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Neighborhood-level map shows your household's cancer risk from poisonous air

cancer, air pollution, health, environment
Photo by Bruno Miguel on Unsplash

Chemical plants near residential areas can make hazardous air, increasing cancer risks.

When you take a deep breath, it's good to know what you're breathing in. If living in the wildfire West has taught me anything, it's that you can't always rely on your nose to know how clean the air is. On really bad Air Quality Index (AQI) days, we see and smell smoke, but the AQI can still be unhealthy even if the air seems clear.

A new ProPublica analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows that some of us may be living in places with toxic air pollution from industrial chemicals and not know it. Air polluted with hazardous chemicals can cause various kinds of cancer, but until now it wasn't simple to see what your own household risk was.

With ProPublica's interactive, neighborhood-level map, now you can.

And you might want to—especially if you live in Texas, which apparently has a quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest excess cancer risk. Nothing like getting rid of those pesky environmental regulations, eh?


As explained in ProPublica's article about the first-of-its-kind map:

"At the map's intimate scale, it's possible to see up close how a massive chemical plant near a high school in Port Neches, Texas, laces the air with benzene, an aromatic gas that can cause leukemia. Or how a manufacturing facility in New Castle, Delaware, for years blanketed a day care playground with ethylene oxide, a highly toxic chemical that can lead to lymphoma and breast cancer. Our analysis found that ethylene oxide is the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide. Corporations across the United States, but especially in Texas and Louisiana, manufacture the colorless, odorless gas, which lingers in the air for months and is highly mutagenic, meaning it can alter DNA."

Yeah. Not great.

Also not great is how people of color are more affected by toxic air pollution. ProPublica shared these statistics: "Census tracts where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white. In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts."

After reviewing the map, Wayne Davis, an environmental scientist formerly with the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, told ProPublica, "The public is going to learn that EPA allows a hell of a lot of pollution to occur that the public does not think is occurring."

Most people's air is within a safe range, but there are certain hot spots near industrial plants where cancer risk is many times higher than what the EPA deems acceptable. The EPA examines air pollution from certain types of facilities and industries in isolation, not taking into consideration how hazardous air might compound in a cluster of hot spots and put the people living near them at much higher risk.

Matthew Tejada, director of the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice, told ProPublica it would take "working back through 50 years of environmental regulation in the United States, and unpacking and untying a whole series of knots" to address these high-risk hot spots.

The whole ProPublica report, which you can find here, is worth a read. You can access the interactive map here. (Scroll down a bit to find the bar to enter your city, zip code or street address.)

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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One of the most popular health trends over the last few years has been staying as hydrated as possible, evidenced by the massive popularity of 40-oz Stanely Quencher cups. The theory among those who obsess over hydration is that, when you pee clear, you’ve removed all the waste in your body and are enjoying the incredible benefits of being 100% hydrated. Congratulations.

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Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

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Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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