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Wilma Subra on Toxic America with Sanjay Gupta M.D. on CNN tomorrow June 2 at 7 p.m |
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Watch our very own Wilma Subra on Toxic America with Sanjay Gupta
M.D. on CNN tomorrow June 2 at 7 p.m.!!
Environmental warrior takes on industry
By David S. Martin, Senior Medical Producer
May 25, 2010 8:45 a.m. EDT
Chemist
and environmental activist Wilma Subra collects a water sample in
Gueydan, Louisiana.
New Iberia, Louisiana (CNN) -- Chemist Wilma Subra was working at
her desk by a picture window one cool June evening in 2006 when the
passenger in a passing car fired a single shot in her direction. The
bullet lodged in a brick a few feet from where she was sitting.
Not your typical day at the office for a chemist, but Subra is not a
typical chemist.
"I think they were just trying to scare me and get
me to back off," says Subra, a soft-spoken grandmother who has made it
her life's mission to help communities fight against chemical threats
from industry.
Subra didn't quit. She moved her desk away from
the window and went back to work. The gunman was never caught.
"I can't close up and not be out there," she says matter-of-factly.
"Out there" means traveling to communities across the country worried
about pollution.
 Is enough being done to protect us from
chemicals that could harm us? Watch "Toxic America," a special
two-night investigative report with Sanjay Gupta M.D., June 2 & 3
at 8 p.m. ET on CNN.
Mossville,
Louisiana: 'Like an experiment'
"Communities need so much
help, and you educate and empower them, and then they take on the fight
and the issue. They just need that little bit of information to make
them aware."
Subra received a MacArthur genius grant for her
work in 1999. Her almost genteel manner belies the persistence and
quiet intensity she brings to her work.
Subra, 66, president of
Subra Company, began as a consultant, testing in communities for
government and industry. But she didn't like not being able to tell the
locals what she'd found.
"So in 1981, I said, 'OK, it's time
for me to start doing this on behalf of the communities," Subra says.
Working from small offices in rural New Iberia, Louisiana, Subra has
about 30 active cases at any time. Some of them last for years.
Special
Report: Toxic America
Surrounded by files and stacks of
papers, Subra, also gets calls and e-mails with urgent questions from
communities in the United States and around the world. Subra says she
sometimes gets an emotional call from someone who works in industry.
"It's
someone in their family who is now sick. And they'll start off by
saying I'm so and so and I've never agreed with you and I've been on
the other side, but my wife or my child is sick and I want to know what
are the potential things they could have been exposed to that caused
the illness," she says. "And suddenly we can have a dialogue about what
they're exposed to ... They have a complete change of attitude because
they thought they would never be touched by it, and now someone in
their family is being touched by it. It's amazing."
In the
weeks since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank off the coast of
Louisiana, Subra has been working long hours investigating the
potential environmental and human health impacts of the oil spill in
the Gulf.
Her work in the past year has ranged from natural gas
drilling in Dish, Texas, to groundwater contamination from oil and gas
drilling in Pavilion, Wyoming. She has provided technical assistance to
communities near the polluted Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco,
California, and evaluated the potential environmental impacts of
importing Italian nuclear waste through the port of New Orleans,
Louisiana.
Her biggest victory, Subra says, came in a fight
against an oil waste incinerator in Amelia, Louisiana, that began using
hazardous waste and toxic wood treatment waste as fuel. "There were
all kinds of illnesses in the community," says Subra, who is from
nearby Morgan City, Louisiana. Among those who got sick: grandchildren
of longtime friends who developed a type of brain tumor called a
neuroblastoma. After 12 years, a federal judge ordered the facility
closed. Subra testified at the trial.
Much of her time has been
spent in Mossville, a 200-year-old African American community in
southwest Louisiana surrounded by 14 chemical plants.
"All the
people there are being exposed to a very large quantity of very toxic
chemicals," Subra says.
Subra says there are thousands of
communities in the United States facing environmental threats.
"Next to industrial facilities, next to paper mills, next to
refineries, next to chemical plants, next to landfills, next to
hazardous waste sites," she says.
Asked if she's a modern-day
Erin Brockovich, the environmental crusader who became the subject of
an Academy Award-winning movie, Wilma Subra laughs.
"I've been
doing this since way before Erin was doing it."
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