Saturday, August 26, 2000

Planes scream low upon final approach to Hartsfield International Airport. Trains roll by filled with cars, trucks and a cornucopia of chemical goos.

Truck stops, warehouses and factories offer quick access through the neighborhood to Interstates 75 and 285. The Ford Motor plant a mile away emits a toxic brew.

On cool mornings, Willie Starr smells the sewage from a nearby treatment plant. Vagrants roost in the abandoned elementary school across from his house in what remains of the Blair Village neighborhood of southeast Atlanta.

"Since the school went out of here," Starr says, "it's almost a slum."

The once-thriving neighborhood is the epicenter of what may be Atlanta's most polluted area, according to a recent analysis by Clark Atlanta University's Environmental Justice Resource Center.

People living in and around Blair Villa Drive are exposed to more toxic emissions and environmental crud than folks in any other Atlanta community, Clark Atlanta's researchers say. Each year, they are subjected to 1.5 million pounds of toluene, xylene, ethylbenzyne and more.

The chemicals seep into the ground, the water and the air from a handful of nearby factories. While the levels of chemicals in the area don't pose immediate health hazards, they can contribute to a host of respiratory illnesses, the researchers say.

They pinpoint the area surrounding Blair Villa Drive as the most-polluted section of ZIP code 30354 --- Atlanta's "dirtiest" address. They base their findings mostly on the Environmental Protection Agency's "toxic release inventory," a compendium of chemicals.

The researchers also factored in the large number of nearby wastewater treatment plants and garbage landfills, as well as the interstates, factories and junkyards.

"There's no doubt that this segment of the community bears a disproportionate amount of pollution," says Robert Bullard, director of the Resource Center. "In south Atlanta and south Fulton, you see a pattern emerge of environmental racism."

That's an explosive accusation. But it is echoed by Rosel Fann, who chairs the neighborhood planning organization that includes Blair Villa Drive. Within a one-mile radius, 98.5 percent of the residents are black.

"We deal with landfill pollution, airplane pollution, truck pollution," Fann says. "We are saying no more --- no more dumping on residents of southeast Atlanta. If you dump something on us, dump a grocery store, or a drugstore."

Blair Village used to be a working-class neighborhood of red-brick ranchers and tree-lined streets. Then, in the '70s, the public-housing complexes arrived, attracted by cheap land. Whites, who once outnumbered blacks 4-to-1, left for the suburbs.

Hartsfield also encroached. And many homes were abandoned during the '80s under the federal government's noise-abatement buyout program.

By the early 1990s, Blair Village had been wiped from the city's maps. So, too, had the adjoining neighborhoods of Poole Creek, Gilbert Heights and Plunket Town. Yet Blair Villagers still call their neighborhood by its long-cherished name, even if it barely resembles its former self.

Apartments near Southside Industrial Boulevard now sit empty and dilapidated, a favorite spot of winos and drug addicts. Blair Village Elementary School --- once the neighborhood's heart --- is abandoned, covered with graffiti.

Security fences surround churches. Diesel-belching trucks ply neighboring roads, heading from interstate to warehouse to airport.

"I wished I could've just sold out and find a new location," says Starr, a forklift driver who has lived on Blair Villa Drive since 1971. "But I didn't try to sell. Who would want a house around here?"

City officials say Atlanta's southeastern neighborhoods are not dumping grounds for landfills, wastewater treatment plants and other municipal projects.

"City policies are very sensitive to issues of environmental justice," says Mike Dobbins, Atlanta's commissioner for planning, development and neighborhood conservation. "In many ways, we've been in the forefront of reversing practices that result in environmental justice offenses."

Dobbins points to the city's efforts to close landfills and install sophisticated odor-control equipment on wastewater treatment plants.

The Atlanta Regional Commission also considers environmental impacts on minority neighborhoods before approving transportation projects. It is one of five specific criteria that federal regulators say they will be monitoring as the region moves forward with its 25-year transportation plan. Yet all sides admit it is a difficult balancing act weighing the city's needs against the possible impact on individual neighborhoods.

"We in the environmental justice movement would never advocate trading jobs for the environment. It's possible to have both," Bullard says. "But what the people in Blair Village have to put up with is way out of proportion to what average Atlanta residents have to deal with. . . . They should not have to trade off their quality of community life just so somebody can take a flight out of Atlanta."

Hartsfield's $5 billion runway expansion is the latest flashpoint. Many residents of Forest Park and north Clayton County, both below Blair Villa Drive where the proposed 9,000-foot runway will open in 2005, are demanding their homes be bought up before the airport expands.

"Pollution kills communities, not just people," Bullard says, "and the people in Blair Villa have a right to a clean environment. A clean environment is a right, not a privilege."