Residents Living in the Shadow of the Steel Industry Ask the EPA to Reconsider Delay of Hazardous Air Pollution Rule

At a hearing held Wednesday to gather public comments on the Trump administration’s delay of tighter restrictions on hazardous air pollution from steel manufacturing, residents urged the government to consider the impact on public health. 

“What’s missing from this conversation and this decision is people. The people who, every day, are exposed to hundreds of tons of toxic pollution in their communities,” said Valerie Denney, a member of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, a citizens group that promotes economic development in Gary, Indiana.

The interim final rule, issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as part of its Clean Air Act obligation to set emission standards for hazardous air pollutants such as benzene and lead, delays the implementation of a Biden administration-era rule for steel and iron-making facilities for two years.

The 2024 rule strengthened or set emissions limits and required fenceline monitoring for chromium. Some of its provisions had been scheduled to take effect in April. 

Testimony at the hearing described billowing smoke, brown haze and an “overpowering stench” as part of the daily experience of living near a steelmaking facility. Steel mills are significant sources of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. 

“People have been exposed to pollution from steel mills in Gary for more than 100 years. So I can almost see why the EPA and U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs might think, ‘Another two years. What the heck? What does it matter?’” Denney said in her testimony, referring to big steel companies in addition to the federal government. 

Delaying “is a tactic that benefits industry, not people,” she said. “I believe the EPA’s role is to protect people, and those of us that live in the shadow of industry ask you to protect us.”

At the hearing, Michael Long, the senior director of environmental affairs at Cleveland-Cliffs, which operates facilities in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, said the delays would “not expose anyone to harm” and that steelmaking facilities pose a “low risk to public health.” 

Advocates point to evidence that communities near coal-based steelmaking suffer disproportionately from higher rates of cancer, asthma and premature deaths. The rule delays will result in air pollution emissions that “EPA has previously determined harms health and is avoidable for the next two years,” said Hilary Lewis, the steel director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit that focuses on decarbonizing heavy industry. 

The delay in setting up fenceline monitoring deprives communities of vital information about the pollution in their neighborhoods, Lewis said. 

“It’s hard to do much else without that basic information,” she said. “Information is the first step in getting action to reduce pollution.”

EPA said it was delaying the 2024 rule because of “serious concerns that facilities will be unable to comply with the relevant requirements by the existing deadlines.” 

But environmental law experts say the agency’s actions violate the Clean Air Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, the latter of which governs how rules are written and enforced by the federal government. 

Wednesday’s hearing was “strange” because it came after the EPA had already issued the interim final rule in July, said Jim Pew, an attorney at Earthjustice who has worked on air pollution issues since the 1990s. “That rule is already final. It already went into effect. EPA didn’t ask people what they thought before it was issued,” he said. 

Earthjustice filed a lawsuit against the agency in August, alleging that the interim final rule was illegal because the EPA is only supposed to bypass notice and comment procedures if there is a “real emergency,” Pew said. There was no evidence that any emergency existed in this case, he added. 

“It’s a fake emergency. It’s just an excuse to push back the deadlines because industry doesn’t want to comply,” he said. Interim final rules are normally “the exception,” Pew said. He noted that the EPA has issued seven of them in the last few months. 

The agency is arguing that it needed to issue the interim final rule because of “impracticability” concerns, said Annie Fox, a law clerk at the Clean Air Council, which is also involved in the lawsuit. Fox said the agency’s claims that industry can’t meet the compliance deadlines were “illegitimate.” 

“EPA previously rejected that argument from industry twice. EPA very thoroughly reviewed the feasibility of the rule and of compliance deadlines before they finalized the 2024 rule,” she said.

In his testimony, Cleveland-Cliffs’ Long said the interim final rule was correct in its determination that “compliance deadlines of less than three years are infeasible,” and called the emission limits and work practices outlined in the original rule “fundamentally flawed.” 

“There is no existing technology capable of complying with the rule,” he said.

A recent report from the Environmental Integrity Project found widespread compliance problems with the Clean Air Act at steel facilities across the country. For communities locked in a decades-long fight for cleaner air, the EPA’s delays are painful. 

“The continued assault on our communities, many of which are predominantly communities of color, is a tremendous environmental injustice,” said Allan Haline, a resident of Ogden Dunes, Indiana, in his testimony. “I implore you to reconsider your actions and hold our polluting steel mills accountable.” 

Haline, who said he was a physician who has “personally witnessed the adverse health effects stemming from air pollution,” said he was “appalled” by the delay.

“This is something that people have needed and actually been entitled to under the Clean Air Act ever since the act was enacted,” Pew said. “These reductions should have happened 20 years ago.”