The seasonal burn casts a long shadow over the Glades. The hoods of cars are faded due to ash buildup and nebulizers are ever-present in the community during the harvest season. Thousands of people in the region are employed by two of the biggest national sugar producers — U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals — in a region that has suffered from high unemployment for decades. The sugar growers also fundraise for charitable causes, securing food, clothing, and household supplies for residents.
Public agencies at the county, state, and federal level have declined to phase out sugarcane burning, despite growing concerns about the adverse health effects of the practice expressed by both public health researchers and Glades residents themselves, as well as a class action lawsuit currently underway in the region. This neglect has left this low-income, predominantly Black community acutely vulnerable to respiratory illness.
A yearlong joint investigation by Grist and Type Investigations has found that the School District of Palm Beach County has leased the land adjacent to Rosenwald Elementary to U.S. Sugar for harvesting since 2002, despite consistent concerns raised by parents, students, and teachers about the effects of the burn; that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has for decades maintained discriminatory zoning rules that ban burning only when smoke drifts into wealthier areas of the county; and that public officials have referred resident complaints about the burn to the sugar industry itself.
On a windy afternoon last fall, Phillips sat on her front porch with a young puppy in her lap, just 300 feet from Rosenwald and its fields of fire, momentarily resigned about the noxious air quality in her community.
“They’re killing people by doing this,” she said. “It’s taking innocent people’s lives for no apparent reason.”
‘A fair deal’
The incident in Phillips’ third grade classroom was not the seasonal burn’s most extreme intrusion into Rosenwald. On February 6, 2008, plume after plume of smoke billowed into the school. Administrators faced a dilemma when deciding how best to respond, according to internal correspondence: “Would the evacuation expose students to even more smoke from the sugar can [sic] burn or would keeping them in the school expose them to less smoke than the evacuation?”
By the end of the day, six students had been hospitalized and nine more had been treated by paramedics on-site.
As the community grappled with the fallout from the emergency, it was not widely known that the school district was actively collecting revenue from growers starting fires like these. Six years earlier, Rosenwald had quietly become the hub of a partnership between the sugar industry and the Palm Beach County School District.
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The month before the incident, in fact, the school board was considering renewing the pact. “The question we may get now from the Board is whether this is a good/fair deal,” wrote a lawyer for the school district to another official in an email dated January 9, 2008. But at the school board meeting two weeks later, Joseph Moore, the district’s chief operating officer at the time, recommended the lease be renewed. The estimated revenue was projected to be $7,000 per year over the next five years. The safety and health of students was not mentioned in any internal correspondence provided to Grist and Type Investigations after a public records request, and the school district’s lease renewal with U.S. Sugar ultimately took effect three weeks after the evacuation.
Rosenwald Elementary School in South Bay is adjacent to nearly eight acres of sugarcane stalks. Students are often unable to play outside due to smoke from sugarcane burns. Google Earth
Claudia Shea, director of communications for the School District of Palm Beach County, did not respond to questions sent over several months about the district’s lease with U.S. Sugar; complaints from teachers, parents, and students about health concerns regarding the burn; or allegations by teachers that they are discouraged from speaking against cane burning at school. Shea ultimately provided a statement saying that, because agriculture is the primary land use in the region, it is impossible to locate schools “not in immediate proximity to these agricultural operations.” Shea also said that “the School Board has no authority to regulate agricultural activities of the region” and that the federal, state, and local agencies tasked with permitting and regulating the burns “ensure a healthy learning & working environment” at district schools.
Initially, the lease agreement also included an educational program called Sharing Our Agricultural Roots (SOAR) that helped students plant gardens of cherry tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, and spinach. “Far beyond the educational aspects of what school gardens contribute is the self-esteem that they provide,” reads a program description from 2011, which was provided Grist and Type Investigations in response to a public records request. The description does not note the fact that the burn curtailed the amount of time that students could spend outdoors, tending to these gardens.
The hazards that the seasonal burn brings Rosenwald and its students are openly acknowledged by some stakeholders. On its website, the architecture firm contracted by the Palm Beach County school board to modernize Rosenwald emphasizes that its new design prevents students from having to walk outside during the school day: “Sugarcane fields are burned sending hazardous pollutants into the air. The heavy smoke and ash prohibit outdoor play, keeping the children inside throughout the school day many times during the year.”
Smoke from a sugarcane burn appears over a strip mall in Belle Glade. Patrick Ferguson, Sierra Club Organizing Representative for The Stop Sugar Field Burning Campaign
The school district has also budgeted for an extra janitor to clean the “ash and muck” at Rosenwald and 11 other schools in the Glades. Teachers and students throughout the region say that the smoke is an ever-present concern. When Brittany Ingram, a former teacher at Belle Glade Elementary School, asked her students what would improve their community for a class assignment, she recalls several students writing “clean air” in their journals. In March 2017, she decided to distribute flyers around the school to raise awareness about a community event calling for mechanical harvesting as an alternative to the burn. Soon after distributing the flyers, however, she says she was reprimanded by her supervisor.
At Pahokee Middle School, Dayan Martinez became accustomed to always seeing a handful of asthmatic students sitting in the main office while their peers were exercising during P.E. Martinez taught sixth grade meteorological science, but he stayed quiet when it came to discussing the clouds of smoke that would form outside of his own classroom. He wasn’t a Glades native, and was wary of raising concern about a practice so deeply associated with many residents’ livelihoods.
“Sadly, you don’t ask many questions sometimes,” he said.
Rosenwald’s current lease with U.S. Sugar, signed in 2017, expires in 2022. The lease renewal estimated that revenue increased slightly, from $7,000 to $12,000 every year. The SOAR gardening program was omitted from the most recent agreement. Instead, it states that the sugar company’s partnership benefits Rosenwald by “affording them the opportunity to be involved in agricultural events sponsored by U.S. Sugar.”
‘We already know’
Dozens of scientific studies link exposure to sugarcane smoke to a litany of adverse health outcomes, according to a literature review currently being conducted by researchers at the University of Florida’s department of environmental and global health. Among the maladies associated with the practice are chronic kidney disease and increased risk of fetal death.
“We already know that particulate matter is hazardous,” said Eric Coker, a professor in the department. “Particulate matter can actually affect almost every organ system in the body, from neurologic to cardiovascular to respiratory to reproductive.”
As a result of these hazards, sugar-producing regions in Brazil, India, and Thailand are taking steps to phase out the burn. In Louisiana, growers primarily use mechanical harvesting, instead of burning, to harvest their crop. Palm Beach County is an anomaly. And because of this, Glades residents say that they suffer unduly from ailments like asthma, bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cancer.
The regulation of sugarcane smoke in Florida involves four different federal, state, and county agencies that permit and monitor the burns and air quality. Ultimately, they’re tasked with ensuring that pollution does not exceed federal air quality standards. The EPA’s environmental justice mapping tool, which combines demographic and environmental indicators, places the Glades within the 80th to 98th percentile in its index of the most hazardous areas for respiratory health in the U.S. However, even though the respiratory risk in the Glades is higher than in most of the country and surrounding areas, it still doesn’t violate legal standards established under the Clean Air Act, according to the EPA. Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, which is responsible for monitoring the state’s compliance with the Clean Air Act, also said that Palm Beach County meets national air quality standards. In a recently filed class-action lawsuit, residents dispute those conclusions.
Thanks to months of sugarcane burning every year, much of the Glades region falls within the top 20th percentile of an EPA index of the most hazardous areas in the U.S. for respiratory health. Grist / EJSCREEN
In 1978, Palm Beach County passed the Environmental Control Act, which authorized county commissioners to regulate pollution. But agricultural industry stakeholders insisted on and were granted an exemption for pollution generated by their activities, according to Jim Stormer, who worked on the county health department’s air pollution control program from 1990 to 2015. Even if sugarcane burning created air pollution, the county had no power to force sugarcane farmers to comply with the law.
In the 1990s, the EPA introduced a new standard to measure hazardous particulate matter in the air: PM 2.5. This type of particle, named for its size, is especially harmful because it can get lodged deep in the lungs. Scraping together grants, Stormer teamed up with researchers at the University of Florida to collect data detailing the chemical composition of sugarcane burn emissions to submit to the EPA. Stormer also offered support to researchers at Florida International University in determining the percentage of hazardous emissions in the Glades that could be attributed to sugarcane burning. One of those studies found that ambient levels of harmful particulate matter increase 15-fold during the harvest season — and that a significant portion of that pollution could be sourced definitively to sugarcane burning.
But without an epidemiological study that shows a causal link between the burn and the adverse health effects reported by Glades residents, regulation is unlikely, Stormer said.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, or FDACS, did choose to regulate the practice nearly 30 years ago — but only in instances when the burn’s smoke drifts into Palm Beach County’s more densely populated and wealthier regions. On a typewritten report dated September 1992, the department mapped the county into four zones, spanning from the coastal Zone 1 in the east to Zone 4, which encompasses the Glades and other western parts of the county.
Smoke from a sugarcane burn darkens a clear sky near South Bay. Patrick Ferguson, Sierra Club Organizing Representative for The Stop Sugar Field Burning Campaign
When the wind blows toward the more urban areas to the east, the agency prohibits sugar growers from burning, forcing them to either wait to harvest or use the alternative method of “green harvesting,” where leaves are mechanically removed instead of burned off. Zone 4 is currently the only area where burning is always permitted, no matter which way the wind blows.
“You’ve got 1.4 million people living in Palm Beach County but only probably 30 or 40 thousand of them in Belle Glade,” said Rick Roth, a sugar farmer and state representative, explaining why mitigation measures don’t apply to the Glades. “That’s why we have the regulations that try to minimize the amount of sugarcane soot going east.”
He added that it takes 30 percent longer to harvest sugarcane mechanically, rather than using the burn: “It’s really a matter of trying to just do it as cheaply as possible.”
Outside contacts
For the past five years, a handful of Glades residents have gathered regularly in a nondescript office on Main Street in Belle Glade. A “Stop the burn” sign greets them at the door when they arrive.
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Gilda Di Carli | Radio Free (2020-08-19T10:55:43+00:00) ‘They’re killing people by doing this’ — why students at a school 40 miles from Mar-a-Lago can’t go outside. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/19/theyre-killing-people-by-doing-this-why-students-at-a-school-40-miles-from-mar-a-lago-cant-go-outside/
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