For decades, Chicago got a portion of its power from a very local source: a pair of coal-fired power plants on the city’s southwest side. Built in the early 20th century, both Crawford Power Plant and Fisk Generating Station were of another era in a number of ways.
For one, they were practically on top of residential neighborhoods, and when it came to controlling the pollution from burning all that coal, the plants were by no means state of the art. The combination led the two to be ranked number one and number two on a 2012 list from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that graded the environmental justice performance of the country’s coal-fired power plants, which at the time accounted for just under half of the country’s electricity.
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The report found that 39% of the people living within 3 miles of a coal-fired power plant were people of color, and that urban plants almost exclusively have non-white communities as their neighbors — including Crawford and Fisk, which were located in the predominantly Latinx Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods, respectively.
While both are now closed, as are many of the plants that were included in the NAACP top ten in 2012, the effect of all those years of burning coal has been deeply felt by neighboring communities: one Harvard study found that the two Chicago plants accounted for 550 emergency-room visits, 2,800 asthma attacks, and 40 premature deaths annually.
Now, we have an even deeper understanding of the effect that burning coal has had writ large: a new study published by the journal Science in November found that 460,000 so-called excess deaths between 1999 and 2020 could be attributed to the fine-particulate matter pollution from coal-fired power plants, along with other toxic emissions like sulfur and sulfates.
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The study notes interrelated trends in those deaths: 390,000 of the deaths occurred between 1999 and 2007, and whenever concrete actions were taken to reduce pollution, like taking new mitigation measures or closing plants entirely (which has happened a lot over the past decade), deaths decreased dramatically. At the Keystone Power Plant in Pennsylvania, for example, there was an average of 640 “attributable deaths” prior to 2008. But after sulfur dioxide scrubbers were installed between 2009 and 2010, the average declined to an average of 80 attributable deaths per year.
The new study doesn’t touch on demographics at all, but the NAACP ranking can give us a general sense of how Black and Brown Americans were affected by all the coal burned during those 21 years. The report gave 75 plants across the country an F grade for environmental justice.
Of the four million people who lived within three miles of those plants at the time, 53% were people of color (they also had a per capita income of $17,500, about 25 percent below average). All of which suggests that a lot of Black people were exposed not only to pollution from coal-fired power plants, but also from many dirty plants at that.
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“There is no silver bullet that will make these plants clean,” the NAACP noted, “the only truly effective way to stop coal fired power plants from polluting the communities in which they are located, is to close them.”
That has come to pass for many plants, including Crawford and Fisk, which both closed in 2012. Crawford, in particular, was faced with a mounting public campaign from Little Village residents over the public health effects of the plant. But it’s not just the dirtiest, most residential facilities that have closed: electricity produced by coal peaked in 2011, and fully half of that capacity will be closed by 2026.
The overall reduction of coal-fired power plants looks different, however, if you still live alongside one, and are still being exposed to fine particulate matter and other pollution they emit. And while there are far fewer coal plants in operation today than there were a decade ago, there are still 219 in operation, and the same rule that NAACP noted in 2012 still applies today: the only way to make them truly clean is to shut them down altogether.