Thirty years ago, officials in Wichita, Kansas, discovered that the groundwater beneath a historically Black neighborhood in the northeast part of the city was contaminated with trichloroethylene, a carcinogenic chemical used to degrease metal. It took four years to determine that the contamination originated in a nearby Union Pacific train yard, from a chemical spill that may have happened years — if not decades — prior.
The TCE, which not only causes cancer but can also lead to fetal heart development issues, among other health problems, still remains in the groundwater; Kansas environmental officials only finalized a plan for remediation last year. But it took pressure from a local, Kiah Duggins, to get the state to commit to studying the health effects of the spill on her community too.
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Duggins, who was born in Wichita the year the spill was discovered and grew up in the affected community, is the kind of engaged Black resident who can make all the difference when it comes to local environmental issues.
And there may have been a lot more Wichitans like her if the city had received a $3 million climate justice grant from the Environmental Protection Agency that it was set to jointly apply for with a local nonprofit. But as Wichita Eagle columnist Dion Lefler writes, the city council abruptly pulled out of the Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants program earlier this month, just before the November 21 deadline.
Funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, the EPA’s climate justice grants are, as the agency put it, a “once-in-a-lifetime” funding opportunity “to help communities confront environmental pollution, climate change challenges, and create positive change in their communities,” according to a release.
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Like many programs designed to benefit Black and Brown Americans in the face of climate change and pollution, there’s a very good chance that the grants will not continue under the new Trump administration. But they are available now, and in Wichita, “the funding would have helped residents of minority neighborhoods in the northeast, north-central and Oaklawn neighborhoods inform themselves and advocate for themselves on environmental issues,” according to Lefler.
The grant would have funded a variety of educational and community-engagement activities, which city manager Robert Layton told the Eagle can be difficult to measure the effects of. There were also concerns about the city’s “role and liability” in administering the grant money.
The corridor is also located close to the many Black and Brown neighborhoods.
With the city’s history of freight, meat packing, and other industries, the groundwater contamination in northeast Wichita is far from the only industrial pollution in the city — it’s not even the only area contaminated with TCE. There’s another place now known as the North Industrial Corridor, where a history of heavy (and varied) industrial use led to TCE and other carcinogenic solvents seeping into the groundwater in the surrounding vicinity. The polluted area was declared an EPA Superfund site in 1990, the state took over the cleanup responsibilities a few years later.
A common pollutant isn’t the only thing the two toxic plumes share: the corridor is also located close to the many Black and Brown neighborhoods that grew up around the stockyards, packing plants, and an oil refinery that have at one point or another been located in north Wichita.
That history of diverse working-class communities living alongside polluting workplaces is why the city earned a different chunk of money and attention from the EPA during its short-lived climate justice era: last year, it was announced that Wichita State University would be home to one of 17 Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers, which will help people with “removing barriers and improving accessibility for communities with environmental justice concerns,” according to an EPA release. The center is set to receive $10 million, if not more, over the next decade from both the EPA and the Department of Energy.
But unlike the federal grant that city leaders decided to leave on the table, the center at WSU won’t be solely focused on environmental justice in Wichita, but across all of Kansas and three other Midwestern states too.