, the populations in neighborhoods with the highest PM2.5 levels were 52% Black, compared to 22% for other areas of the same counties," the Guardian reports. "The region’s air is affected by a number of energy plants that still use coal, including one a few miles north of the most polluted neighborhoods."
So that's the bad news. The good news is that this data comes from 2011 to 2015, and beyond what's already changed since then, more change is going to come.
Ameren has announced plans to fully retire two of the coal-fired plants closest to St. Louis (the Meramec to the south and the Sioux to the north) by 2028. It will also retire two units at the much bigger plant to the west, the Labadie, by 2036.
Will it be enough to fix the area that big parts of the region are now breathing? Time will tell.
Until then, we may have to take solace in the fact that we're not Bakersfield, south Los Angeles or Chicago's south and west — the top three spots on this list, in that order. No. 7 is nothing to brag about, but at least we're not No. 1.
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