A "Cancer Alley" resident is speaking out after the Trump administration dropped a federal lawsuit aimed at cutting toxic emissions ... telling TMZ it's upsetting but not surprising, given the president's vow to dismantle so-called "radical" DEI programs.
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00:00Can you just kind of give us an overview of what's happening to the community in terms
00:08of illnesses and death?
00:10Well, starting out with myself as a young child coming up, living near DuPont at the
00:18time, one street away from them, and just about everybody in the community now is gone.
00:24There's only one lady living.
00:26I'm not sure how old she is now, but that's the only living person, and she has a really
00:31bad case of dementia.
00:33I don't want to call any names, but she has a real bad case of dementia.
00:38Everybody in my family died from some form of cancer.
00:42DuPont-Denka was having the near neighbor meetings.
00:45Eventually they stopped that because we all started complaining about these certain things.
00:50There was even some black soot or some kind of stuff was on our homes at one time and
00:55on our cars at one time, and they came out and looked at it, and that's all that happened
01:00with it.
01:01They didn't do anything.
01:02They just offered us a meal to pacify us at these meetings, but nothing was ever done
01:07about it.
01:08So that lawsuit is filed, but then last week when you heard it was dropped, what was your
01:14reaction?
01:15How were people feeling about this decision?
01:18Most people were outraged.
01:19It's a slap in the face for all the hard work that all the scientists and other people have
01:24done in helping us to obtain some kind of justice for this, and now it's just like they
01:33don't care about anybody.
01:35Everything is money, corporate greed.
01:37That's all they worried about, their money.
01:41The governor came by and talked about people was going to lose jobs.
01:45Okay, people losing jobs against people losing lives, which is more important.
01:50Well we know what's important to them.
01:52The reasoning behind dropping the lawsuit, they mentioned DEI front and center.
01:59What do you think about that?
02:01Partially yes, because it's a predominantly black community, and we've been fighting for
02:06years to get them to even just comply with their releases and falsifying reports and
02:16stuff like that.
02:17What they did now with legislation being changed and they're not regulating them as they were
02:22before, haven't helped all of those people.
02:25Even the children are coming down with birth defects and all kinds of abnormalities that
02:30I didn't even experience when I was a child.
02:32They're saying that the plant has spent $35 million to cut their emissions by 85%, and
02:39they're basically saying, look, they've done what they need to do to get within the proper
02:44readings as far as emissions from this plant, and that everything will be fine going forward.
02:50And that's not true, because we have a report here that was done by a scientist, Ms. Wilma
02:55Schumer.
02:56I was with her just last week before the last, and here's a book she compiled, and the findings
03:04are close up to February 26, 2025, and they have only once been in compliance, and it's
03:13supposed to be 0.02 under the emissions, and they have never, ever done that, never.