Twenty-six months since the CSX coal export terminal was built exploded In Curtis Bay, break the windows and send a thick layer of… Coal dust causes cancer In the air, this dust still covers cars, clotheslines, runways, slides and children's bicycles. Some were there before the explosion: a grim sign of the daily catastrophes that have claimed lives in this industrial society for generations, but rarely appear on television news.
And the 6-year-olds in my first-grade class didn't have the honor of ignoring that. As Curtis Bay residents, they saw thick dust everywhere. This toxic airborne substance made it very difficult for children to breathe, causing many of them to stay inside during the holiday. If you know a 6-year-old, you know that they talk a lot.
School children in Curtis Bay are losing their parents, aunts, uncles, neighbours, grandparents and friends Respiratory illnesses occur at higher rates than almost anywhere in Maryland. Since I left the classroom in 2012, I have been Study of governing decisions Behind this grim statistic.
But it doesn't have to be this way. There is a chance this month to change conditions on the ground, the Maryland Department of the Environment announced Opens public comment On whether the construction of a 14 million ton open-air coal dock is a reasonable imposition to impose on the residents of Curtis Bay.
The question would be funny if the risks were not so great. Besides the stress of living in anticipation of the next explosion and knowing that the dust coating their homes is slowly killing them, residents have heard from at least one mayoral candidate. He suggests that the solution to the pollution problem could be their mass exodus.
Such extreme measures have been called for before. A quarter century ago, when things were blowing up across Baltimore's “carbon belt,” conditions became so bad that residents of two local neighborhoods, Fairfield and Wagner Point, They moved to press for their evacuation. They had no other choice. They could not get officials to care about their health. It was very difficult to prove that the ever-present dust – the dust that turns the lungs of local crabs black – was harming them. It is difficult to prove that the asthma, cancer and respiratory diseases they suffer from have roots in the local industry.
What worked was pointing out the explosions. And it was there a lot From explosions. Therefore, residents were left to pursue a campaign that left their actual diseased bodies out of the discussion and instead dramatized their imminent demise in the next catastrophe.
When they received financial compensation to leave their homes, after years and years of work, a A spokesman for the city's Department of Housing and Community Development announced Officials are “happy that the area has become clean… and they no longer have to worry about the environmental risks there or any harm to the residents.” This is one of the most chilling lines I've come across in over a decade of research.
What officials then and now refuse to see is that every explosion is also an exposure — and that when populations move, they carry with them years of embodied effects, including heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other grim ailments. Speculation. The palpable relief shown by the speaker at the time betrayed a deadly selective concern when it came to environmental damage that continues to this day, given the fact that Officials took the opportunity to talk about the CSX explosion in 2021, but it has done little to address residents' daily exposure to coal dust for 140 years.
This great exhalation – this “happiness” that comes with getting things done without addressing people's real concerns – is the attitude that got us here. By making displacement the solution to environmental problems and settling on a course of action that does nothing to rein in the embodied or explosive effects of the industry, officials have nearly lit the fuse that would ignite CSX.
Now you have the opportunity to insist that today's leaders do not make the same mistake.
When MDE sets terms for CSX's operating permit this spring, it will decide who has the right to exist on this peninsula: a coal export terminal owned by a giant multinational corporation that has shown no interest in protecting health, or life, and breathing. Humans who have long-standing relationships with Curtis Bay?
When they make this life-and-death decision, officials must pay attention not only to… Mutations But also for everyday disasters – such as the cumulative effects of exposure to coal dust, and the effects of coal on environmental crises. We can't let them forget that they work for young children who want to play outside during recess, not for out-of-state companies. They work for the benefit of the people of Curtis Bay Calling for a response One that respects their fundamental right to have a future in the place they know and love. These residents don't want that Settlement of claims Then they are forced to leave their homes.
They want the coal to go.
They want to stay.
Chloe Ahman (chloeahmann@cornell.edu) is a professor at Cornell University and author of the book Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore. Until 2012, she worked as a public school teacher in South Baltimore.
