Fighting to Breathe in the Shadow of a Coal Power Plant

A glimpse at a small Pennsylvania town in the middle of a health crisis, all while the Trump administration moves to relax what regulations there still are on how their nearby plants operate. ut there are also thousands of smaller casualties of this effort to dismantle the EPA. The Flint water crisis increasingly looks to have been a harbinger, not an aberration, something that will not improve with looser water standards. Some of the rollbacks have been almost comical, like the administration's twin moves—based on fringe science—to loosen restrictions on asbestos and small amounts of radiation exposure on the basis their threats to human health are overstated. And then there are the ordinary American victims—past, present, and future—of coal power generation, a dangerously dirty process given a new lease on life with the CPP's rollback, but which has been decimating small and powerless communities for decades.Here is one such community: an area of Pennsylvania called Allegheny County that is home to a large coal power plant in the town of Springdale—and a mortality rate in some areas that's 87 percent above the national level. People in this little corner of the country get cancer, and they get asthma, and they get it early and often. They have no doubt about the cause. It is not a question of bureaucracy or environmentalism or liberty to them—it's life and death.