The system Congress set up 21 years ago to clean up toxic air pollution still leaves many communities exposed to risky concentrations of benzene, formaldehyde, mercury and many other hazardous chemicals.
Pollution violations at more than 1,600 plants across the country were serious enough that the government believes they require urgent action, according to an analysis of EPA data by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity. Yet nearly 300 of those facilities have been considered "high priority violators" of the Clean Air Act by the Environmental Protection Agency for at least a decade.
About a quarter of those 1,600 violators are on an internal EPA "watch list," which the agency has kept secret until now.
EPA estimates facilities across the country emitted 40 percent fewer toxic emissions in 2005 than they did in 1990, but toxic air pollution has persisted in communities like Ponca City, Okla.; Hayden, Ariz.; Tonawanda, N.Y.; and Muscatine, Iowa.
"I don't think it's a great deal of comfort to tell somebody whose kids may develop brain damage or the adults in the neighborhood who may get cancer that overall we're reducing toxic air pollutants. It doesn't help them," says Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., an author of the 1990 update to the Clean Air Act. "What will help them is that the industries that are in their area actually control the pollution and stop poisoning the people."