On a wet spring day in June, fog shrouded the Mission Mountains on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. Silver beads of rain clung to blades of grass and purple lupine. On a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake in the southeastern corner of the reservation, the land was mostly cleared of trees after state-managed logging operations. Some trees remained, mainly firs and pines, spindly things that once grew in close quarters but now looked exposed without their neighbors.

Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes. “It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”

This nearly clear-cut, 640-acre parcel is state trust land and is a small part of the 108,886 state-owned acres, above- and belowground, scattered across the reservation — this despite the tribal nation’s sovereign status.

The Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that remained in the square would thrive on the occasional fire and controlled burn after logging operations, benefiting the next generation of trees. Instead, the area was unburned, and shrubs crowded the ground. “I see this stand right here looking the exact same in 20 years,” said Incashola. It’s his first time being on this land, despite a lifetime on the reservation — because it’s state land, the gate has always been locked.

A clear line divides forest managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe and recently harvested state-owned land. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News

Tony Incashola Jr., director of tribal Resource management for CSKT, looks out at state-owned parcels from an airplane on August 8. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News

State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.

States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.

But the Flathead Reservation is just one reservation checkerboarded by state trust lands. 

To understand how land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples and nations continue to enrich non-Indigenous citizens, Grist and High Country News used publicly available data to identify which reservations have been impacted by state trust land laws and policies; researched the state institutions benefiting from these lands; and compiled data on many of the companies and individuals leasing the land on those reservations. Altogether, we located more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. In at least four states, five tribal nations themselves are the lessees — paying the state for access to, collectively, more than 57,700 acres of land within their own reservation borders.    

However, due to instances of outdated and inconsistent data from federal, state, and tribal cartographic sources, our analysis may include lands that do not neatly align with some borders and ownership claims. As a result, our analysis may be off by a few hundred acres. In consultation with tribal and state officials, we have filtered, clipped, expanded, and otherwise standardized multiple data sets with the recognition that in many cases, more accurate land surveying is necessary.

The state trust lands that came from sanctioned land grabs of the early 20th century helped bolster state economies and continue to underwrite non-Indian institutions while infringing on tribal sovereignty. “The justification for them is very old. It goes back to, really, the founding of the U.S.,” said Miriam Jorgensen, research director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. The goal, she said, was to help settlers and their families gain a firmer foothold in the Western U.S. by funding schools and hospitals for them. “There’s definitely a colonial imperative in the existence of those lands.”

Although tribal citizens are a part of the public those institutions are supposed to serve, their services often fall short. On the Flathead Reservation, for example, Indigenous youth attend public schools funded in part by state trust lands inside the nation’s boundaries. However, the state is currently being sued by the CSKT, as well as five other tribes, over the state’s failure over decades to adequately teach Indigenous curriculum despite a state mandate to do so. 

Since 2022, the CSKT and the state of Montana have been negotiating a land exchange in which the tribe will see some 29,200 acres of state trust lands on the reservation returned, which could include the logged, 640-acre parcel near St. Mary’s Lake. In the trade, Montana will receive federal lands from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, or potentially both, elsewhere in the state. Such a return has been “the want of our ancestors and the want of our tribal leaders since they were taken,” Incashola said. “It’s not a want for ownership, it’s a want for protection of resources, for making us whole again to manage our forests again the way we want to manage them.”

Tribal nations and states have struggled with state and federal governments over jurisdiction and land since the inception of the United States, says Alex Pearl, who is Chickasaw and a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. But the potential return of state trust lands represents an opportunity for LandBack on a broad scale: an actionable step toward reckoning with the ongoing dispossession of territories meant to be reserved for tribes. “The LandBack movement that started as protests has become a viable policy, legally,” Pearl said. 

The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is one of the largest reservations in the U.S., stretching 4.5 million acres across the northeastern corner of Utah. But on closer look, the reservation is checkerboarded, thanks to allotment, with multiple land claims on the reservation by individuals, corporations, and the state of Utah. Altogether, the Ute Tribe oversees about a quarter of its reservation.

The state of Utah owns more than 511,000 surface and subsurface acres of trust lands within the reservation’s borders. And of those acres, the Ute Tribe is leasing 47,000 — nearly 20 percent of all surface trust land acreage on the reservation — for grazing purposes, paying the state to use land well within its own territorial boundaries. According to Utah’s Trust Lands Administration, the agency responsible for managing state trust lands, a grazing permit for a 640-acre plot runs around $300. In the last year alone, the Utes have paid the state more than $25,000 to graze on trust lands on the reservation.

Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, almost all of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing. 

The Pueblo of Laguna, Zuni, part of the Navajo Reservation, and Ramah Navajo, a chapter of Navajo Nation, are located in the state of New Mexico, which owns nearly 143,000 surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands across a total of 13 reservations. The Navajo Nation leases all 218 acres of New Mexico state trust lands on its reservation, while the Ramah Navajo leases 17 percent of the 24,600 surface state trust land acres within its reservation’s borders. The Pueblo of Laguna leases more than half of the 11,200 surface trust land acres in its territory, while the Zuni Tribe leases 37 of the 60 surface trust land acres located on its reservation. The nations did not comment by press time.

Cris Stainbrook, president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, said that for tribes, the cost of leasing state trust lands on their reservations for grazing and agriculture is likely lower than what it would cost to fight for ownership of those lands. But, he added, those lands never should have been taken from tribal ownership in the first place.

“Is it wrong? Is it fundamentally wrong to have to lease what should be your own land? Yes,” said Stainbrook. “But the reality of the situation is, the chances of having the federal or state governments return it is low.”

Read Next

The extractive industries filling public university coffers on stolen land

In theory, tribal nations share access to public resources funded by state trust lands, but that isn’t always the case. For example, Native students tend to fare worse in U.S. public schools, and some don’t attend state-run schools at all. Instead, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools, a system of nearly 200 institutions on 64 reservations that receive funding from the federal government, not state trust lands. 

Beneficiaries, including public schools, get revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations, and commercial projects. Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.

While state agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, the process is complicated by the state’s legal obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. Still, some states are attempting to create statewide systematic processes for returning trust lands. 

At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.

That’s the case with Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program, which facilitates exchanges of land that the state’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, deems unproductive. Those lands are designated as “unproductive” because they might not generate enough revenue to cover maintenance costs, have limited or unsustainable resource extraction, or have resources that are physically inaccessible. A 540-acre plot of land that was transferred to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in a 2022 pilot program was considered financially unproductive because “the parcel is too sparsely forested for timber harvest, its soils and topography are not suitable for agriculture, it offers low potential for grazing revenue, it is too small for industrial-scale solar power generation, and it is located too close to the 20,000-acre Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge for wind power generation.”

Currently, Washington’s state constitution does not allow for the exchange of subsurface acreage; the DNR retains mineral rights to state trust lands even after exchange. Transfers are funded by the state, with the Legislature paying the DNR the value of the land to be exchanged so the agency can then purchase new land. The value of all the lands that can be exchanged is capped at $30 million every two years.

Even that money isn’t guaranteed: The legislature isn’t obligated to approve the funding for transfers. Additionally, the program is not focused solely on exchanges with Indigenous nations; any public entity can apply for a land transfer. Through the pilot program in 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and Kitsap County received a total of 4,425 acres of federal land valued at more than $17 million in exchange for unproductive trust lands. All three entities proposed using the land to establish fish and wildlife habitat, natural areas, and open space and recreation. None of the proposed projects in the pilot program had tribes listed as receiving agencies for land transfer. However, six of the eight proposals up for funding between 2025 and 2027 would be transferred to tribal nations.

Read Our Full Series

In North Dakota, the Trust Lands Completion Act would allow the state to exchange surface state trust lands on reservations for more accessible federal land or mineral rights elsewhere. The legislation made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year and, this fall, state officials hope to couple it with bigger land-use bills to pass through the Senate and then the House.

But one of the legislation’s main caveats is that it, like Washington, excludes subsurface acres: North Dakota’s constitution also prohibits ceding mineral rights. North Dakota currently owns 31,000 surface and 200,000 subsurface acres of trust lands on reservations. State Commissioner of University and School Lands Joe Heringer said that returning state trust lands with mineral development would be complicated because of existing development projects and financial agreements.

Right now, the only mineral development happening on reservation-bound state trust lands is on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the state’s northwestern corner, with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. 

Initial oil and gas leases are about five years, but they can stay in place for decades if they start producing within that time. “There’s already all sorts of leases and contracts in place that could get really, really messy,” Heringer said.

By design, subsurface rights are superior to surface rights. If land ownership is split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources, even though the process might be complicated, regardless of what the surface owner wants.

“It’s not worthless, but it’s close to it,” Stainbrook said of returning surface rights without subsurface rights. 

Still, Stainbrook acknowledges that programs to return state trust lands are meaningful because they consolidate surface ownership and jurisdiction and allow tribes to decide surface land use. Plus, he said, there’s a lot of land without subsurface resources to extract, meaning it would be left intact. But split ownership, with tribes owning surface rights and non-tribal entities holding subsurface rights, prevents tribes from fully making their own choices about resource use and management on their lands. And states are not required to consult with tribes on how these lands are used.

“In the sense of tribal sovereignty, it has not increased tribal sovereignty,” Stainbrook said. “In fact, I mean, it’s pretty much the status quo.”

Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribal governments of 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. These awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.

In 2023, a wildfire swept the Flathead Reservation, just west of Flathead Lake. Afterwards, the CSKT and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which manages the state’s trust lands, discussed salvage timber operations — in which marketable logs are taken from wildfire-burned forests — on two affected state trust land parcels, both inside the reservation. The tribe approved a road permit for the state to access and salvage logs on one parcel, but not the other, since it wasn’t as impacted by the fire. Later, the tribe found out that the state had gone ahead with salvage operations on the second parcel, bypassing the need for a tribal road permit by accessing it through an adjacent private property.

That lack of communication and difference in management strategies is evident on other state trust lands on the reservation: One logged state parcel is adjacent to a sensitive elk calving ground, while another parcel, logged in 2020, sits atop a ridgeline and impacts multiple streams with bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. The uniformity and scale of the state logging — and the prioritization of profit and yield — do not align with the tribes’ forestry plans, which are tied to cultural values and use of land, Incashola said. “Sometimes the placement of (trust lands) affects cultural practices, or precludes cultural practices from happening on those tracts,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it, because they have the right to manage their land.” 

Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation did not make anyone available to interview for this story, but answered some questions by email and said in a statement that the department “has worked with our Tribal Nations to ensure these lands are stewarded to provide the trust land beneficiaries the full market value for use as required by the State of Montana’s Constitution and the enabling legislation from Congress that created these trust lands.”

Since the 1930s, the CSKT has prioritized reclaiming land, buying private and state trust lands back at market value. Today, the tribe owns more than 60 percent of its reservation.  

While logging used to be the tribe’s main income source, it has diversified its income streams since the 1990s. Now, the tribe’s long-term goal is for its forests to return to pre-settler conditions and to build climate resiliency by actively managing them with fire. The state’s Montana Climate Solutions Plan from 2020 acknowledged the CSKT as a leader on climate and recommended that the state support tribal nations in climate resilience adaptation. However, that suggestion remains at odds with the state’s management of, and profit from, reservation lands. The 640-acre parcel near the Mission Mountains that Incashola had never been able to visit because of the locked gate, for example, abuts tribal wilderness and is considered a sensitive area. Since 2015, the state has made $775,387.82 from logging that area.

The legislation that included the Montana-CSKT land exchange passed in 2020, but progress has been slow. The exchange doesn’t include all the state trust land on the reservation, which means the selection process of those acres is ongoing. The lands within the tribally protected areas, as well as those near the Mission Mountain Wilderness, are of high priority for the CSKT. There are some state lands that are ineligible, such as those that do not border tribal land. But the state has also interpreted the legislation to exclude subsurface acres that could be used for mining or other extractive activities. The tribe is steadfast that subsurface acres are included in the legislation. The impasse has complicated negotiations.

“It’s out-and-out land theft,” said Minnesota State Senator Mary Kunesh of state trust lands on reservations. Kunesh, a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has authored two bills that returned state land to tribes, each with a decade or more of advocacy behind it.

On the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation in Minnesota, for example, the tribe owns only about 5 percent of the reservation, although federal legislation recently returned more than 11,000 acres of illegally taken national forest. Meanwhile, the state owns about 17 percent. That ownership has an impact. Tribes in Minnesota do not receive revenue from state trust lands on their reservations, nor do tribal schools, Kunesh says. “Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that could have perhaps been used to educate, to create housing, to create economic opportunity have been lost to the tribes,” Kunesh said. Still, “it’s not that the tribes want money. They want the land.”

Land return is contentious, but Kunesh has seen support for it from people of all backgrounds while working to pass legislation. “We do need our non-Native communities to stand up and speak the truth as they see it when it comes to returning the lands, and any kind of compensation, back to the tribes.”

But those land returns will also require political support from senators and representatives at both the state and federal level. “Ultimately, it is up to Congress to work with States and other affected interests to find solutions to these land management issues,” the National Association of State Trust Lands’ executive committee said in an email.

In some states, legislators have indicated strong resistance. Utah lawmakers passed a law this year that allows the state’s Trust Land Administration to avoid advertising state land sales. The law gives Utah’s Department of Natural Resources the ability to buy trust land at fair market value, ultimately avoiding possible bidding wars with other entities, like tribes. The legislation came after the Ute Indian Tribe outbid the Department of Natural Resources when trying to buy back almost 30,000 acres of state trust land on their reservation.

“It’s going to have to take the general public to get up in arms over it and say, ‘This is just morally wrong,’” said Stainbrook of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “We haven’t gotten to that point where enough people are standing up and saying that.”

Near the southeast edge of the Flathead Reservation is a place called Jocko Prairie — though it hasn’t looked like a prairie for some time — with stands of large ponderosa pines and other trees crowding in, a result of federal fire-suppression practices on tribal lands. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have worked to restore the prairie by keeping out cattle, removing smaller trees, and reintroducing fire. Land that was once crowded with thickets of brush is now opening up, and as more sunlight reaches the ground, grasses and flowers have come back. 

This year in early June, a sea of blue-purple camas spread out on the ground under the trees, reactivated by fire after decades of lying dormant. It was a return.

It’s been four years since Hurricane Laura slammed into southwest Louisiana just shy of Category 5 status. It was the fiercest storm the state had seen in a century, driving more than 10 feet of storm surge onto land. Six weeks later, Hurricane Delta, a Category 2, carved a near-identical gash through the Bayou State, seeming to sense the path of least resistance Laura left behind. That winter, a deadly freeze gripped the ravaged region. Pipes burst and pavement froze into deadly ice slicks as temperatures dropped into the teens. A few months later, spring floods dropped a foot and a half of rain on Lake Charles, the city that had already endured, at that point, three epochal disasters. One journalist dubbed it the “most unfortunate city in the United States.” 

At a meeting this July, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, the administrative and legislative body that oversees Lake Charles and the rest of Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish (pronounced cal-kuh-shoo), seemed eager to shake that reputation. Hundreds of millions of federal disaster aid dollars have poured into the parish, much of them aimed at Lake Charles. The number of tarps covering rooftops — the blue dots that came to define the region after the back-to-back storms — has dwindled. The parish’s income is now exceeding expenses thanks in part to an uptick in sales tax revenue — a sign of economic recovery.

The sentiment was codified in an assessment, presented at the July meeting, called the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. It noted that “there is excitement among our leaders to make great strides in areas that do not involve hurricane recovery.” Minutes later, the jurors approved the use of the parish courthouse grounds for a food and music festival that its organizer promised would be the “go-to festival for the month of November for the state and the region.” The jurors were buoyant. Calcasieu Parish, and Lake Charles, was finally on the up-and-up. 

But while Lake Charles makes progress recovering from the storms’ physical and economic damages, the city is still grappling with another legacy the storms left behind — one that’s quietly undermining its long-term recovery.  

Officials estimate that Lake Charles permanently lost close to 7 percent of its population, more than 5,000 people, in the wake of the storms, though city planners note that the real number is likely even higher. Between 2019 and 2020, the Lake Charles area lost a higher share of its population than any other city in the U.S., a pattern of out-migration sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and severely exacerbated by Laura and Delta.

People left for bigger urban areas like Houston and New Orleans, where housing could be found. Some had been relative newcomers to Lake Charles who had rented apartments and houses; roughly half of the city’s affordable housing stock was damaged. Others were from families who had called Lake Charles home for generations. Those who remained did so for one of two reasons: They could afford to stay, or they couldn’t afford to leave.

But Louisiana doesn’t have a uniform or an effective way of tracking and compensating for that movement — no state in the country does. And that has long-lasting political implications for both the people who leave and those who stay. When a city loses people, it doesn’t just lose some of the social fabric that imbues a place with feeling. Where people end up dictates district lines, congressional representation, and how state and federal resources are distributed.

Lake Charles is now gaining back some of the population it lost, but the influx isn’t following historical patterns: Many of the people who have moved in or returned home are settling into wealthier and, overall, whiter parts of Lake Charles — areas that recovered more quickly from the devastation. Meanwhile, in some of the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods in northern Lake Charles, the recovery process has been painfully slow. 

The U.S. relies on the decennial census to take stock of exactly how many people live where. Come hell or high water, its once-in-a-decade population assessment dictates how district lines are drawn. But in Lake Charles, the timing of the first two storms, which hit as the census was closing down its field offices, immediately invalidated information painstakingly gathered by census officers. Census officials were still trying to track down people displaced by Laura when Delta hit. The city now stands as an example of what happens when the census fails to capture the population-level impacts of natural disasters. How can cities account for storms that hollow out a generation of working-class families? 

Lake Charles is one of many cities across the country being forced to confront these questions. Up until now, however, the invisible population trend lines being etched into the city have been a lot easier to ignore than scarred rooftops and abandoned buildings. 

Edward Gallien Jr., 67, lives with his pit bull, Red, on Pear Street in northern Lake Charles. His house is less than 4 miles away from the county government office where the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury meets, but Gallien hasn’t experienced the recovery the jurors are keen to celebrate. His roof is caving in, frayed scraps of a blue plastic tarp barely covering the sagging asphalt shingles. Smashed windows let in putrid-hot summer air and mosquitos breed in the fast-food containers idling in the sink. 

Other houses on his street bear a tell-tale red tag, meaning they’ve been abandoned and marked for demolition by the city. Gallien, who inherited his property from his parents, is still holding out hope that help will come so he can rebuild. He informally inherited his house, a practice permitted under Louisiana state law that can make it exceedingly difficult for property owners to claim federal relief dollars after a disaster hits.

“I’m not giving up,” he said. “I ain’t got nowhere else to go.” 

Gallien’s house, severely damaged by Hurricane Laura, is one of the most visible reminders of the legacy of hurricane recovery in Lake Charles. Pictures of homes like his were in every post-hurricane story written about the city. The fact that dilapidated houses still exist haunts city and parish officials, but they’re quickly explained away as relics of a bleaker time. The federal hurricane relief money dried up, parish officials note; the city is moving as fast as it can, Lake Charles city councilmembers say. There’s plenty of blame to go around, too: The city says the parish government should be footing the bill; the parish thinks the opposite. 

“It’s not quite recovered to where we need to be,” a parish spokesperson told Grist, a sentiment echoed by many other local representatives. “But it’s a lot closer than it was.” 

Driving around Lake Charles, for-rent and for-sale signs dot hundreds of front yards, subtle evidence that the storms’ impacts linger on. Stalled-out apartment complexes, funded by hurricane relief aid and federal infrastructure funds, sit half built. “Coming soon!” signs adorn new buildings that locals say have been “coming soon” for the better part of a year. The tallest skyscraper in Lake Charles, the Capital One Tower on Lakeshore Drive, badly damaged by the hurricanes, is set to be demolished this week. 

Tasha Guidry, a community organizer and life coach who grew up in Lake Charles and currently lives in the central part of the city, pointed out a new apartment complex on a recent drive from the northern end of the city to its southernmost tip. A handful of cars sat in their respective parking spots in the complex; the rest were empty. “I don’t know how they figure people are coming back here,” she said. “There’s nothing to come back to.” 

The United States Census collects demographic, economic, and geographic data about U.S. residents every 10 years, and conducts a community survey update every five years. The census conducted its latest survey in 2020, and was still collecting data when Laura and Delta hit Calcasieu Parish. The survey had already been marred both by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and statements made by former president Donald Trump about the aim of the census, which experts believe further dampened collection efforts. 

Louisiana ended up having one of the lowest self-response rates to the census in the country, and Calcasieu Parish had one of the highest rates of incomplete surveys. 

Every state in the country uses census data to assess the distribution and racial and economic equity of its populations. Once the latest numbers are published, states have a certain amount of time to rejigger their districts in order to remain compliant with federal voting rights regulations — meaning the census plays an integral role in determining how communities are represented in government. The data and redistricting determines how many seats each state gets in the U.S. House of Representatives, how political districts are drawn, and where trillions of dollars for federal programs are distributed. 

In the wake of the hurricanes, the 2020 census triggered a massive redistricting effort in Lake Charles — the school board, the city council, and Calcasieu Parish itself. “We’ve been redistricted to hell,” Guidry said, noting the sheer volume of redistricting processes triggered by the census within Lake Charles and the parish.

The flow of people out of Lake Charles to other cities in Louisiana or Texas further deepened long-standing racial and economic divides, both at the parish and city levels. “The majority of homeowners were able to come back and rebuild,” said Mike Smith, a member of the Calcaiseu Parish Police Jury who represents District 2, encompassing north Lake Charles. But many renters didn’t come back — at least not immediately. And when they did, they couldn’t find places to live in their old neighborhoods. “Our biggest concern now is housing,” Smith said. Roughly half of the city’s residents lived in rented houses before the storm.

The census didn’t capture these trends, and, in many cases, neither do the new district maps. 

On the city council, Craig Marks, a Democrat who represents District F in the southern portion of Lake Charles, says he has observed a mini, hyper-localized migration taking place: Hundreds of renters have left the worst-damaged neighborhoods and moved into new areas of Lake Charles, including into his own. 

Marks’ District F went from being 51 percent people of color to roughly 66 percent after the latest census round. The shift is significant because for more than a decade, there have been three majority white districts in Lake Charles and three minority ones, with Marks’ district comprising the seventh, a swing seat. “You would pretty much always have a white person in the fourth seat, so the majority would always be 4-3 white,” said Marks, “and that affects how the city is run.” Minority populations, Black people specifically, have been severely underrepresented, often by design, in the Louisiana state Legislature — Louisiana’s parishes and city councils, also prone to gerrymandering, mirror this inequity. 

But what looks like progress in Marks’ district might not end up being as good as it seems. Marks estimates that roughly a third of his constituents are relatively new renters, and some portion of them either don’t vote or haven’t updated their addresses, voting instead in the districts they lived in before Laura and Delta. “The numbers can be deceptive,” he said. Marks is up for reelection next year, and he doesn’t yet know what the long-term impact of population displacement in his district will be. “It makes it harder now, because you’re trying to get people on your team who really don’t have a vested interest in your district,” he said. “When they get straight, they’re going to be in other districts where their homes originally were.” 

What Marks is contending with in Lake Charles is a microcosm of larger disaster-driven trends unfolding across the rest of the U.S., particularly in regions prone to large-scale disruptions like hurricanes and wildfires that displace thousands of people in one fell swoop. Each disaster creates ripples of movement in and out. When multiple cataclysmic disasters strike one region in quick succession, climate change-driven phenomena called “compounding events,” they create overlapping ripples of displacement, making the movement that much harder to track. If it was tracked in real time, local officials would see disturbing trends. 

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, New Orleans knocked down much of its affordable housing, damaged during the hurricane, deeming it a safety hazard. The new buildings that went up were more expensive, and the new construction very quickly gentrified neighborhoods, forcing even more people out in a second, extended wave of displacement. “New Orleans absolutely became a city that was whiter and wealthier than it was beforehand,” said Daniel Aldrich, a professor of political science at Northeastern University. But it was difficult to capture those changes as they were happening, Aldrich said, because the initial population shifts occurred so quickly and because many of the people who left the city were renters. 

“There’s no way the census, every 10 years, will be able to manage keeping up with the rapid population shifts that are already happening,” Aldrich, who switched his research focus to disasters and resilience when his own home was destroyed by Katrina, said. 

After big hurricanes, cities have every incentive to apply for federal relief money and spend it on fixing what’s visibly broken. But calculating population loss, and adjusting district lines to compensate for it, is far less common. States, districts, and cities can conduct their own analyses to determine whether their population makeup has changed, but such analyses are expensive and time-consuming. Following a disaster, local officials have to decide how to allocate whatever limited resources they have, and conducting door-knocking campaigns or tracking mail-forwarding notices to follow displaced people is low on the list of priorities. 

In 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau started incorporating disaster displacement into its weekly “household pulse” surveys — the agency’s smaller, near-real-time assessments of major issues facing the population. There is no law requiring cities and states to use this data to assess population loss. “We collect these data for governments to use in a way that best serves their needs,” a Census spokesperson told Grist.

There’s a financial and political incentive for districts not to update their population numbers following a major disaster, especially if officials in those districts suspect they may have lost many of their residents. The more population you have, the more money you get from your state and the federal government. “If you’re a local administrator and you know the next census is going to record a drop in population, meaning you’re going to lose resources, that’s the last thing you want to accelerate,” said Aldrich. “You want to leave that number hanging until the last possible moment to hold on to whatever federal and state funds that are coming because of the old numbers.”

In six months, Lake Charles will hold its first mayoral and city council elections since Laura hit in 2020. Marks isn’t sure how he will fare. He doesn’t even know how many people he has in his district. What he does know, however, is that more change is coming. When Laura hit and floodwater inundated Lake Charles, it demonstrated exactly which parts of the city were built on high and low ground. North Lake Charles, despite trailing the rest of the city in recovery, sits on some of the highest real estate around, while the southern edge of the city, a former swamp, dealt with more flooding during Laura, Delta, and the extreme rains the following spring. “Ironically, the poor part of the city is the higher part of the city,” Marks said. He forecasts another intercity migration soon. “I would predict that in the next 20 years, you’re going to see a drastic change in the makeup of Lake Charles.”

Nicholas Petris, born to Greek immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1923, could remember a time when electric trucks were a common sight on the streets of Oakland. In fact, just a couple decades before his birth, both electric and steam-powered vehicles — which were cleaner and more powerful, respectively, than early gas-powered cars — constituted far larger shares of the American car market than combustion vehicles. The electric cars of this era ran on lead-acid batteries, which had to be recharged or swapped out every 50 to 100 miles, while the steam cars relied on water boilers and hand cranks to run. But for a few historical contingencies, either model could have rendered its gas-powered alternatives obsolete.

By the time of Petris’ childhood, however, cars with internal combustion engines had become dominant. Gas guzzlers won out thanks to a combination of factors, including the discovery of vast oil reserves across the American West, improvements in the production and technology of gas-powered cars (including the invention of the electric starter, which eliminated the hand crank), the general population’s limited access to electricity, and the occasional propensity of early steam cars to explode.

Whereas electric car pioneers had envisioned communal networks of streetcars and taxis, the gas-powered automobile promised independence, unconstrained by the relatively limited distances battery-powered vehicles could travel without a charge. This meant more Americans than ever were driving on their own, rather than sharing mass transit, such as the railroads on which Petris’ father worked as a mechanic. Petris grew up in a California increasingly dense with traffic and crisscrossed by freeways.

But with the rise of combustion cars came smog. Named for its superficial resemblance to both smoke and fog, the lung-punishing, eye-burning, occasionally deadly mixture of air pollutants began settling on cities — most famously Los Angeles — in the mid-20th century. In 1949, for instance, a blanket of ammonia-smelling vapor settled on Petris’ hometown; a newspaper in nearby Palo Alto, where Petris was studying law at Stanford, declared smog “a growing menace.” By the early 1950s, scientists had identified its cause: exhaust from gas-powered cars. Legislators and regulators — especially in California, the biggest auto market in America — raced to limit the fumes that cars were permitted to spew into the atmosphere. 

In 1958, a still-youthful Petris won election to the California Assembly and was immediately placed on its transportation committee. Just months later, the legislature ordered the state department of public health to establish air quality standards such as maximum allowable levels for auto pollutants. In 1966, the year Petris won election to the state Senate, a California agency required all new cars to reduce certain pollutants in exhaust. Yet federal clean air standards remained far weaker than California’s, and Detroit-based car companies expended tremendous resources aimed at slow-walking regulation. Industry representatives begged for delays, claiming they needed more time to improve pollution-control technology.

Over the seven years Petris spent in the legislature’s lower chamber before his election to the Senate, he had been fielding a steady drumbeat of constituent concerns about air pollution. Doctors showed up at his office begging him to do something about the brownish haze poisoning their patients. He read of the thousands who died from breathing polluted air in Los Angeles alone. A turning point came when a scientist brought Petris a report attributing his state’s infamous smog problem to the automobile and suggesting that, despite its protests, the auto industry had the tools available to reduce its emissions. Despite seven years of incremental legislative progress, Petris realized the government hadn’t done nearly enough. “Oh, we can’t wait any more,” he would recall remarking. It was time, Petris concluded, for something “extreme.”

On March 1, 1967, the newly elevated state senator announced his intention to introduce a bill that would limit each California family to just one gas-powered car beginning in 1975. “[The] internal combustion engine is pouring out poison,” Petris told the press. “So why not limit it?”

The press responded with scorn. Petris’ hometown newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, dismissed his proposal as “so ridiculous that it is difficult to select from the variety of arguments that demonstrate its absurdity.” Even the senator’s campaign manager was furious. Yet rather than watering down his bill, Petris altered it to simply ban all cars with internal combustion engines by 1975.

California’s other legislators were uninterested, so Petris asked merely that his Senate colleagues study the subject further during the legislative recess, during which time he could regroup. Few of these colleagues could have suspected that Petris’ crusade was just beginning. In fact, in the years to come, the California legislature would come shockingly close to heeding his call and banning all gas-powered cars. Copycat efforts would erupt across the country and within the U.S. Congress. For a brief moment, Petris’ pipe dream would be at the vanguard of the burgeoning environmental movement.

As we now well know, this fight to ban the internal combustion engine ultimately failed, stymied by aggressive auto industry lobbying. But more than 50 years later, history appears to be repeating itself. Late in the summer of 2022, a California state agency announced a ban on the sale of new cars containing internal combustion engines. This ban, set to take full effect in 2035, ignited explosive reactions across the political spectrum. In a matter of months, almost a dozen other states had followed suit, enacting bans modeled after California’s, and the European Union appeared poised to do the same.

As it had a half-century earlier, fierce pushback came from the auto industry and its political allies. In Europe, the government of Germany (home to several powerful automakers) forced a wide loophole into the ban, and other countries (including Italy, home to other big car companies) are now pushing to delay implementation. In the United States, the House of Representatives passed a bill to strip all states of their ability to impose such bans. Though the Senate has not done likewise, the Supreme Court may well be preparing to eliminate California’s authority to set tougher auto emissions standards than the federal government, a position that former President Donald Trump would undoubtedly support if he wins another presidential term in November.

Largely unmentioned in this ongoing fracas is the fact that nearly all of this — California leading the charge to prohibit gas-powered cars, other governments following suit, intense industry resistance — has happened once before. Petris’ crusade, though it made the front pages of newspapers across the nation, is little-remembered. Yet the history of his fight and eventual failure has only taken on increased relevance as climate change has revealed the necessity of decarbonizing transportation, which accounts for almost a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Never-before-cited archival material documenting this lost history reveals vital lessons for an effort whose time, a half-century later, may have come at last.

It was a warm, clear Wednesday in March 1969, two years after Petris’ bid to limit and then ban gas-powered cars had apparently died a quiet death, when the state senator reintroduced his bill — and received a very different reception. Just weeks earlier, the largest oil spill in U.S. history had begun off the coast of Santa Barbara, and the California legislature had recently concluded hearings that criticized American automotive companies for failing to tackle smog. This time Petris cannily decided to submit his bill not to the Senate transportation committee, as in his initial attempt, but instead to the much more welfare-oriented health committee. The bill proposed to add the following language to California’s health and safety code: “On or after January 1, 1975, no motor vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine shall be operated on the highways of the state.”

The big car companies “laughed at first,” Petris later recalled, their lobbyists writing off the bill as too radical to merit opposition. But, as contemporaneous reporting and documents in the California State Archives show, Petris brought in doctors to tell the health committee about the “violence” smog enacted on the human body; he brought in William Lear, creator of the Lear Jet, to talk about advances in steam-powered car technology. Supportive letters poured in. On July 24, the health committee unanimously approved the bill. Late that evening, in a move even Petris acknowledged to be a “surprise,” the full Senate passed it by a vote of 26 to 5. The senators had amended the bill only slightly, to have it ban the sale of gas-powered cars in 1975, rather than their possession.

“Detroit went crazy,” Petris recalled in another oral history interview. The big car companies deluged the state with lobbyists and money; they mobilized the state’s car dealers’ trade association, which sent an “all-out alert” to local members, rallying them against the bill. The state chamber of commerce, in turn, condemned the bill’s “serious economic consequences.”

But California residents mobilized, too: In Los Angeles, a group of mothers and children picketed outside a General Motors plant, telling the press they supported the bill. Ultimately, the issue reached a boiling point in a seven-hour hearing before the Assembly’s transportation committee; the chamber was packed with high-priced lobbyists and irate car dealers. As the clock approached midnight, Petris realized he was going to lose by a single vote. He tried to soften the bill’s language to persuade the last legislator, changing an outright ban to an effective one via stringent emissions standards, but to no avail.

Nevertheless, the bill’s opponents did not revel in their victory. “The damage has been done,” lamented one San Jose car dealer. “The car is now looked upon like some kind of dangerous drug.”

Indeed, even before his bill died in the California Assembly, Petris had begun traveling the country, urging other legislators to try to ban the internal combustion engine. Soon, copycat bills appeared in Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Washington.

“We want to scare hell out of the industry,” a New York legislator told Washington Monthly. “We want them to come up with a clean alternative, now.”

Multiple members of Congress also introduced copycat bills at the federal level. One would have phased out gas engines by 1978; another sought to ban them outright within three years. The federal bill that attracted the most support was that proposed by Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day. His bill was fashioned as an amendment to the Clean Air Act, which was being debated in 1970.

“I do not believe that the automotive industry will shift to a low emission engine unless the Congress acts and requires it by statute,” Nelson wrote in a contemporaneous letter.

Read Next

California towns are banning new gas stations. Big Oil is paying attention.

Perhaps the most surprising fact about the whole saga is just how popular the campaign to phase out gasoline-powered cars was among members of the public. Multiple polls in 1969 found that more than 60 percent of respondents favored banning the internal combustion engine within a few years. Supportive letters and petitions streamed into Nelson’s office. Newspaper editorial boards, including that of The Washington Post, endorsed Nelson’s bill. 

“Given a choice between the fetish of the automobile and suffocation, at least some would prefer to go on breathing,” declared The Tennessean. In California, a group called The People’s Lobby gathered a reported 425,000 signatures in an attempt to put the issue on the ballot so that state residents could vote on Petris’ proposal directly.

Bending to popular will, Mercedes started experimenting with hybrid electric buses, while General Motors tried out next-generation steam-powered cars. Even then-President Richard Nixon, in a 1970 address to Congress, announced the creation of a public-private partnership “with the goal of producing an unconventionally powered, virtually pollution-free automobile within five years.”

Among the loudest supporters of Senator Nelson’s bill was the United Auto Workers, or UAW, one of the most politically outspoken and vocally environmental unions in the nation. “I do not believe we can live compatibly with the internal combustion engine,” declared Walter Reuther, the union’s president, in 1970. As public statements and unpublished documents in the union’s archive memorialize, UAW officials demanded cleaner cars despite the fact that it could theoretically put union members’ jobs in jeopardy.

“We’re concerned first as citizens as to the poisoning of the atmosphere, obviously,” Leonard Woodcock, Reuther’s successor as UAW president, told NBC’s Today Show later in 1970. But he was confident that the transition to clean cars would actually create more jobs for UAW members, rather than fewer. In fact, he thought that public outcry over the dangers of auto emissions could reach such a fever pitch that car production would be jeopardized if the industry didn’t find an alternative. UAW members themselves told legislators that they wished fervently for better jobs, hoping to be freed from the horrific health and safety conditions that predominated in auto plants.

As they had in Sacramento, auto industry representatives descended on Washington to fight Nelson’s bill. Publicly, they blasted the senator as ignorant, having “little or no knowledge of the facts of automobile design.” Nelson lamented the effectiveness of such attacks. “The chief obstacle to more stringent control of the internal combustion engine or to developing alternatives to it,” reads one memo in his archival papers, “has been the auto industry itself.”

All of the bills, state and federal alike, failed in the end. Nixon’s program to create a “pollution-free automobile,” meanwhile, was underfunded and soon folded. The car companies quietly shelved their greener experiments, and much-vaunted private efforts — such as William Lear’s steam car — couldn’t attract sufficient financial backing to become true market competitors.

Yet the midcentury crusade to eliminate the internal combustion engine was not a complete failure. In California, Petris pivoted quickly, throwing his support behind the most stringent emissions standards he could get. “I’m a realist,” he told the press. “So I settle for the next best thing.” Soon the California Air Resources Board — the same agency that 50 years later would announce a phaseout of gas-powered cars — adopted the strongest emissions regulations in the nation, which effectively forced auto companies to begin installing catalytic converters en masse.

Nationally, Senator Edmund Muskie — the legislative force behind the Clean Air Act — introduced a bill requiring automakers to reduce pollutants by 90 percent by 1975, the very same deadline Petris and Nelson had set in their crusades. Despite fierce industry lobbying, that bill passed, and a reluctant Nixon signed it into law. “I won after all,” Petris later told an interviewer. But in the years that followed, industry lobbying successfully pushed the EPA to extend the deadline. In 1973, the U.S. was hit by an oil embargo from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which battered car companies’ bottom lines and gave them an argument for further delays.

Nonetheless, the companies significantly reduced emissions in the following years, leading to “99 percent cleaner” vehicles compared with 1970 models, according to the EPA. A study commissioned by the agency found that, in the two decades following its passage, the act saved hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

Today, as the fight to ban the internal combustion engine is in the headlines once again, the story of Nicholas Petris’ fight for an emissions-free engine is instructive: It takes state pressure to get industry to shoulder the expense of innovating cleanly, and it takes public pressure to turn a zany bill into a national movement.

Conversely, however, even national popularity can fail to realize legislative or legal success in the face of concerted industry opposition. As the recollections of Petris, Nelson, and many others testify, the Detroit car companies were deft and dedicated opponents of the bills to ban the internal combustion engine, and their resistance stymied the most far-reaching efforts to curb auto emissions. This history, then, counsels constant vigilance for the proponents of contemporary efforts to phase out the gas-powered car. Even the passage of the Clean Air Act did not stop beneficiaries of the status quo from slow-walking change at every step.

Above all, this history demonstrates the power of solidarity in the fight for environmental change. Even at the expense of their own convenience, members of the public united to demand a different world. “I will sell bicycles if I have to,” one car dealer reportedly wrote in a telegram to Petris. “You go get ’em.” Leaders of the UAW — a union definitionally dependent on the automobile — threw their support behind a bill to ban the very thing they produced; some called for expanded mass transit, and some went much further still.

Read Next

A freeway ripped the heart out of Black life in Detroit. Now Michigan wants to tear it down.

“Better we tear the factories to the ground,” one UAW regional director wrote of the pollution problem, “than continue this doomsday madness.”

In the years following the defeat of Petris’ bill, however, the UAW dropped its environmental advocacy. The energy crisis, the escalation of union-busting, the spread of offshoring, and the rise of Ronald Reagan united to deradicalize the union, and by the late 1970s it was lobbying for weaker emissions standards. Yet in 2023, in the UAW’s first direct election, the radical candidate Shawn Fain became the union’s new president. Fain, known to sport an “eat the rich” T-shirt, has since led a drive to unionize the electric-vehicle sector.

“We have to have a planet that we can live on,” Fain told a rally. It’s a message that evokes both a long-lost past — and a hopeful future.

Henry Morales woke up in the emergency room in Salinas, Puerto Rico, not knowing where he was. A doctor appeared beside him and gestured toward a dark-haired woman with a worried expression. “Do you know who this is?” he asked. Morales blinked, but didn’t answer. Words seemed to belong to some faraway place, and he was too tired to reach for them. “Who is this?” the doctor repeated. After a few minutes, Henry heard himself respond. “That is my wife,” he said.

The memory of what led him to the hospital returned in blurry snapshots that he continues to piece together more than 20 years later. He’d been working a regular shift at Steri-Tech, a company that sterilizes medical devices, where he’d been an operator technician for five years. His job was to move boxes of medical supplies in and out of the sterilization chambers and to check the small vials of biological material placed in each box as a way to verify that it had all been successfully sterilized. In the normal course of Morales’ work, he typically wore a respirator to protect himself from the toxic gas, ethylene oxide, used to sterilize the medical products. 

On the day of his hospitalization, Morales and several coworkers had just removed a pallet of sterilized equipment from the chamber. Once the door to the chamber was closed, Morales and the others took off their gas masks, as was standard. Morales noticed that one vial of biological material was missing. He identified the box he’d overlooked and to be sure that it was sterilized, he opened it. 

One memory that has always remained vivid for Morales is what he smelled when he opened the box. “Dulce,” Morales said to describe the scent; it was sweet, unlike anything he’d smelled before. 

Steri-Tech uses the gas ethylene oxide — which has a unique ability to penetrate porous surfaces and destroy microorganisms without damaging heat-sensitive materials like heart valves, pacemakers, catheters, and intubation tubes — to fumigate the products it sterilizes. It’s what Morales smelled when he opened the box. 

As he arranged the box back on the pallet, Morales began to feel lightheaded, and he stumbled through the rest of his shift. 

Once he clocked out, anxious to pick up his wife and go home, he made his way to his car. As soon as he opened the door, his “mind went out.” 

A coworker found him convulsing with a seizure in the driver’s seat. His arm was lodged between the seat and the center console, his shoulder dislocated. The coworker quickly called an ambulance, and Morales was rushed to the hospital, where medical staff ran MRI and CT scans and found that a portion of the left side of Henry’s brain had died. He was diagnosed with epilepsy and prescribed the anti-seizure drug Dilantin, which he continues to take four times a day. 

When they spoke after the accident, Steri-Tech founder and CEO Jorge Vivoni assured Morales that the plant was safe. According to Morales, Vivoni told him that his condition was the result of congenital epilepsy, not workplace exposure. But during his recovery, Morales decided to read about the effects of inhaling ethylene oxide and recognized that he had experienced all the symptoms of acute exposure: headaches, dizziness, twitchiness, and seizures. 

“Henry was never sick,” his wife, Jannette, said. “Everything changed that day. Before that, he was a healthy man.”

At the time of his accident in 2003, the dangers of breathing in ethylene oxide were not fully known, so neither Morales nor any of his peers consistently wore protective gear while working. Ethylene oxide is a volatile organic compound, a synthetic gas that breaks down over the course of a few months after it’s released into the atmosphere. Research since Morales’ incident has shown that ethylene oxide can damage DNA structures — an ability that makes it both an effective sterilizer and a carcinogen. When it is inhaled by humans, it can irritate the respiratory pathways and increase the risk of cancer and negative health effects in unborn children. About 50 percent of the medical equipment in the U.S. and its territories is sterilized this way.

In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency published its analysis of an epidemiological study of more than 18,000 workers in sterilization facilities that assessed the cancer risk associated with the inhalation of ethylene oxide. The researchers found the chemical to be 30 times more toxic to adults and 60 times more toxic to children than previously known, making it the second most toxic federally regulated air pollutant. The study found links between the exposure to ethylene oxide and multiple types of cancer, including lymphoma and female breast cancer. In response to the EPA’s analysis, some communities in the continental U.S. began to rally against the sterilizers in their backyards. In 2019, a wealthy suburb of Chicago even managed to shut one down. 

But it wasn’t until 2022 that Puerto Ricans learned about the toxic emissions that they worked with and lived near. That summer, the EPA released a modeling analysis finding the island to be an epicenter for ethylene oxide pollution. Four of Puerto Rico’s seven sterilization plants exceed the agency’s cancer risk threshold. The Steri-Tech facility where Morales worked, which has been in operation since 1986, was determined to be the most dangerous sterilizer in the U.S. and its territories. In contrast, the modeling showed that none of California’s 12 sterilizers violated federal standards. The EPA scheduled a community meeting to be held that August in Salinas, at which Jose Font, the agency’s deputy director of its Caribbean division, would answer questions about ethylene oxide and the community’s exposures. 

On the night of the meeting, the community center was packed with people who wanted to know why they were only just finding out about the toxic emissions they had lived next to for three decades. Mistrust of local and federal authorities runs deep in the municipality of 25,000, where more than half the population lives in poverty and families bring home on average $20,000 per year. Instead of apologizing, Font mischaracterized the risks to residents’ long-term health. Referring to the 2016 EPA study, he assured the community members that they could only develop cancer from the emissions if exposed for 70 years. 

“If you are exposed to a given concentration during 70 years, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, you could develop, or there could be the potential for you to develop, cancer,” Font said. “That is what this means. It is very important to understand that. We are talking about the long term, 70 years, seven days, 24 hours a day exposed to that concentration. These studies are extremely conservative.” 

Speaking next, Steri-Tech general manager Andres Vivoni, who is Jorge’s son, said that number should be doubled to 140 years, since the plant only operates for 12 hours a day.  

But “that’s not how it works — 70 years and then boom, you get cancer,” Tracey Woodruff, an environmental and reproductive health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, said. Jennifer Jinot, the former EPA scientist who led the EPA’s ethylene oxide study, explained that an individual’s risk of developing cancer increases the longer they are exposed to the chemical. The EPA’s 70-year benchmark, she said, is the agency’s estimation of the length of an average lifetime, across which exposure — and cancer risk — increases. 

Angela Hackel, a spokesperson for the EPA, said that the agency “will not respond to the alleged mischaracterization of risk” and that, “in general, EPA agrees with how risk was communicated at the Salinas meeting.” Steri-Tech did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“We are dying here,” said long-time resident José Santiago when the community members were given an opportunity to speak at the 2022 meeting. “We are dying. And whoever does not live here, who lives elsewhere, who makes the money, is not impacted, does not worry.” Santiago’s sentiment would prove to be far more accurate than what Font and Vivoni had to say. Subsequent air monitoring by the EPA in the vicinity of Steri-Tech would show that residents were being exposed to levels more than 1,000 times above the agency’s threshold for acceptable risk.

Working conditions at Steri-Tech expose a legacy of negligence by local and federal environmental regulators. Six former plant workers described “inadequate” protective equipment, chronic safety issues that were met with “light” inspections that were “not thorough,” and a work culture that put profits before all else. One employee even found that an important pollution-control device had been turned off at night, confirming rumors he’d heard from workers at the plant. (Several of the workers interviewed for this story asked that their names be withheld for fear of legal retribution from the plant owners or concerns about their friends and family who still work at the facility.) The family that owns and runs the plant are “arrogant and domineering,” said one former worker. “It doesn’t matter to them if their employees get sick. They would implement rules and say, ‘If you want to work, then work, and if you can’t accept things here, then leave.’” 

Salinas is a sleepy seaside town that’s best known for its tranquil beaches and traditional seafood restaurants. Multicolored houses line wide streets. Stray dogs meander in packs along the roadside underbrush. There’s a plaza, a public school and a laundromat, a housing development, and a public park. The presence of an industry other than tourism is only apparent in the chemical odors that waft through the town, thick and unpleasant in the hot, bright air. 

The high number of medical sterilizers in Puerto Rico is directly tied to the outsize presence of the pharmaceutical and medical-supply industries, which were lured to the island almost half a century ago to take advantage of federal tax incentives aimed at spurring industrialization. Pharmaceutical companies were by far the largest beneficiaries of these policies. According to a 1992 report from the federal General Accounting Office, for every dollar pharmaceuticals paid to a Puerto Rican worker, they saved $2.67 in taxes that they would have otherwise paid to the federal government. This came out to around $70,000 in tax breaks per worker every year. 

In addition to the tax incentives, they came eager to capitalize on the relatively cheap labor force and bountiful aquifers, which provided a source of clean water for manufacturing medication. Medical device manufacturers soon cropped up alongside the pharmaceuticals, as advancements in technology called for greater collaboration between the two industries. Sterilization is typically the final step before a medical product goes to market; once the island’s device manufacturers were in business, it only made sense for the sterilizers to follow. 

A general lack of environmental enforcement enabled the industry to pollute freely, dumping the toxic byproducts of pharmaceutical production into Puerto Ricans’ air, water, and soil. The legacy of that pollution is palpable in Salinas, where chemical smells hide the scent of the sea.

The employment rate in Salinas hovers around 36 percent, more than 5 percentage points lower than the island average. The range of job opportunities in this region is narrow, and many young people end up leaving for the capital or the mainland to study and find work. Those who remain have few options beyond the restaurants and the pharmaceutical companies. 

The safety concerns inside Steri-Tech do not end at the fence line. That’s why some residents are pushing the EPA to conduct a cancer study of the surrounding neighborhood. Esteban G. Morales Neris / Centro de Periodismo Investigativo / Grist

One exception to that trend: A former employee, whom we’ll refer to as Marcos, came to Salinas for its primary industry. He had already spent more than a decade working in the medical technology industry before he joined Steri-Tech as a quality assurance worker. The job entailed overseeing every step of the sterilization process, from the receipt of non-sterile medical products to the approval of processing records after each sterilization cycle is completed. At the time, Marcos knew that ethylene oxide was dangerous, but he also understood it to be a critical component of the medical industry’s supply chain. 

Not long after Marcos began working at the plant, he started noticing certain workplace practices that put him ill at ease. Different types of medical equipment require different sterilization “recipes” that specify certain conditions such as temperature and pressure. Failure to use the right specifications risks leaving bacteria on products and infecting patients who come in contact with them down the line. For each batch of sterilized products, plant workers were supposed to fill out charts indicating which recipe they used and submit the paperwork to Marcos for review. On numerous occasions, these handwritten documents confused him, because they differed from the automated records produced by the sterilization equipment. Worryingly, the workers’ records indicated that they had used the correct recipe, while the machine’s data suggested otherwise. 

“If there is an issue with a sterilization cycle, you have to sterilize the product again,” Marcos explained. But some types of medical equipment can only withstand one cycle of sterilization without getting damaged. If a batch of this kind of product is incorrectly sterilized, it gets discarded, and “Steri-Tech has to pay for it.” 

Marcos began hearing rumors that workers on the night shift were turning off the plant’s thermal oxidizer, a device that captures and burns off excess ethylene oxide before it can leak out of the sterilization chambers into the plant or into the air outside. The rumors worried Marcos, so he decided to see for himself whether they were true. One morning, he arrived to work several hours early, and sure enough, the emissions-reduction equipment was switched off and silent. Marcos informed upper management of the practice but does not know whether they ever did anything about it. “I was told not to go there again because that was not my department,” he said. He understood that the propane fuel that powered the thermal oxidizer was the kind of expense that the plant’s owners were known for cutting when they saw fit. 

Turning off the thermal oxidizer at night was an open secret at the plant, according to Marcos. Residents of La Margarita, the neighborhood surrounding Steri-Tech, also reported seeing a dark ash-like substance coating their cars, front yards, and sidewalks, which Marcos said was a sign that the thermal oxidizer was being overloaded — an issue that he witnessed firsthand. Operators would run multiple sterilization chambers simultaneously, even though the thermal oxidizer was designed to burn off gases from just one chamber at a time. Unable to handle the excess ethylene oxide-laden air, the oxidizer would release the toxic gas along with fine black particles that eventually landed in the neighborhood. 

“It was a constant struggle to do things right,” Marcos said.

Other former workers described frequently feeling unsafe at the plant. Despite federal regulations that required it, protective equipment was unavailable to operators on the plant floor during most of Marcos’ tenure. If an accident happened — a sterilization chamber opening too soon, an equipment malfunction — workers had no way of protecting themselves from high levels of exposure to ethylene oxide. Marcos recounted an incident in which one of the workers he supervised was near a sterilization chamber when a valve burst, filling the room with ethylene oxide. Afterward, the worker developed asthma. Another former employee described a situation in which a valve was jammed open, causing the plant’s main burner to turn red with heat. As ethylene oxide leaked into the air, the workers were too scared to approach the shutoff valve, because it was right next to the flaming burner. 

A former operator at Steri-Tech who worked with Marcos, and whom we are calling Frank, said managers instructed workers to wear face masks, which were connected by hoses to ventilators at the back of the facility, whenever the sterilization chambers were open. But the ventilators made it difficult to breathe, so when workers were unsupervised, Frank said, he and other operators usually avoided the equipment altogether. Another former Steri-Tech operator, who took his job after Frank left, said he was never provided protective equipment even though he requested it. This employee did not have health issues prior to working at the facility, but a few months after he joined, he developed sinus and respiratory problems. “It was a horrible experience,” he said. “It did not pay enough to put myself at that level of risk.”

Read Next

An invisible chemical is poisoning thousands of unsuspecting warehouse workers

The conditions at Steri-Tech highlight the dangers of commercial medical sterilization using ethylene oxide, a complex process in which careful consideration must be paid to every step in order to keep workers, nearby residents, and patients safe in the long run. Steri-Tech is just one of nearly a hundred facilities around the country that fumigate medical products using ethylene oxide. While the workplace practices within the Salinas plant cannot be extrapolated to these operations, they may help to explain the substantial levels of ethylene oxide that officials have observed near some of them and underscore the importance of strong enforcement, particularly in places like Salinas where regulators have been historically absent. 

Eventually, the true danger of these sloppy practices came to light when the products failed a sterility test conducted by Medtronic, one of Steri-Tech’s clients, raising concern about the possibility of live bacteria on a batch of supposedly sterile products. The incident was just one of many that convinced Marcos to leave for good. “Above all, it was money, not quality,” he said. “Above all, it was money, not people.”

In August 2022, EPA officials set up six air monitors in the vicinity of the Steri-Tech plant to measure the precise levels of ethylene oxide being emitted. The closest was located at one of the dozens of houses across the street. The monitors collected samples for one week. In its subsequent report, the agency noted that the predominant wind direction in the area originates in the east, meaning the plant’s pollution blows directly into La Margarita. That, coupled with Steri-Tech’s high emissions, were driving ethylene oxide exposures far above federal safety standards. 

The EPA considers an acceptable cancer risk from air pollution to be below 1 in 10,000. That is, if 10,000 people are exposed to a concentration of a pollutant over the course of a lifetime, one person would be expected to develop cancer from the exposure. Over the one-week measurement period in Salinas, the monitor at the house across the street from the plant recorded, on average, 40 micrograms of ethylene oxide per cubic meter of air, which translates to a cancer risk of 1 in 8. That’s more than 1,000 times higher than the EPA’s acceptable risk threshold. The other five sampling locations also registered concentrations of ethylene oxide that breach federal standards.

Last September, following the EPA’s monitoring study, Steri-Tech replaced the thermal oxidizer with a new piece of equipment — a catalytic recuperative oxidizer — designed to reduce its ethylene oxide emissions. Since then, residents of La Margarita have reported hearing booms emanating from the facility, so loud that they could be heard more than a mile away. After finding that Steri-Tech could not prove that its new emissions-reduction equipment was functioning properly, the EPA issued a notice of violation and fined the company $200,000. Steri-Tech then sued the EPA, alleging that the agency did not have sufficient evidence to back up its finding. In an email, Angela Hackel, the EPA spokesperson, said she could not comment on the lawsuit, noting that EPA enforcement officers are currently engaged in “confidential enforcement discussions” with the company. The agency finalized new rules earlier this year that will require all medical sterilizers to continuously monitor the level of pollution coming out of their industrial chimneys. Without strong oversight of Steri-Tech, residents of La Margarita may not benefit from those provisions.

While it is impossible to draw a direct line between a source of toxic emissions and deaths from cancer, the presence of sickness is everywhere in La Margarita, where homes of the deceased lie empty, their front lawns overgrown.

The EPA is the primary federal agency with jurisdiction to enforce environmental laws in Puerto Rico, but its presence on the island has long been minimal. Puerto Rico has its own regulatory agencies tasked with ensuring environmental compliance, but in recent decades, these bodies have hardly played a role in curbing pollution. The Environmental Quality Board, once tasked with the regulation of industrial air emissions, was consolidated into the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources in 2018. Despite the many documented cases of pollution from medical-supply companies in Puerto Rico, the consequences for polluters are limited. Inspections are few and far between. Penalties are paltry. And so the pollution continues. 

Compared to the frequency of EPA inspections and enforcement actions on the mainland, Puerto Rico scored among the lowest in the U.S. and its territories. Its roughly 250 industrial facilities that emit air pollutants have been inspected a mere 1,300 times since 2014 — a rate that ranks it 46th in the nation for inspection frequency. Similarly, it ranks 48th in an assessment of the number of actions taken against air polluters. 

Between 2011 and 2022, three of the seven sterilizers in Puerto Rico were inspected just once, and two were never inspected at all. Because of its high reported emissions, Steri-Tech was one of the more scrutinized facilities. In an email, Hackel, the EPA spokesperson, told Grist that regulators had inspected Steri-Tech three times over the past five years.

Veteran environmental advocate Victor Alvarado has long been preoccupied with the possible adverse health effects of Steri-Tech’s emissions on the neighboring community — effects that environmental regulators are not required to study in an official capacity. He gave the example of the power plant a few miles down the coast in Guayama, which releases thousands of pounds of toxic heavy metals and other pollutants every year. Its effect on the town’s residents is ongoing, one reason why Alvarado and other Salinas residents have pushed the EPA to conduct a cancer study of La Margarita. “If we leave it to the EPA, if we don’t push them to do a health study, it won’t happen,” Alvarado said. As of this month, the study had still not begun, said researchers at the Ponce School for Health Sciences, which the EPA commissioned to carry out the study.

Last year, the agency announced long-awaited rules that require the nation’s roughly 90 sterilization facilities to install equipment that captures ethylene oxide. These controls — called Permanent Total Enclosures, or PTEs — which functionally seal off the facility and are meant to prevent ethylene oxide from entering the atmosphere, have rarely been used on large facilities. Several engineering experts questioned the efficacy of PTEs in sterilization facilities, which are warehouse-like structures with multiple entry points and exits. 

“EPA has not one shred of engineering analysis to show it will work,” said Ron Sahu, a mechanical engineer who has worked as a court-approved technical expert in litigation against the sterilization industry and has submitted reports to the EPA on the efficacy of PTEs on behalf of environmental groups. “It is a faith-based, hopeful suggestion, and we’ll see how it works.” 

The sterilization industry has also warned the EPA that strict compliance with the rule is not feasible. In instances where companies have installed the technology, it has failed to reduce ethylene oxide emissions to safe levels. In Southern California, contrary to the EPA’s earlier modeling, Parter Medical Products was forced to shut down by local regulators in 2022 after an air quality monitor near the facility detected levels of ethylene oxide more than 4,000 times above the EPA’s safe limit. After installing a PTE, emissions decreased, but the company still exceeded public health thresholds. The emissions from the facility currently put the cancer risk for residents nearby at 378 in 10,000 — 378 times above the EPA’s threshold.

Earlier this summer, environmental and community organizations as well as industry groups sued the EPA for its new rules, the former arguing that they are not sufficiently protective of public health, and the latter claiming they are prohibitively expensive to implement. That litigation, which is still in its initial stages, indicates that the fight over the regulation of medical sterilizers is far from over. 

As with all industrial facilities, the safety concerns inside Steri-Tech do not end at the fence line. Joel Ramos Rodriguez lives in his childhood home near the plant, staying on even after losing both of his parents to cancer. For as long as he can remember, the 56-year-old has suffered from hyperthyroidism and neurological problems, the source of which his doctors have never been able to place. Rodriguez said the plant’s presence is most bothersome at night, when a sweet odor fills the air and loud noises emanate from its interior, keeping him awake.

More than 20 years after the accident that upended his life, Henry Morales said that whether or not the EPA passes stronger regulations the damage is already done for generations of Steri-Tech employees. Of his old friends and colleagues from Steri-Tech, he says he is the “sole survivor,” the rest having died from cancer and other health complications years ago. As for his own health, his neurological problems have never subsided, and he still suffers from the aftermath of a stroke that occurred a decade after the accident. 

“They threw me out,” he said of the company, which declined to ever provide worker’s compensation, or even to check on him afterward. “That was it.”