Pollution Permeates Wilmington, and it is Not a Coincidence

Inhabitants of Wilmington Delaware have experienced heavy pollution in their area for years, and they maintain that environmental racism is the cause.

Delaware native Shari Griffin has driven through New Castle, Delaware so many times that very little can surprise her on this ordinary drive. The roads are not the smoothest, but they are tolerable. The suburban scenery is not the most exciting, but it is familiar. The breeze that wafts through her driver’s seat window that is opened just a crack is not the freshest, but it is still refreshing. However, there is always one part of her drive that unsettles her. When she gets on route 4-95 and wizzes by the ramp that leads to Gander Hill Prison there is a distinct shift in the atmosphere. Slowly, but surely, a thick, putrid smell permeates the air and wafts into the car. It stays. She knows now that she is in Wilmington.

“You ain’t even gotta see the landfill, you can smell it,” she says. “It hits you as soon as you get on 4-95. And it smells terrible.”

Shari was raised in the New Castle area on the outskirts of Wilmington, and can’t help but notice, as an African American herself, that the placement of industrial structures, docks, and ports —near predominantly Black neighborhoods—must be by design. “Where those things are placed at, it’s inherently racism”, she says. “Because if you compare it to parts like Greenville [Delaware]…you don’t see any landfills out there. You don’t see any ports, any docks, or anything like that. But you see it by the ghettos of Wilmington and the poor parts of Wilmington, and the people that are living there have to deal with that. Have to live with that.”

There is a distinct demographic difference between Greenville and Wilmimgton that makes Shari’s observation especially pertinent. According to Data USA, a comprehensive website and visualization engine of public US Government data, approximately 80% of the Greenville population in 2017 was White, while only about .5% of the population was Black/African American or Hispanic/Latino. In Wilmington, on the other hand, approximately 60% of the population in 2017 was Black/African American while only 30% was White.

Nimalah Baaith-Ducharme is of Puerto Rican descent and has lived in Wilmington, Delaware all of her life, so she knows first-hand what it means to live in an area that endures environmental racism. “[We were], two blocks down from a really awful neighborhood but also two blocks up from a really great neighborhood,” she recalls. “So [we were] trapped in this limbo of like, you get the the residue of higher income neighborhoods but you’re also still combating the issues that plague lower income neighborhoods.”

Nimalah does not remember time being set aside to clean the streets, fill in the pot holes, or make the uneven roads even. Everyone around her just grew accustomed to these inconveniences and dealt with them as best they could. Her neighborhood is not completely forgotten though. “If you’re super lucky,” she says, “ they’re gonna put a traffic cone.”

Dr. Philip Barnes, a policy scientist at the University of Delaware with the Institute for Public Administration and an assistant professor with the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, explains that areas like Wilmington have a longstanding history of experiencing environmental racism. “There [were] some tanneries, chemical processing, heavy manufacturing, and those industries’ byproducts are still there. The contaminants remain.” he says. “There is legacy pollution from some of the industry that was around the Christina River and the Southbridge [Wilmington] community is predominantly an African American community that is living in, surrounded by, this legacy contamination.”

The only approach the city of Wilmington can take to completely eradicate this issue, according to Dr. Barnes, is applying a cumulative impact assessment to all their future projects. This is a process that identifies additive or interactive environmental effects occurring from human activities over time in order to then avoid cumulative environmental effects.When deciding where to put the next heavy industrial complex, one of the considerations should be if the community proposed is already dealing with a set of existing impacts from previous industrial complexes. However, Dr. Barnes notes, this is unlikely to happen, “because the next time they need to put a polluting industry or a dirty facility somewhere, they put it in the same spot, adjacent to where the other ones are.”

Just last October, the Wilmington City Council pushed for state environmental regulators to broaden their considerations when granting permits to new facilities.

Delaware Public Media reported that the DNREC (Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control) was condemned in August for approving a construction permit in Southbridge, despite community opposition, to Walan Specialty Construction Products. According to the Wilmington Area Planning Council, the neighborhoods closest to the Port are predominantly African American, so environmental racism was believed to be at play.

“We define them as ‘environmental justice’ communities, but they should really be called environmental injustice communities,” Dr. Barnes says. “And this is one of the issues with environmental justice communities; it’s that it’s never ending.”