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Cancer Alley

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Re: Cancer Alley

#71

Post by Tuna-Fish »

derbOac wrote: post #45
Red_Tarsius wrote: post #12

I just saw this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9mrbIxeBE and it sounded like an interesting topic to bring on HN. I didn't know about the "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana, but I figure most countries have their own alleys of death. I live in Italy and Taranto is notorious for this reason. The city was home to one of biggest steel producers in Europe. The local economy revolved around the steel plant, but people f…

I wonder about the historical trends in these types of zones. Presumably they didn't exist prior to the industrial revolution?

Before the industrial revolution, the primary way to refine gold from diffuse ore was to dissolve the gold in mercury, separate the amalgam, and then boil out the mercury to leave the gold behind. In large-scale mining, this resulted in local air pollution levels that were horrifying even when compared to the worst unmitigated industrial revolution era sites. Entire communities would get mercury poisoning from the air they breathed.

Re: Cancer Alley

#72

Post by _yb2s »

jahewson wrote: post #67
_yb2s wrote: post #57

California has its own version of this in the north east Bay Area- with a high density of refineries blowing directly downwind into dense poor communities. Chevron owns and pays for the local newspaper covering that area, which spreads misinformation about the health risks to the community. It amazes me you have this dense urban area with ultra strict vehicle emissions rules, where low income people struggle to get t…

Ok but the other three refineries in the Bay Area are not adjacent to low-income areas (I live next to one!). So what exactly is your point?

I'm not sure what you are talking about? I was generalizing for people not familiar with the area, and lumping together the entire "North East Bay" which includes all of the Bay Area refineries. West/North Richmond, Rodeo, Martinez, and Benicia all would be crazy expensive regions if it weren't for the massive health issues with living in those areas.

Re: Cancer Alley

#73

Post by hbossy »

derbOac wrote: post #45
Red_Tarsius wrote: post #12

I just saw this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9mrbIxeBE and it sounded like an interesting topic to bring on HN. I didn't know about the "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana, but I figure most countries have their own alleys of death. I live in Italy and Taranto is notorious for this reason. The city was home to one of biggest steel producers in Europe. The local economy revolved around the steel plant, but people f…

I wonder about the historical trends in these types of zones. Presumably they didn't exist prior to the industrial revolution?

I would expect any medieval lead and gold mines surrounding to be horribly unhealthy.

Re: Cancer Alley

#74

Post by s1artibartfast »

LASR wrote: post #28
max_ wrote: post #25

As humans our days on this planet are numbered. It surprises me how we are all sleep walking to extinction and "the masses" truly don't give a damn?

Recently I've been fascinated at some of the long-term space missions that various space agency plan. Some of these missions span multiple decades simply because of the nature of space travel. A burning question in my mind: how does one get motivated to work on something that they'll probably not even live to see come to fruition/failure? Personally, I wouldn't be, unless if there was some pay involved. Dealing with…

it is a personal and cultural question, more than anything.

There are cultures where people will pick up litter and sweep the public streets, because they take care in having and keeping things nice.

There are cultures in which dumping your garbage on the street is normalized.

There are even times and places where people complete to die and sacrifice their lives for their their social group.

Re: Cancer Alley

#75

Post by tempestn »

shapenamer wrote: post #54
tempestn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not really expected to provide context when posting to HN. If something's interesting, it's interesting. I think of the Wikipedia articles as implicit "TIL" posts.

It seems like lowest effort submission possible to me. It's not really related to tech news at all. There's no recent news or changes. The op didn't post anything about why they found it interesting. The conversation happening here is sparse and not interesting. Aside from the fact that I've had comments downvoted for "being low effort" in the past. People can find anything interesting but not everything is a good su…

Comments are different from posts. The comment needs to have content to be valuable. With a post, you don't need to add any editorial; it's the thing being posted itself that needs to be interesting - but not to everyone.

If no one finds it interesting, people won't vote for it, and it'll never reach the homepage. But given that people did vote for it, obviously a number did find it interesting.

Re: Cancer Alley

#76

Post by dekhn »

_yb2s wrote: post #57

California has its own version of this in the north east Bay Area- with a high density of refineries blowing directly downwind into dense poor communities. Chevron owns and pays for the local newspaper covering that area, which spreads misinformation about the health risks to the community. It amazes me you have this dense urban area with ultra strict vehicle emissions rules, where low income people struggle to get t…

About once a year, there's an emergency at the refinery, that leads to flaring or other problems, and there's a community alert. For example, a few days ago: https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/flaring...

Re: Cancer Alley

#78

Post by Smoosh »

Red_Tarsius wrote: post #12

I just saw this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9mrbIxeBE and it sounded like an interesting topic to bring on HN. I didn't know about the "Cancer Alley" in Louisiana, but I figure most countries have their own alleys of death. I live in Italy and Taranto is notorious for this reason. The city was home to one of biggest steel producers in Europe. The local economy revolved around the steel plant, but people f…

In Australia, it would be Wittenoom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYAWxJ8a7RA

Re: Cancer Alley

#79

Post by dogman144 »

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Good book on the topic, specifically around why it continues.

Re: Cancer Alley

#80

Post by refurb »

While an interesting read, where is the data? You even look at the sources on the wikipedia page and it says [citation needed].

Cancer isn't evenly distributed across the countries (i.e. every city of 1M has 100 colon cancer cases), and clustering would be expected even from random distribution. Then layer on top things like genetic makeup of the population, smoking rates, diet, etc, etc, etc and you end up in a situation where confounding factors can make it really hard to tease out causes, especially if the effect is small in size.

I'm not saying there aren't higher rates of cancer in this area or that industrial pollution can't contribute to cancer rates, but this wikipedia article seems like nothing but a bunch of talk.

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