“There’s no school!” Stafford Frank, whose family settled in Mossville in the nineteen-fifties, said from one row back. “What’s the population of children?” he asked. Patches of air outside were hazy with gas, but even Regan occasionally appeared not to grasp the extent of Mossville’s destruction. Someone asked whether the black mask he wore was for COVID or air pollution.

See, that’s what I cherish, and that’s been destroyed.” We had churches for different denominations. “They had a little club on the corner, and families lived down that street. Sitting next to Regan on his tour bus, she asked the driver to slow down, and peered out the window. “I just want you to imagine what it was like,” Carolyn Peters, the president of Concerned Citizens of Mossville, a local advocacy group, said. But when Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, visited Mossville and met with a group of current and former residents recently, as part of his tour to investigate environmental injustice across the South, he saw concrete slabs and overgrown lots spread beneath a small city of industrial towers and gas flares. In its prime, it had its own high school and beauty salon the streets were lined with fruit trees. Mossville, an African American enclave outside Lake Charles, Louisiana, was founded by formerly enslaved people in the late seventeen hundreds.

Missouri ghost towns polution dioxin