Charlie Reeves grew up in public housing in South Philadelphia near the oldest and largest oil refinery on the East Coast. Back in the 1970s, his father led public protests at City Hall over what he was convinced was toxic air pollution from the Sunoco Refinery. Authorities dismissed the protests and assured the neighborhood that everything was fine. Those reassurances did not ring true – especially when Charlie, his mother, and several neighbors were diagnosed with cancer, and Charlie’s mother died. Finally, the refinery (then owned by Philadelphia Energy Solutions) closed on June 21, 2019, when a massive explosion and fire at the plant sent a fireball into the sky and rattled windows for miles around.
To Charlie Reeves, the most devastating fact was what he learned six months later, when the Environmental Integrity Project revealed that air pollution monitors ringing the refinery had registered benzene – a known carcinogen – at the plant’s fence lines at concentrations averaging more than five times the federal limit (EPA’s “action level” for benzene) for an entire year. That meant that local residents like the Reeves family could have been exposed to excessive cancer risks for a long time – including months after the explosion, and potentially years before the fire. Philadelphia is one of 13 communities across the country that face potential cancer risks from excessive benzene air pollution detected at the fence lines of nearby oil refineries, according to EPA data produced for the first time in 2019 because of a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Integrity Project and allies.
