The Secret Toxins Left Behind After Hurricane Helene
Lobbying by the chemical industry and weak regulations are obscuring details about industrial toxins contaminating areas hit by disasters like Hurricane Helene. If Trump takes office, his administration will likely weaken disclosure rules further.
A store owner clears mud from his shop at the Biltmore Village in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on October 1, 2024, in Asheville, North Carolina. (Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images)
The Saturday following Hurricane Helene, soldiers warned Whitney Anderson about the mud.
Anderson and her family were going for a hike up a hill to get a view of Biltmore Village, a historic shopping and dining area within the city limits of Asheville, North Carolina, that was devastated by flooding from the storm. Thick mud encased the village, leaving roads buried and cars partially submerged.
As the group started up the hill, members of the National Guard warned them to stay away from the mud, saying it was highly toxic. In the weeks to come, Anderson learned that residents in nearby towns along the French Broad River were reporting that the mud caused chemical burns and ate through clothing and boots. Others complained of foul odors permeating the air as the sludge dried.
A few miles north of Biltmore Village on the banks of the river sits Silver-Line Plastics Corporation, which manufactures PVC pipes. These pipes are made with polyvinyl chloride, a synthetic plastic made up of the highly toxic and explosive chemical vinyl chloride. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently took steps to better regulate vinyl chloride after a train shipment of the chemical derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last year, leading to a massive ball of burning gas.
On October 15, nearly three weeks after the hurricane, Silver-Line posted a note on its website that they “receive already manufactured PVC resin, which is non-hazardous and inert.” Until that point, there appeared to be no easy way for Anderson or other residents to know whether vinyl chloride was used in the plant or could have leaked into the surrounding area.
All of this got Anderson thinking: Following the hurricane, what toxins could have been released that we don’t know about? What contaminants could have leached from factories deluged by the flooding, which impacted the homes and businesses of hundreds of thousands of people and huge swaths of urban and agricultural land?
“I have a four-year-old,” Anderson told the Lever. “I’d like to feel safer than I do.”
This seemingly simple request to know which hazardous materials are housed in industrial facilities counters a tangled web of federal disclosure laws and regulatory holes that have allowed corporations to keep details about their toxic materials largely out of the public eye. And amid industry lobbying, environmental advocates say regulators have long failed to update these rules to reflect today’s chemical landscape and disaster risks.
Such secrecy could increase if former president Donald Trump is reelected: Project 2025, the right-wing corporate plan for his second term, proposes rolling back environmental disclosure rules and protecting “sensitive” industry information.
Under the 1986 Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, federal and industrial facilities are required to report on the “storage, use, and releases” of specific chemicals. While a crucial step forward in environmental transparency, the act’s disclosure requirements are inadequate and outdated, said Eve Gartner, an attorney and toxins expert at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice.
“There are so many shortcomings,” Gartner said, pointing to the many industries that are omitted from the reporting requirements and the high toxic chemical thresholds that must be met before facilities are required to divulge data about their hazardous materials.
Decades of lobbying from the chemical industry have stymied efforts to fix these regulatory shortcomings.
In 2022, for example, as federal regulators sought to pass stronger restrictions and disclosure rules around toxic chemicals, lobbying by the chemical and related manufacturing industry skyrocketed to $66 million — an all-time high. Most of that money came from the American Chemistry Council, a group that represents the chemical industry. The council lobbied on matters including the EPA’s authority to require chemical reporting, record-keeping, and testing, which was implemented under the Toxic Substance Control Act of 1976.
So far this year, the American Chemistry Council has spent almost $9.9 million lobbying on issues including the EPA’s attempt to further regulate toxic chemicals and protect communities from chemical accidents. The lobbying group also helped weaken bipartisan rail safety legislation following the East Palestine train derailment, and as of this year, 64 percent of American Chemistry Council lobbyists previously held government jobs.
There are sixteen industrial plastics facilities across North Carolina that are members of the American Chemistry Council (Silver-Line Plastics is not a member, according to the council’s website).
For chemical disclosure requirements to be meaningful, said Gartner, they must be overhauled — something that has likely not happened because the current level of secrecy “works well for the chemical industry,” she said.
“If we were serious about protecting communities from toxic chemicals, we would really update these statutes,” Gartner added. “We would make them actually reflect what we know about the hazards that these chemicals pose.”
Antiquated Rules
The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act came about two years after a 1984 disaster in the city of Bhopal, India, where a pesticide factory owned by a subsidiary of the American firm Union Carbide Corporation leaked roughly forty-five tons of the dangerous gas methyl isocyanate. The toxic gas drifted across the city, resulting in the immediate deaths of at least 3,800 people. Over time, it’s estimated that up to 20,000 people died from exposure and half a million survivors suffered long-term adverse health conditions.
Under the landmark legislation, facilities across the United States that work with any of the 794 toxic chemicals identified by the EPA must report emission data to regulators each year. This data is then compiled in various catalogs, including the toxics release inventory, which includes publicly available land, water, and air emissions data from more than 21,000 industrial facilities.
However, there are critical gaps in this law, including the fact that not all polluters are required to submit emissions data. For example, sectors like some hazardous waste collection, treatment, and disposal facilities are exempt, and it was only in 2021 that the EPA added natural gas processing facilities to the list of industries covered by this rule.
There is also the issue of how emission data is acquired: according to the EPA, some facilities are required to actively measure or monitor their emissions. However, few are actually doing this, and instead, many are approximating their releases using unreliable formulas, according to reporting by ProPublica.
Additionally, the thresholds for reporting chemicals are far too high, said Gartner. A facility must only disclose information to the EPA if it manufactures or processes 25,000 pounds or more of a listed toxic chemical per year, or otherwise uses at least 10,000 pounds of one of these chemicals annually.
“From my perspective, it should be lower than 100 pounds,” Gartner said.
Such high chemical thresholds may be why Silver-Line Plastics Corporation, the plastic plant in Asheville, North Carolina, does not appear on the toxics release inventory. According to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, Silver-Line “does not have significant quantities of hazardous chemicals” though “the public is advised to treat areas that have flooded and any substances of unknown origin with caution.”
“Without a list of the chemicals they did have, I am still concerned,” said Anderson, the Asheville resident. “Not having ‘significant quantities of hazardous chemicals’ isn’t the most reassuring thing to read.”
The EPA’s toxics release inventory lists twenty-one total industrial facilities across Asheville’s Buncombe County that do reach chemical disclosure thresholds. This includes the Dave Steel Company, which fabricates steel and since 2020 has reported almost 34,000 pounds of chemicals released into the environment, along with off-site disposals of toxic materials. The facility, which works with toxins like aluminum dust and lead, sits next to the historic Biltmore Village destroyed by Hurricane Helene.
While the EPA is working to expand the number of chemicals that facilities must disclose through the toxics release inventory, industry interests are pushing back.
Since 2021, the EPA has added a number of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to the list. These “forever chemicals” appear in everything from clothing to fire extinguisher foam to cookware, and are linked to a long list of health conditions. According to a new study by the US Geological Survey, approximately seventy-one to ninety-five million people may be relying on groundwater that is contaminated with PFAS.
3M, one of the largest manufacturers of PFAS, opposed adding more of these chemicals to the disclosure inventory, arguing in a 2021 response to EPA’s proposed rule that attempting to gather additional information about PFAS “would create an unreasonable burden on the regulated community.”
Chemours — a chemical company founded as a spin-off from the chemical giant DuPont that has allegedly contaminated drinking water with a PFAS used in the production of Teflon — noted similar concerns after the EPA proposed additional PFAS disclosures in 2022.
“We believe that the EPA underestimated the burdens and associated costs with the proposed regulatory requirements and should conduct a robust benefit cost analysis for the final rule,” the company wrote in their comment.
Chemours also asked for the EPA to bring back a loophole called the “de minimis exemption,” which allowed companies to avoid reporting PFAS data to the toxics release inventory if an individual PFAS compound made up less than 1 percent of a chemical mixture. These chemicals are often used in very small concentrations, meaning facilities were rarely required to submit PFAS data. The EPA eliminated this loophole last October.
In 2023 and 2024, Chemours parent company DuPont spent $2.1 million on lobbying efforts on subjects including “chemical management matters,” “emerging chemicals of concern,” and the EPA’s continued implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, which gives the agency the authority to require facilities to submit chemical reporting, record-keeping, and testing.
This October, the EPA proposed adding more than a hundred individual PFAS to the toxics release inventory list. The proposal will likely face industry pushback.
“It really comes down to both corporate greed and corporate power,” said Naomi Yoder, a geographic information systems data manager at the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University in Houston. “Our regulatory agencies . . . are not immune from being influenced by the corporations that really are looking out for their bottom line.”
Gatekeeping Critical Data
Three years before Hurricane Helene destroyed North Carolina’s coast, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana. Torrential rain and winds of up to 150 miles per hour ripped apart coastal towns and caused widespread flooding from the southernmost port of Louisiana all the way to New York, resulting in ninety-one deaths across nine states.
Chemical plants, offshore industrial sites, and oil refineries were also destroyed in the storm, leading to 171 oil spills and 730 tons of air pollutants emitted.
However, “these totals are almost guaranteed to be an undercount of what was actually released due to severely lacking data protocols by the response agencies involved,” according to a 2022 analysis of Hurricane Ida by Yoder, who was then working at the New Orleans–based nonprofit Healthy Gulf.
Yoder and a colleague looked at the effectiveness of another EPA chemical disclosure rule: the risk management program, which was formed under the Clean Air Act of 1990 and requires industrial facilities that use extremely hazardous, combustible substances such as vinyl chloride to create a risk management plan in the case of a chemical disaster. The plan must include general information about each facility’s operations, the chemicals on site, and the risks associated with the facility.
Currently, there are approximately 12,000 facilities nationwide with a risk management plan, two of which reside around Asheville. Approximately 131 million people live within three miles of these plants around the country, roughly 73 percent of whom are impoverished or people of color.
Similar to the toxics release inventory, facilities are only required to submit a risk management plan to the EPA if they meet certain chemical thresholds. Submissions must occur once every five years, and the plans are supposed to be available to the public. However, Yoder and their colleague discovered this information is far from accessible.
The documents sit in federal reading rooms, located in government buildings with restrictive hours and conditions. “You can’t bring anything digital, you can’t take photographs, you have to go in with a pen and paper and copy what you want,” said Yoder, who noted there are only two federal reading rooms in all of Louisiana where Hurricane Ida hit. What’s more, members of the public can also only access risk management information for up to ten industrial facilities per month.
Furthermore, the risk management plans encompass a worst-case scenario assessment of what could happen on the facilities’ sites in the case of chemical accidents like explosions — not the dangers that may be impacting residents during day-to-day operations. Some liquified gas facilities, where natural gas is cooled down to a liquified state, aren’t even required to submit risk management plans to the EPA, even though the plants emit methane, which is eight-five times more potent than carbon dioxide and highly flammable.
Consequently, the vast amount of pollution incident records following Hurricane Ida “were simply a data point indicating a simple occurrence, without specification of type of pollution or amount,” the authors wrote.
This is a huge problem, Yoder said: “We think that we have safeguards in place around chemical incidents and chemical contamination, and then when there’s an incident, it just makes you realize those are not as in place as we would want them [to be].”
“It Really Needs to Be Significantly Updated”
After spending ten days at her parents’ house in Delaware following Hurricane Helene, Anderson returned to Asheville with her four-year-old son and husband. “We were extremely lucky that the house survived,” Anderson said, though they still lack internet access and worry about contaminants in their water supply.
While Asheville locals try to put their lives back together, residents and farmers in the surrounding smaller towns that were hit hardest by the potentially toxic mud are still concerned about the sludge. “Regardless of if there are some really concerning chemicals that got out of the plastics plant, we know there’s gas, oil, dead bodies,” Anderson said.
Recently, the environmental nonprofit organization MountainTrue discovered trimethylbeneze in the mud — a pollutant found in crude oil and gasoline that can lead to symptoms like dizziness, headaches, lung irritation, and changes in blood cells that affect their ability to clot. Though Anderson is less concerned about Silver-Line Plastics now, the findings lend credence to Anderson’s desire for more information about the toxins in the mud and where they could have come from.
Attorneys at Earthjustice also have questions about how the EPA plans to address these concerns moving forward as climate change brings more natural disasters to peoples’ front doors.
Regarding the risk management program, “We know the EPA is talking about expanding the list [of industry sectors] to have more coverage, which would be good, but as it stands there are questions about why are certain facilities not covered and what can be done to get them covered,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice. Kron helped petition the EPA in 2012 to include the oil and gas extraction industry in the list of sectors that must report emissions data to the toxics release inventory.
“The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act was an important step when it was adopted in 1986, but it’s really outdated and to be really meaningful and truly give communities the information they need to protect themselves, it really needs to be significantly updated,” Kron said.
But if Trump reenters the White House, the opposite could occur. Project 2025, the corporate-funded plan to dismantle much of the government during a second Trump term, calls for the risk management program to be revised to “protect sensitive information.” The manifesto also recommends amending the EPA’s evaluation and assessment of chemicals.
“Project 2025 makes extensive recommendations to effectively dismantle agencies that regulate health and environmental protections and allow industry to operate with impunity,” Earthjustice wrote in their Project 2025 Analysis. According to the group, this includes hamstringing the federal government’s ability to “continue to protect communities harmed by pollution and toxic chemicals.”
Meanwhile, in Ashville, Anderson is unsure about what the weeks ahead will look like. Although her home was spared from the destruction, she has questions about the dangers the storm left behind. Still, she’s not ready to leave the community, where people have come together to grieve and support each other.
“When this happened,” she explained, “someone said, ‘Thank goodness Asheville has Asheville.’”