Refining Relationships: How an Unlikely Community-Scientist Partnership led to a Historic Environmental Justice Victory

Abstract:

Demolishing the smokestacks of the former Tonawanda Coke Corporation in the summer of 2021 marked a critical milestone in the community’s 16-year long struggle for clean air, water, and soil. This history of the fight for environmental justice in the community of Tonawanda, NY, located on the industrialized Niagara River, details how community and regulatory science data was leveraged for monumental advancements of environmental health and self-determination. At the heart of this long-term campaign’s successes–that includes regulatory enforcement, criminal prosecution, and closure of the plant–was the labor of establishing and maintaining working relationships between stakeholders. This article is written by and with community members, nonprofit staff, an academic, and a former state regulatory scientist to collectively document the ways that the traditional pitfalls of community-initiated pursuits of accountability for environmental polluters were overcome.

Refining Relationships: How an Unlikely Community-Scientist Partnership led to a Historic Environmental Justice Victory

It all started with a Buffalo News article in January of 2002. At that time, the prevailing hypothesis was that the slew of strange illnesses plaguing the predominantly white community in Tonawanda, NY were a legacy of the Manhattan Project. A ceramics plant, owned by Union Carbide, had been converted to a uranium rolling operation in the mid-1940s in the process of developing the atomic bomb. Uranium refined in Tonawanda was then enriched in Oak Ridge, Tennessee before making its way southwest to the testing grounds, and some eventually to Japan. In the Buffalo News article, above a photo of four solemn men, appears the quotation: “This neighborhood is killing us. There is death all around us.” Laborers who had worked in the war effort and then at other local plants were getting vocal about their manifold illnesses that had been gripping them since the 1990s.1

When the New York State Department of Health conducted a cancer surveillance study from 1994-1998 they indeed found that locally both specific and overall cancers were

1 Pignataro, T. J. “TOXIC IN TONAWANDA? AS STATE INVESTIGATES, A NEIGHBORHOOD IN FEAR.” The Buffalo News, January 13, 2002. https://buffalonews.com/news/toxic-in-tonawanda-as-state-investigates-a-neighborhood-in-fear/article_d9 52d43f-50ce-5237-a1f0-85d585b52eea.html.

significantly higher than state averages.2 In a follow-up study that focused more specifically on the area around the facilities handling radioactive materials, they found that ionizing radiation from uranium was not associated with the documented cancers that were found to be elevated. State officials validated local observations of illness without providing an explanation of their cause. The paper spread out over the kitchen table, Jackie James, a nearly lifelong resident of Tonawanda and mother concerned about her health and that of her family’s, read this article with ever-deepening interest. She thought to herself “If it’s not that, then what is it? I want to find out.”

In this article we document the community-initiated environmental health research efforts and the community's fight for their right to live in a clean and safe environment, that were, at least in part, spawned from that morning read of the newspaper. The 16 years (and counting) of work on airborne and soil-deposited residues of industrial pollution within this small city offers vital insights into practices of collaboration that are conducive to unlikely environmental justice triumphs. The many environmental governance successes outlined below are rooted in reciprocal relationships that were fostered and maintained by a commitment to addressing the problem that transcended egos, recognition or prestige, and a willingness on the part of the state agency scientists to listen closely to a group of community scientists who publicly challenged them. This article helps substantiate what exactly is meant by the sometimes nebulous goal of “trust-building” and supplements existing conversations that center on the quality of community science data as compared to regulatory monitors or those deemed admissible in court.3 Additionally, this history documents a means of destabilizing an

2 The original report was issued in December of 2001 with a follow up in 2004 (a smaller area but longer duration) and a final report in 2013. The final report summarizes: “lung cancer, bladder cancer, and total cancers were elevated among both males and females; esophageal cancer was elevated among males and uterine cancer was elevated among females. Two additional types of cancer were elevated, each in just one sub-area: oral cavity/pharynx cancer among males, and leukemia among females.” (NYS DOH 2001; NYS DOH 2004; NYS DOH 2013: 1).

NYS DOH, and NYS DOH Bureau of Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance. “Cancer Surveillance Improvement Initiative: Linde/Praxair Study of ZIP Codes 14150, 14151 and 14217.” Cancer Surveillance Program, Bureau of Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance, New York State Department of Health, December 13, 2001.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U4rNjeIbN3kqH-NNG8OjLCiYBk9GIYFT/view?usp=sharing.
NYS DOH. “FOLLOW-UP INVESTIGATION OF CANCER INCIDENCE IN THE AREA OF THE FORMER LINDE SITE, TOWN OF TONAWANDA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK, 1990-1999.” Cancer Surveillance Program, Bureau of Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance, New York State Department of Health with the assistance of New York State Cancer Registry staff and the Bureau of Environmental Radiation Protection, November 2004. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U4rNjeIbN3kqH-NNG8OjLCiYBk9GIYFT/view?usp=sharing.
NYS DOH. “Tonawanda Study Area Health Outcomes Review: Birth Outcomes and Cancer, Erie County, NY.” Empire State Plaza, Corning Tower Room 1203, Albany, New York 12237: Center for Environmental Health Bureau of Environmental & Occupational Epidemiology, The New York State Department of Health, October 9, 2013. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VQ_iJsC3jMGiWkW5hBgCT-1hR0TWaVHN/view?usp=sharing.https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/investigations/tonawanda/docs/final.pdf.

3 Environmental Law Institute, OP. “A Citizen’s Guide To Using Federal Environmental Laws to Secure Environmental Justice,” 2002.

all-too-common friction between community members and regulatory scientists, routing the collective work towards monumental victories: criminal prosecution of the polluter including the environmental manager being sent to jail, over $12.2 million dollars awarded by the courts toward health and soil studies, and eventually one of the authors pressing the plunger to demolish the stacks of the offending facility.

Community Scientists and the State

When James was reading the paper that winter morning, a community environmental group in Tonawanda had not yet formalized. Yet, the heavy industrialization of the Niagara River from the bottom of Lake Ontario to the top of Lake Erie had yielded nearby wells of experience. James was invited to speak on a Toxic Tour in the summer of 2003 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the infamous injustices of Love Canal, just 12 miles upriver. As the bus passed through Tonawanda and James spoke about the proven harms and unproven etiologies, a North Buffalo resident, Adele Henderson, approached her and said, “You know, I think it’s something in our air that is making us sick.” James responded, “I think maybe you’re right.” Henderson, Bob Hirsch (Henderson's husband), Tim Logsdon, and James started a new citizens group in Tonawanda. Mike Schade joined the group, lending his experience working with Lois Gibbs on environmental justice campaigns related to Love Canal.

Together they learned that there were 54 air regulated facilities in Tonawanda—the highest concentration of regulated facilities in all of New York State. Schade was aware of a group out of California called Global Community Monitor that was using a low-cost tool for air grab sampling, known as “the bucket.”4 Denny Larson of Global Community Monitor flew out to western New York to assist the group in conducting a good neighbor campaign using data from bucket monitors as leverage.5 In a basement in 2004, Larson and a handful of community members gathered to conduct a training (see Figure 1). The hardware of the bucket method is less expensive than its professional alternative, a stainless steel evacuated sphere called a

https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/eli-citizens-guide-using-federal-environmental-laws-secure-envi ronmental.
Brett, Annie. “Putting the Public on Trial: Can Citizen Science Data Be Used in Litigation and Regulation?” Villanova Environmental Law Journal 28, no. 2 (August 1, 2017): 163.

EPA. “EPA Needs a Comprehensive Vision and Strategy for Citizen Science That Aligns with Its Strategic Objectives on Public Participation.” Improving EPA Research Programs. Office of Inspector General, US Environmental Protection Agency, September 5, 2018. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-09/documents/_epaoig_20180905-18-p-0240.pdf.

Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic. “Supplement 2: Using Citizen Science Data in Litigation; Manual for Citizen Scientists Starting or Participating in Data Collection and Environmental Monitoring Projects.” Edited by Shaun Goho and Wendy Jacobs. Harvard Law School, March 2019. https://citizenscienceguide.com/supplement-2-using-citizen-science-data-litigation.

Wyeth, George, LeRoy C. Paddock, Alison Parker, Robert L. Glicksman, and Jecoliah Williams. “The Impact of Citizen Environmental Science in the United States.” Environmental Law Reporter News & Analysis 49, no. 3 (2019): 10237–63.
4 Ottinger, Gwen. “Buckets of Resistance: Standards and the Effectiveness of Citizen Science.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 2 (2010): 244–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243909337121.

5 Ryder, Paul. Good Neighbor Campaign Handbook: HOW TO WIN. 0 edition. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2006.

summa canister, but the lab analysis of its sample remained expensive. The group would go out at night, when the factories were most likely to release fugitive emissions, and rely on their noses to signal when to begin the three-minute sampling process. False starts or ephemeral noxious plumes could prove costly when it came time for analysis, so they had to be extremely discerning in determining when to sample. When they received the results from two of their first moonlit sampling runs in a thicket of facilities, they were immediately concerned by high benzene and carbon disulfide levels. The group, previously dubbed Toxic in Tonawanda, decided to rebrand as the Clean Air Coalition (CACWNY)6 when releasing their results, to “sound less militant”.

Figure 1. Image of the Bucket sampling training from Denny Larson. 2004. Photo by Adele Henderson.

While the name may have appeared more neutral, their press conference announcing their findings infuriated the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) who felt blindsided for not being consulted prior to publicly releasing data, skeptical of the 3-minute grab sample’s validity, and less-than-pleased that the media inferred that DEC wasn’t doing their job.

6 The original name was simply the Clean Air Coalition, in 2007ish James added “of Western New York” to the name to distinguish it from other regional coalitions.

In an initially heated phone call, the procedural disconnect between grassroots community science and governmental regulatory science was quickly overcome through a conversation that revealed the lack of consultation to be an oversight and not an attempt to undermine state authority. Much of the success of the relationships that undergirded this campaign emerged from this incident, essentially emerging from a deficit of trust.

Using Toxics Release Inventory data available on the US EPA website, the team was able to tie the relatively unique carbon disulfide signature of their July 20th, 2004, run to a nearby 3M sponge factory. Equipped with their book on good neighbor campaigns, the community group met with the owners of the plant alongside the same engineer from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation that had initially made contact to reproach the group—Al Carlacci. 3M flew someone out from headquarters to give a presentation on what they would do to reduce emissions, and then set those plans into motion.

Elated that their plans to improve their community’s air quality were progressing exactly as planned, they moved on to benzene. CACWNY’s data appeared to be the perfect fulcrum for the community to gain leverage with their industrial neighbors, but figuring out the source of the benzene, which is a much more common emission, proved difficult.7 Was there a single facility to blame or was it an aggregate level from dozens of facilities? The group held meetings on Saturday mornings at a local fire station. On April 1, 2005, the same New York State engineer suggested the group focus on the Tonawanda Coke Corporation (TCC) due to the wind direction present during CACWNY’s bucket sampling.

At this time, the collaboration and trust with the state DEC was growing more robust. Al Carlacci of NY DEC Air Resources, with the support of his immediate supervisor and the DEC team in Albany was transitioning from supporting the group on weekends to actively attempting to replicate their findings using longer duration samples and the more conventional industrial hygiene tool of summa canisters. Carlacci’s official data indicated ambient benzene levels just as concerning as the initial CACWNY bucket samples. Tom Gentile, Chief of the Air Toxics Section for the Division of Air Resources at DEC then utilized this second round of monitoring to secure a $300,000 grant from the EPA (matched in-kind by DEC)8 to place four high quality real-time monitoring stations in Tonawanda from 2007-2008 as a full year of data is needed for a violation of the Clean Air Act to be identified (Figure 2).

As Jackie James has noted, “People ask me all the time, “wow what kind of data did you have? How did you get it?” “We got it because we worked with certain agency scientists that we could trust. We kept the lines of communication open and we all pulled in the same direction. It wasn't always easy, but we were straight up and didn't throw any punches. It made everything much easier. The trajectory of ‘data for civic action’ is not nearly enough. Relationships are the backbone of any successful collaboration. And you can build that trust by doing what you say you’ll do.” Tom Gentile recalls that James told him once that she did not like him, but that this was a step of honesty on the way to developing profound trust.9 As James further notes, “I may disagree with a partner, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go low and throw them under the

7 Indicative of this confusion, the community members initially thought that the NOCO energy company, a half mile to the north, was the source of these benzene emissions. This bucket sample was taken on August 16th. Both samples mentioned were taken around 11pm.
8 Under assistance agreement XA97265106-0 form EPA Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards.

9 Personal communication: Gentile, Tom. “Subject: Re: Scientist-Community Collaborations,” February 22, 2021.

bus. This would be a sure way to lose trust in any collaboration.” The CACWNY and DEC made an agreement on a “code of ethics” pertaining to how they would not speak negatively about each other in public.10

Glenn and Jennifer Ratajczak, founding board members of CACWNY, recall previous discussions with other DEC officials who directly regulated the Tonawanda Coke Corporation. Their concerns with TCC were met with repeated dismissal, “Being treated by the regulator as if we could not have pertinent information just because we were citizens developed an underlying distrust between us.”11 When the regulator would take community complaints to TCC and believe TCC’s dismissals that were later revealed as bald lies, the community grew suspicious of that regulator’s alliances. Working relationships with Carlacci, Gentile, and James were developed separately from and survived alongside these tensions through the processes James discusses above. Having relationships with engaged constituents who are focused on co-learning the problem made it possible for agency staff to commit to sorting out what was really going on in the face of a system which officially did not acknowledge any harm. As Gentile notes in the genre of bureaucratic understatement, “Not being adversarial, goes a long way in some cases.”

10 This agreement was limited to that time and those people. Today, the CACWNY operates under no such agreement.
NYS DEC. “Working Together to Address and Solve an Air Pollution Problem: Community Based Science

for Action Conference Tonawanda, New York.” September 19, 2015.

11 Lambrinidou, Yanna, William Joseph Rhoads, Siddhartha Roy, Erin Heaney, Glenn Andrew Ratajczak, and Jennifer Holly Ratajczak. “Ethnography in Engineering Ethics Education: A Pedagogy for Transformational Listening.” Indianapolis, IN: American Society for Engineering Education, 2014: 24.

Figure 2. Benzene pollution wind roses indicate the primary source to be Tonawanda Coke Corporation, shown in the green circle.12

The preliminary data from the DEC study supported the hypothesis that Tonawanda Coke was a disproportionate benzene emitter. CACWNY wrote a letter to the owner of the plant, J.D. Crane, asking to meet. He summarily rejected the request and insisted that they are already a good neighbor. The early data from the DEC also spurred a joint DEC/EPA special investigation of the facility in April of 2009 with renewed federal enforcement interest due to the dawn of the Obama administration. Federal and state agencies working in lockstep, without jurisdictional friction and with shared resources and institutional knowledge, was another key aspect of the robust relationships needed to get to the root cause of the city’s compromised atmospheres. Two months later, the DEC presented their findings supporting what CACWNY had known for years: that hazardous air pollutants were elevated in Tonawanda, and benzene was the contaminant of the highest concern. The results pinpointed Tonawanda Coke as the predominant culprit. TCC claimed to emit 4.9 tons of benzene into the air of Tonawanda in 2007

12 NYS DEC. “Tonawanda Community Air Quality Study.” Buffalo, New York: Division of Air Resources; Bureau of Air Quality Analysis and Research and Bureau of Air Quality Surveillance, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 2009.https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/air_pdf/tonfinalrpt2009.pdf.

and 5.2 tons in 2008. Stack DIAL tests later revealed that the company was grossly underreporting their benzene emissions, exceeding more than 10 tons each year. One assessment, likely an overestimation due to co-contaminants, calculated a release of 91 tons.1314 Importantly, 10 tons in annual emissions is the upper threshold for a single facility to be labeled a “minor emissions source.” By reporting under that level, TCC was able to maintain a much less onerous permit than that of major emitters.

James remembers the audience bursting into a standing ovation at the community center auditorium when these results were presented to over a hundred community members in early June, 2009. At that moment, she remembers breathing a sigh of relief. Having studied chemistry in undergrad, she felt sure that having this smoking gun of robust data would be the key to reducing pollution from Tonawanda Coke. Yet, after the projector was turned off and the crowds funneled out, there seemed to be no enforcement activities underway at the state or federal level. “How could they definitely know that we’re living in a gas chamber and not do anything about it?” James remembers remarking to her collaborators with dismay.

13 NYS DEC. “Tonawanda Community Air Quality Study.” Buffalo, New York: Division of Air Resources; Bureau of Air Quality Analysis and Research and Bureau of Air Quality Surveillance, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 2009.https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/air_pdf/tonfinalrpt2009.pdf.

EPA. “FUGITIVE BENZENE EMISSION MEASUREMENT TEST REPORT: TONAWANDA COKE CORPORATION, TONAWANDA, NY.” US Environmental Protection Agency, September 2, 2010.https://archive.epa.gov/region02/capp/web/pdf/tcc_dial_report_summary.pdf.
14 On the stand at trail, Harish Patel, an Environmental Engineer at EPA Region 2’s Air Compliance Branch, estimated that “about 173 tons per year of coke oven gas that could potentially be released from that pressure relief valve” (Patel 2013: 46)

Figure 3. Residents were shocked to learn how far the emissions and associated cancer risks spread past the TCC fenceline. Slide created by Jake Klau, CSCR from Appendix K (DEC 2009: 284-300).

As TCC continued business as usual, the immediate next steps involved elected officials who had reached out to James after reading about the results in the news.15 June 22, 2009: New York State Senator Charles Schumer wrote a letter requesting to meet with J. D. Crane, owner of Tonawanda Coke. Crane declined the meeting, stating in his August 21st reply that the EPA’s claim “cannot be substantiated.” His counsel continued, “Nor does, in our view, the [DEC + EPA] Tonawanda Community Air Quality study, an ambient air quality study, stand for that proposition. It’s a red herring, bun with no burger claim” and attempted to shift the blame from his facility to the incomplete combustion of automobiles.16 Concurrently, in July 2009, New York State Senator Kirsten Gillibrand wrote a letter to EPA head Lisa Jackson regarding the benzene levels, requesting that Jackson meet with the Clean Air Coalition, accelerate enforcement of mitigation activities, and establish an environmental benefits program to study health and remediate the soot that has been contaminating their soil for decades. There was no response.

From Science to the Courtroom

James’ fibromyalgia was wearing her down again. She was exhausted by both the disease and the huge amount of work needed to make these large strides towards environmental justice. The community group she had co-founded with Tim Logsdon, Adele Henderson, and Bob Hirsch years earlier, CACWNY, was formalizing into a nonprofit and she had been appointed as the Executive Director in 2007. Having fundraised to fill her position, James stepped down in September 2009 to take care of her health. They hired someone with more organizing experience and energy to assemble a protest at the gates of Tonawanda Coke—Erin Heaney. The protest was tremendously successful and was featured above the fold in The Buffalo News.17 Aaron Mango, an Assistant United States Attorney working for the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the Western District of New York, stumbled upon the story when he visited his parents’ house in Buffalo that Sunday, October 11, 2009 and saw the paper sitting on their kitchen table. The next working day Mango emailed criminal agents with EPA stating his intentions to investigate the company on criminal charges. As the criminal investigation progressed, a search warrant was executed at the plant on December 17, 2009, which included law enforcement agents from the DEC, EPA, US Coast Guard, FBI, and others. On the day before Christmas Eve in 2009, and as a result of what was found during the search warrant,

law enforcement officials returned to the plant and arrested Mark Kamholz, the plant’s

15 Looking back, the first author realizes how much of a greenhorn she was at this point, having not known that she needed to engage with local elected officials. She was lucky enough to have been contacted by their cabinets after the results of the June 2009 meeting were disseminated in the media.
16 Email: Crane, J.D. “Re: Regional Air Emissions—Benzene Levels,” August 21, 2009.

17 Sommer, Mark. “Protesters Demand Tonawanda Coke Cut Emissions DEC Study Found Dangerously High Levels of Benzene | Latest Headlines | Buffalonews.Com.” The Buffalo News. October 8, 2009. https://buffalonews.com/news/protesters-demand-tonawanda-coke-cut-emissions-dec-study-found-dange rously-high-levels-of-benzene/article_658c4065-e45b-5949-b74c-bd637617e166.html.

environmental manager, taking him out in handcuffs. After almost 9 years of data collection and organizing, they had achieved their first regulatory intervention and first national news coverage.18

Figure 4. Protest outside the gates of TCC, 2009. Image by Eric Duvall (Tonawanda News).

In July 2010, Tonawanda Coke and Kamholz were indicted by a federal grand jury in a 20-count indictment, and the resulting prosecution required additional labor from community organizers, such as collecting impact statements from residents. The protracted work prompted many to burn out, sometimes repeatedly. Many from CACWNY, like James, always came back. The DOJ criminal presecution then spurred the EPA to advance civil litigation, yielding two parallel tracks of accountability. Key details emerged through the litigation, such as the identification of an unregulated pressure release valve as a primary source of fugitive benzene emissions, the existence of which employees were directed to conceal (see Figure 3). A worker in active employment at Tonawanda Coke courageously took the stand and testified that he was

18 Shogren, Elizabeth, Sandra Bartlett, and Kristen Lombardi. “N.Y. Town Unites, Exposes Pollution-Monitoring Flaws.” NPR.org, November 10, 2011. https://www.npr.org/2011/11/10/142189390/tonawanda-provides-lessons-for-fighting-toxic-air.

The first author remembers taking one of the NPR reporters for a walk down the backside of the plant along the railroad tracks, which provides the best view of the facility. The stench was horrendous and the reporter’s nose began to bleed.

instructed to conceal the valve from regulators.19 Trial in the criminal case lasted from February 26 to March 28, 2013, with the jury finding Tonawanda Coke guilty of 14 counts, including violations of the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The plant’s environmental manager, Mark Kamholz, was personally facing the same 18 counts with an additional obstruction of justice charge. Kamholz was convicted on all of the same counts as the plant, as well as an additional charge of obstruction of justice.

Figure 5. “A steaming pipe was the smoking gun.” Picture of the unregulated valve responsible for much of the fugitive benzene emissions. Image by the Department of Justice.

This was only the second time that a company had been convicted following a jury trial for violating Title V of the Clean Air Act. Indicative of the many false summits along the path to accountability and harm reduction, James and colleagues thought that the declaration of guilt was the threshold of victory for environmental health. Yet, EPA Special Agent Robert Conway, turned to her and explained, “if you have a guilty verdict, we’re only halfway there. We need a good sentence.” A year passed between the verdict and sentencing. The presiding judge, Judge Skretny, invited the community to provide their stories about the air quality’s impact on their lives to help him determine the sentencing. He additionally invited the impacted community to submit scientific project proposals to better understand the emissions and their impacts. These projects could potentially be funded through court-mandated community service projects,20 where polluters pay money not only to the government in fines but also pay money to third parties for

19 Center for Health, Environment & Justice. “Community Organizing Wins: Major Air Toxics Reduction—A How-to Guide on Organizing for Air Toxic Reductions with Lessons Learned from a Tonawanda, NY Success Story,” June 2015.http://archive.chej.org/wp-content/uploads/PUB-143-Community-Organizing-Wins.pdf.

20 Under the Trump administration the DOJ advanced a policy that it will not actively seek community service projects like the ones funded here as part of a criminal sentence. However, federal judges can still impose them if they deem appropriate.

environmental restoration or study. James and collaborators put in a $711,000 project proposal to continue the soil testing they had already begun and submitted it to the judge. In March of 2014, Judge Skretny ordered Tonawanda Coke to pay $12.5 million in a criminal fine and $12.2 million in community studies including the study proposed by the first author and colleagues. The environmental manager was sentenced to a year and a day in prison and subject to a $20,000 fine in addition to community service.

After their losses in court to the DOJ, TCC agreed to settle with the EPA and installed pollution control equipment, reducing their benzene emissions by 86 percent (NYSDEC 2013: 1). Their settlement also included $1.3 million for community-focused research, totaling over $13 million for environment and health projects across both lawsuits. While the reductions were major accomplishments, the 100-year-old plant was unable to be retrofitted with adequate environmental protection systems without an investment sizable enough to outweigh its cost efficacy. A broad array of issues continued, from failures in safety controls that led to a worker being pulled into the furnace by his jacket snagging on a conveyor belt to an underground waste heat tunnel collapsing in January 2018 that caused a black billowing smoke cloud to be released.

Figure 6. Photos from the “Stop the Stacks” campaign. Images by Annmarie Kozlowski Schneider, Matt Creedon, Paul Leuchner and Jackie James, 2018. Used with permission.

Company denials persisted. A few of the original CACWNY team formed an additional group, Citizen Science Community Resources (CSCR), and in May, CSCR began a “Stop The Stacks'' campaign. They held a press conference with elected officials (City of Tonawanda Mayor Rick Davis, Grand Island Supervisor Nate McMurray and Town of Tonawanda Supervisor Joe Emminger) and community leaders (Joyce Hogenkamp and Jenn Pusatier), and launched a Facebook social media photo-documentation campaign of the company’s site. These community photos were used by the DOJ in their September 2018 brief that resulted in hauling TCC back into court. In July of that year, fire broke out at the facility and workers drove a forklift to the entrance blocking fire trucks from entering. As a result of these collective problems, the DEC refused to renew their environmental permits that were up for renewal. At that point the facility was already on probation, the public was on high alert, and the DOJ and the DEC were not only keeping close tabs on these happenings but local politicians too were getting fed up. Town of Tonawanda Supervisor Joe Emminger and the town board all went on record saying that Tonawanda Coke needed to be shut down. Finally, in October of 2018, TCC was forced to close and declared bankruptcy. With the plant’s shuttering, safely overseen by the DEC and EPA, what had once been a benzene cancer risk that was 75-times above New York State guidelines was reduced to New York State averages. By December 2019, ambient benzene levels had dropped 92 percent since the end of DEC’s sampling in 2008.21

Figure 7. Benzene levels on Grand Island Boulevard, 1,500 feet northeast of Tonawanda Coke Corporation.22

21 NYS DEC. “FACT SHEET: Community Sampling in Tonawanda, New York.” New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, December 2018. https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/air_pdf/tcccitizensample2018.pdf.
22 Pignataro, T. J. “Air Quality up, Risk of Cancer Dramatically down after Tonawanda Coke Closing.” The Buffalo News, December 28, 2018.

In June of 2021 the smokestacks of the defunct coke processing plant were detonated and redevelopment of the site moved forward (Figure 8).

Figure 8. June 5, 2021 Jackie James celebrates after depressing the ceremonial plunger on the stacks at Tonawanda Coke. Photo by Dean Bogart.

Conclusion

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/air-quality-up-risk-of-cancer-dramatically-down-after-tonawanda-coke- closing/article_69fa4caf-4372-56df-aabe-c8235e0caf16.html.
Based on data from:
NYS DEC. “FACT SHEET: Community Sampling in Tonawanda, New York.” New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, December 2018. https://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/air_pdf/tcccitizensample2018.pdf.

The collective action started with just a few neighbors sitting around a table discussing their individual health struggles and their collective right to a cleaner environment. These few residents had the tenacity to figure out how to collect an air sample with a homemade air sampler they put together themselves with parts from a hardware store. After they received their data back from an accredited laboratory, they worked alongside their state scientists to figure out where the high levels of benzene were coming from. These exact same tools used by the community to quantify the hazards of the air, bucket samplers, do not always spur this kind of collaborative reaction from the state,23 but interested and engaged regulatory scientists (and then attorneys) were able continue and formalize the evidentiary momentum achieved by the community group in a relatively anomalous way. The town of Tonawanda bears twice the concentration of white people as other towns in southern Louisiana where community groups similarly attempted to utilize the bucket sampler to bring accountability to their industrial neighbors. The campaign in New Sarpy, for example, resulted in direct negotiation with the polluting company’s engineers rather than regulation by the state and much smaller concessions were made from similarly concerning data.24 Racial factors likely played an invisible role in advancing justice in a largely white town,25 yet Black and brown-led coalitions have utilized the bucket for massive change such as the passage of South Africa’s Air Quality Act in 2004.26 Joining other successes, how this group was able to achieve these successes can hopefully serve as a template for other communities facing similar problems.

Like the work in Louisiana, Tonawanda’s search for answers emerged out of public outrage and government dismissal. Erin Heaney, who took over from James as Executive Director at the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York in September 2009, described the early efforts being constantly called into question, “We [Clean Air Coalition] were continuously told that it was not possible that these wrongdoings were taking place at TCC. If TCC were performing these acts, the DEC engineers would be aware of it.”27 But between these groups emerged a set of individuals who were willing to work with each other (within and around the system) in order to determine if there was indeed compromised air quality and if so whose stacks were to blame.

These would-be collaborators experienced conflicts around speed of work and information flow. For example, when the government’s science process and enforcement moved slower than resident-activists deemed acceptable due to the continuous impact of the emissions

23 Ottinger, Gwen. “Changing Knowledge, Local Knowledge, and Knowledge Gaps: STS Insights into Procedural Justice.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 38, no. 2 (March 1, 2013): 250–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243912469669.
Shapiro, Nicholas, Nasser Zakariya, and Jody Roberts. “A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating the Environment to Inviting Apprehension.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 3 (September 28, 2017): 575–602. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2017.133.

24 Ottinger, Ibid.
25 Lavelle, Marianne, and Marcia Coyle. “The Federal Government, in Its Cleanup of Hazardous Sites and Its Pursuit of Polluters, Favors White Communities over Minority Communities under Environmental Laws Meant to Provide Equal Protection for All Citizens.” National Law Journal, 1992.
26 Roemer-Mahler, Anne. “The Power of Knowledge. CSOs and Environmental Policy Making in South Africa.” IDO, August 16, 2006. https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/3639.pdf.
27 Lambrinidou, Yanna, William Joseph Rhoads, Siddhartha Roy, Erin Heaney, Glenn Andrew Ratajczak, and Jennifer Holly Ratajczak. “Ethnography in Engineering Ethics Education: A Pedagogy for Transformational Listening.” Indianapolis, IN: American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.

Jackie James CreedonOctober 29, 2026