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A graphic of a blue coal plant, with the orange silhouettes of children playing soccer. (Graphic by Lissa Deonarain)
We take a deep dive into coal dust air pollution in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, where trains transporting coal expose residents of predominantly Black communities to harmful dust. We look at this issue of environmental racism with the help of the podcast Crosswinds, featuring producer Adrian Wood.
Featuring: Music: “That Documentaries” by The\_Mountain via Pixabay
Making Contact Team Crosswinds Ep. 1: Friendship Team
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TRANSCRIPT
Producer’s Note: This show features an abridged version of episode one of the podcast Crosswinds, which first aired in 2024.
Lucy Kang: You’re listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.
We first learned about a remarkable podcast mini-series last year called Crosswinds, from the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab. It looks at the impact of coal dust pollution on Black neighborhoods in Virginia. We thought it was a hard-hitting look at environmental racism and the history of the coal industry in the area.
So we wanted to share a couple of episodes from this powerful mini-series with you over the next two shows. I got the chance to speak with the producer, Adrian Wood, about Crosswinds and why it was an important project for them.
Adrian Wood: Crosswinds is an investigative audio documentary about coal dust air pollution in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia that follows the relationships between people who are living in that area and their relationships with each other with the air pollution problem and with the forces that sustain their movement for clean and healthy living.
Lucy Kang: So why did you decide to make Crosswinds and look at the issues of coal dust pollution and environmental racism?
Adrian Wood: With the Repair Lab, we work together as a group of academics, activists, and artists on issues of environmental racism. The work that the Repair Lab does is fueled around and centered around the advocacy of our activists and residents who this cycle brought to us their concerns about clean air in their community in Hampton Roads. What I do as a multimedia producer is centered around their advocacy and their concerns. And I work to create narratives that support the changes that they’re seeking in their communities.
I don’t have journalism training. I have fine arts training, but the Crosswinds series has been shortlisted for a journalism prize, the Press Gazette New Media Storytelling Prize. So that’s a huge achievement for us. And I think that goes to show that non-traditional methods of reporting can offer something to journalism as a field, as well as to the communities that they represent.
Lucy Kang: Well, Adrian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me on Making Contact. We’re so excited to share Crosswinds with our listeners.
Adrian Wood: Thanks for your great questions, Lucy.
Lucy Kang: That’s Adrian Wood, the producer of Crosswinds. And with that, here is episode one of the mini-series, where Adrian introduces us to friends and activists with the Repair Lab, Lathaniel Kirts and Malcolm Jones.
Lathaniel Kirts: Everything in school, we were right next to each other. Math class, English class. That was 1993.
Malcolm Jones: He was losing teeth on both sides. So, when he smiled, all you saw was the two front teeth, like a little bunny rabbit. We would always play on the playground. It was me, him and a little boy named Andy. Uh, we would always act like we were Sonic, Knuckles and Tails from the animated series. Neither one of us was as fast as Andy, so we always had to let him be Sonic.
Lathaniel Kirts: Andy had asthma. And he was a military brat just like me and Malcolm were. I believe Andy was born in Hawai’i and he said the air was so much better there, but then once he moved to Virginia, it was really bad. And he said he used to be able to run all day and run on the sand and have a good time and never really get tired. But when he got here, he used to have asthma attacks and he used to have an inhaler. So he used to miss days from school, I remember, for his asthma, just from being there.
Adrian Wood: Malcolm and Lathaniel grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, in a predominantly Black neighborhood near a coal terminal where coal is dumped onto boats. Here, coal export is a 24/7 operation that produces clouds of coal dust. Wind blows the dust into homes, cars, and gardens. People breathe it in.
In Virginia in the early 90s, when Malcolm, Lathaniel and Andy were playing Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, mortality from asthma for Black people was 200% of that for whites. Two decades later, Black people were almost three times as likely to die from asthma as whites. Now, in 2024, the World Health Organization says air pollution is much more lethal than we once thought. Globally, air pollution is the leading environmental risk factor for diseases like cancer, heart failure and strokes. But this wasn’t on Lathaniel’s mind when he was a kid, growing up in Norfolk in the 90s, when air pollution was something he could touch.
Lathaniel Kirts: You could see a kind of a film of, you know, dirt and, and I, which I could assume now, it was probably more coal dust at that moment.
Adrian Wood: Lathaniel and Malcolm grew up in Norfolk, one of seven cities in the Hampton Roads region. Newport News is another Hampton Roads City, and they have the same problem in their Southeast Community , which is right next to another coal terminal. Here, in 2011, Southeast Newport News had an emergency room rate for asthma attacks double that of the rest of the city. That survey showed half of residents saying the cause of their asthma was coal dust.
Since then the value of coal export in the US plummeted, hit record lows around 2016, then rose again. Now, it’s worth half a billion more than when that asthma study was done in 2011. But the profit doesn’t come without a cost. The industry takes a heavy toll on people’s health and well-being as well as the environment. For a long time, it was seen as okay for Black people to bear the brunt of these costs. This disparity has a name. It’s environmental racism.
This series seeks to understand how coal dust pollution affects two Black communities in Hampton Roads, and how these communities continue to fight against environmental racism. Whose responsibility is it to clean up the coal dust? What are residents asking for? And what must they do to prove that their problems are real and worthy of repair?
Welcome to Crosswinds.
I’m Adrian Wood. I’m a white trans sound artist and producer for the Repair Lab at the University of Virginia. This show comes out of a question from Malcolm Jones and Lathaniel Kirts: how can coal dust be reduced in Hampton Roads, to achieve environmental justice?
Lathaniel Kirts: We breathe the same air. And I think that more people came to that realization in the area when there was a forest fire in Canada and then the smoke made its way all the way down here to Virginia – people had to understand it then. The same thing is happening now with the coal dust from Norfolk Southern. The same thing is happening with the coal dust from CSX.
Adrian Wood: Lathaniel just named two rail companies – Norfolk Southern and CSX – that transport coal to the terminals in Hampton Roads. Legally, each terminal is allowed to emit about 150 tons of dust into the air every year – that’s the equivalent of an adult blue whale’s worth of dust, released into the air, every year. A lot of people in Hampton Roads know that the coal dust pollution is a problem. But that community knowledge hasn’t yet led to a long-term viable solution. What will it take for these communities to have access to clean, healthy air?
It seems like common sense that respiratory health problems in these neighborhoods are related to the coal dust. Coal dust can contain mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and silica. These are known to cause cancer, fetal defects and neurological damage, even at very low doses. There is no known safe level of exposure.
Though the mechanics of each terminal are a little different, both of them end up dumping out freight cars full of coal either onto boats or big piles where it gets stored. Everytime a coal car is unloaded, it sends a plume of dust into the air that can be carried by wind through windows and into homes in the neighborhood. When the coal dust lands somewhere, the heavy metals it contains accumulate. They build up in soil and water, as well as on surfaces like playgrounds, plants and porches.
None of this is new. The coal terminals date back to 1865. For a long time they brought money and jobs to the neighborhoods that surround them, and the dust was a tradeoff that came with industry. Now that these terminals employ fewer locals, the question lingers: who gets to decide the threshold of that tradeoff, when the residents are bearing the brunt of the cost?
To understand this question, we have to understand who is responsible, legally, for regulating the coal terminals.
Grace Holmes: So what is the DEQ and what do we do? DEQ is the Department of Environmental Quality and we protect the environment…
Adrian Wood: That’s Grace Holmes, environmental justice coordinator with the Department of Environmental Quality – the DEQ. Grace is introducing the DEQ at a community meeting in Lambert’s Point in Norfolk in 2022.
Grace Holmes: …also required to do things under Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act…
Adrian Wood: Which was passed in the 70s. The DEQ makes sure industries like coal terminals are in compliance with standards set by the Clean Air Act.
Kim Fields: Department of Environmental Quality was like established in the 90s, Which is almost like 20 years later than a lot of other surrounding states would.
Adrian Wood: This is Dr. Kim Fields, an environmental policy expert at the University of Virginia and an assistant professor in African American Studies.
Kim Fields: So, it had a late start. It has meant that most of its environmental, regulatory management has been…not as strong. They just don’t do a good job in general of getting things cleaned up or managed properly.
Adrian Wood: Things like monitoring, enforcement or remediation — these things are essential for environmental justice to happen. One example of this is landfills. Less monitoring and enforcement led to fewer inspections of landfills. The state legislature did an audit in 1995 that showed that the landfills that got skipped were in minority neighborhoods. No inspections meant that landfill juice leaked into groundwater undetected. No enforcement meant that that problem went unaddressed for years. These unmonitored landfills were disproportionately located near predominantly Black neighborhoods, leaking into drinking water and soil, making people sick.
The audit that reported this was specific to landfills. But It came out together with a general audit of the DEQ. Together, these audits painted a portrait of the new agency. Everything was dysfunctional.
Kim Fields: It was a pretty damning [chuckle] report. It said that morale was really low, that it lacked a cohesive vision, that it didn’t have the capacity in terms of workforce or expertise to do the things that it was mandated to do.
Adrian Wood: The 1995 audit of the DEQ was tough. It showed that half of DEQ employees disagreed that the DEQ maintained environmental quality; only a third agreed that it did. That’s maintain, not even improve. While these reports didn’t show explicit evidence of intentional racial discrimination, they did show negative environmental outcomes for communities of color.
Kim Fields: There was this kind of indirect definition of environmental injustice as being overt kind of intentional discrimination based on race.
Adrian Wood: In 1995, this was the de facto definition of environmental racism in Virginia: intentional racial discrimination. If community activists couldn’t prove that intentional race-based discrimination guided government behaviors, then there was no requirement for the state to step in and try to fix things in the environment.
Kim Fields: That really makes it difficult to move for remedy. For environmental justice activists, you know, it really put a damper on their ability to press for changes that would have to come from state government.
Adrian Wood: What did all of this mean for Malcolm, Lathaniel and Andy? When all the DEQ consolidations were happening in the 90s, these three were running around on a playground in Hampton Roads, the region of Virginia that has both the highest concentration of Black residents in the state and the biggest coal export operation in the country. So when coal dust was billowing out of the export terminal in their neighborhood, no one knew how much of it these kids were breathing in.
Salima Hamirani: I’m just jumping in to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, focmedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. And now, back to the show.
Adrian Wood: There is a reason why the coal terminals in Hampton Roads are surrounded by Black neighborhoods. Let’s look at Newport News first.
Michael Mines: The first slaves were brought here on the White Lion.
Adrian Wood: This is Michael Mines – Pastor Mike. He’s a musician and community leader in Newport News with Flow Church and Peninsula Baptist Association. Southeast Newport News is one of the oldest African American waterfront communities in the country. The region has a rich history of freed, enslaved and self-emancipated Africans and African Americans whose descendents still thrive in this historic community.
Michael Mines: When Virginia seceded from the Union, Fort Monroe became Union held territory.
Adrian Wood: Is that here in Newport News?
Michael Mines: Yeah, yeah. 15 minutes from here.
Adrian Wood: Fort Monroe is where the first slave ship landed at Point Comfort, right next to Newport News. Early on in the Civil War, Fort Monroe was seized by the Union. ]
Michael Mines: Slaves began to come to Fort Monroe seeking asylum.
Adrian Wood: Around this time the Union made a decree that if enslaved people came to Union- held territory, they wouldn’t be returned to their Confederate owners. Instead, they would become, quote unquote, “contraband.” A gray area between free and unfree – but a definite improvement from being enslaved.
Michael Mines: And so when that word got out, uh, slaves all over the country began to run to Union held territories. So by the time Lincoln signed the Emancipation, they were already running anyway. So he just, it was already going downhill. He just gave it another shove. And that’s a piece of lost history. And there are living contraband descendants here.
Adrian Wood: Enslaved people were already self-emancipating before this, especially around Hampton Roads which had key locations on the Underground Railroad.
Michael Mines: For both the first slaves to arrive here and then for… the thread to be pulled that unraveled slavery–to both be on the same beach.
Adrian Wood: Newport News is on a spit of land surrounded by deep water that makes it a natural port. It’s why the ships carrying enslaved people docked in this area, in 1619. The deep water is also why coal was shipped out of here in the 1870s.
In that era, post-Reconstruction, thousands of African Americans fled racial terror across the South. In Newport News, they found jobs exporting coal and building ships. Those industries made it one of the biggest cities in the region. Many African Americans settled in the East End of downtown Newport News, one of the first areas to be established in the growing city. East End, also known as the Southeast Community, is still right next to the coal terminal.
Newport News continued to grow in a pattern that’s now familiar across America. Processes like redlining and white flight codified racial segregation. As of the 2020 census, the Southeast Community is 81% African American. On the other side of the Elizabeth River from Newport News, Lambert’s Point, Norfolk, has its own history of coal export.
Carl Poole: Ah, my name is Carl Poole. Let’s see, family’s from Norfolk. I see this every single day. I see it where I work at. I just watch these trains go back and forth. I can see, you know, black clouds going up.
Adrian Wood: Carl works in Lambert’s Point which is next to the coal terminal in Norfolk. Although the coal dust has always seemed like a given, Carl believes things can change. He works as an advocate with New Virginia Majority, a group focused on racial and economic justice.
Carl Poole: I can do something. Even if it’s not gonna work, even if nobody else thinks it’s going to, to do anything.
Adrian Wood: Carl knows the history of Lambert’s Point well from working in the neighborhood.
Carl Poole: Lambert’s Point from its origins is kind of a working-class neighborhood. The neighborhood grew up built in and around Norfolk Southern’s coal distribution.
Adrian Wood: Coal started getting shipped out of Lambert’s Point in 1910. At that time, the neighborhood was mostly white dock workers at the coal pier.
Carl Poole: That’s how the neighborhood got there. It was originally built to house folks working for the railroad, working for Norfolk Southern. They’ve been moving coal in one form or another in that area for well over a hundred years.
Adrian Wood: By the 1930s, the coal terminal employed more machines and fewer humans. By the time the neighborhood got redlined in 1940, many of the white former employees had already moved out. That’s actually part of why it was redlined – that, and exposure to the dirty industry of coal export. In later decades, more white families left, and more Black families moved in – but the coal dust stayed.
Even though Norfolk and Newport News have slightly different stories of how they ended up with giant coal terminals, the end effect is similar – coal dust pollution seeps into the air, soil and water of Black neighborhoods. Even as we’ve raised our standards for clean air over the past few decades nationwide, the contamination continues in Norfolk.
Carl Poole: They’ve been there longer than the neighborhood. There’s not a lot of political will to tell Norfolk Southern what to do. Meanwhile, the neighborhood, in a lot of different ways, feels ignored, um, disregarded. And Norfolk Southern doesn’t feel like, you know, there’s a threat from the neighborhood as far as how they do business. Um, and when it comes to air quality, how they address it, they will say, “There’s not a problem. We’ve tested things in our yards, so you know, where’s the problem?”
Adrian Wood: And when Carl says Norfolk Southern tested things, he’s referring to tests that Norfolk Southern either did in-house, or paid a third party to do. Since 1994, the state government has required Norfolk Southern to publish the results of these air quality tests in an annual report.
Malcolm Jones: [reading] Annual report to the Joint Subcommittee studying measures to reduce emissions from coal carrying railroad cars… [fades out and under]
Adrian Wood: Malcolm is reading from the 2020 report.
Malcolm Jones: [still reading] The Lamberts Point Community Monitoring Program monitors airborne particulates in the area … [continuing under narration]
Adrian Wood: Malcolm, Lathaniel and I are looking at the archive of air quality reports from Norfolk Southern.
[Zoom tape] They’ve been monitoring privately. Uh, for like 20 ish, 20 plus years.
Malcolm Jones: Hmm. So, would that mean they already have the data on the impact that the coal dust is having?
Adrian Wood: I think we don’t know because they don’t release other data. Since 1996, all of the information in these reports about coal dust emissions was self-reported by Norfolk Southern, the emitter.
Lathaniel Kirts: Self reporting yourself and writing a letter is completely the same to me as me reporting my- myself for a speeding ticket every year. I’m going to always go with the under. And I’m never going to say, ‘Hey, I was recklessly driving.’ That’s never going to happen.
Malcolm Jones: And then you’re strategically showing that the number is going down. But are you really changing anything? Did you actually do any interventions to impact it? There’s no graphs. There’s nothing showing us averages over the last five years, over the last 10 years. There’s nothing showing us the baselines of where you originally started with your reports to now. How are the numbers going down without any interventions to actually impact the impact of coal dust or what’s going on in the area?
Adrian Wood: The reports show what Norfolk Southern needs them to show, which is that they are following the rules and reporting air particulates that come when they dump billions of dollars of coal from rail cars onto barges.
The way that environmental racism is defined in Virginia makes it hard for advocates like Malcolm or Lathaniel or Carl to push the government for help. Legally, to prove that it’s environmental racism, they’d have to have records of the coal terminals explicitly acknowledging decisions to pollute these neighborhoods with coal dust because they are Black neighborhoods. And those records don’t exist right now.
But the pollution is visible, it’s tangible, and it has been for a long time. It is clear how personal this fight is to Malcolm and Lathaniel. They grew up watching their friends struggle to breathe. Andy was no longer the neighborhood’s “Sonic.” Malcolm’s younger sister wheezed when she went outside. But when they drove me around Lambert’s Point, the neighborhood where they grew up in Norfolk, I saw how the problem was so close to home.
[Tape] I’ll sit in the back.
Malcolm Jones: Oh, you’re good, you’re good.
Adrian Wood: I want to sit in the car seat.
Lathaniel Kirts: No, you should really sit up front.
Adrian Wood: [Laughs] It can’t be that bad, like the field where they played high school football games.
Malcolm Jones: That’s our home field. Me and Malcolm actually used to play football for Maury High.
Adrian Wood: Their home field still sits right next to Norfolk Southern’s coal export terminal in Lambert’s Point. If you look at the field from a bird’s eye view, one corner is actually cut off by train tracks. That’s how close the football players are to the trains that cart thousands of tons of coal to the port leaving plumes of coal dust along the way. Though they grew up watching loved ones suffer from the health effects of coal dust, Malcolm and Lathaniel weren’t necessarily aware of the cause. When they were kids, the dust was just there, like the highway or the train tracks.
As they got older, they started to see how life could be different on the other side of those train tracks. As adults facing environmental racism, their attitude is still intrepid. Even though environmental racism can feel so entrenched through complicated regulations and confusing state agencies with matched priorities – these two are willing to take things one step at a time to move toward their goal of healthy lives for people in their community.
Malcolm and Lathaniel started looking at the coal dust problem because it spoke to them as a problem that affects everything else – a kind of baseline that they wanted to raise to improve outcomes in other areas, like physical and mental health.
Lathaniel Kirts: The same thing that was going on in Norfolk was going on in my own backyard in Newport News. And so at that point I was like, Hey, I have to be more involved…And I can’t do it all by myself because I’m one man, and the one person I could think about, um, that could help me and assist me was you, Malcolm.
Malcolm Jones: I don’t think I would trust anyone else with this project. I know his values, I know his ethics, I know his standards. I know how hard he wants to fight for people to have the same things that he has.
Lathaniel Kirts: Part of the mission is to one, to bring awareness to the issue that’s going on in our community and to come up with some type of proposal for legislation, um, and public policy.
Adrian Wood: And that’s why we’re here. As practitioners-in-residence at the Repair Lab, Malcolm and Lathaniel are bringing attention to the coal dust problem, and attempting to intervene.
Lucy Kang: That was the voice of Adrian Wood, the producer of Crosswinds. Over the next few episodes, we’ll continue the story told by the podcast mini-series, brought to us by the University of Virginia’s Repair Lab. To learn more, head over to our website at focmedia.org. And that does it for today’s show. Until next time, I’m Lucy Kang. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
