EPA head: ‘Journey to Justice’ tour ‘really personal for me’

— Michael Coleman’s house is the last one standing on his tiny street, squeezed between a sprawling oil refinery whose sounds and smells keep him up at night and a massive grain elevator that covers his pickup in dust and, he says, exacerbates his breathing problems. EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited Coleman and other area residents on a five-day “Journey to Justice” tour that highlighted low-income, mostly minority communities adversely affected by decades of industrial pollution. “I’m able to put faces and names with this term that we call environmental justice,” Regan said at a news conference outside Coleman’s ramshackle home, where a blue tarp covers roof damage from Hurricane Ida. Principal Cheryl Brown called the school’s dependence on portable toilets “degrading” and “inhumane on all levels.” Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba called the water outages ”a cycle of humiliation within our community” and an example of “what it looks like for our children when we fail to provide.” Lumumba said in an interview that his impoverished city needs about $2 billion to fix its water infrastructure, but expects to receive far less from the infrastructure law and other federal spending. Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, a New Orleans-based group that hosted Regan at several Louisiana sites, said the problems Regan witnessed are “generational battles” with no easy solution.