GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. _ Neighbors used to barely notice the drab, low-slung industrial building across the river from downtown.
The corporate name on the sign out front had changed a few times over the years. Truck traffic in and out of the loading docks ebbed and flowed. As far as anybody knew, the only concern was word that spread around town years ago about a gas they used inside being explosive enough to level the entire building.
Even after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded last summer that the same gas is responsible for some of the nation's biggest cancer risks from toxic air pollution, it took months before residents of Michigan's second-largest city discovered they had an ethylene oxide problem.
EPA scientists had determined the lifetime cancer risk in one Grand Rapids census tract is nearly four times greater than the national average. But the Trump administration buried the finding in a report quietly released in August 2018.
Nobody at the EPA told people in the middle- and working-class neighborhood known as Kielbasa Valley that they were potentially at risk. Nor did the agency investigate the facility that had reported emitting the cancer-causing gas: a medical device manufacturer sandwiched between a cluster of two-story homes and a branch campus of Grand Valley State University.
"It's like we've been forgotten. Or maybe they just don't care," said Lorna Conkle, who grew up in the neighborhood and today lives a block away from the facility.
This pattern of inaction by the Trump EPA has been repeated in dozens of communities across the nation during the past year, a Chicago Tribune investigation found.
More than a half million Americans exposed to toxic air pollution face cancer risks exceeding agency guidelines, according to EPA data. Ethylene oxide is the chief chemical of concern.
Yet industrial facilities emitting the toxic gas continue to legally operate under federal regulations that haven't been updated to reflect the risk it poses. As a result, neighbors for the most part don't know they are breathing pollution that can potentially trigger breast cancer, leukemia and lymphomas.
