"The petroleum smell is gone, the benzene emissions have abated and residents in nearby neighborhoods of color feel they’re finally being heard."
"Dorthia Pebbles inhaled harmful pollutants and smelled noxious odors from the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery for years when she would leave her rowhome on Hoffman Street to walk to the corner store.
After losing family members to cancer, she and her neighbors who lived across the street from the massive South Philadelphia refinery, once the largest on the East Coast, couldn’t help but conclude that its emissions were giving them asthma and threatening their health in even more serious ways. But no one from the refinery or the city ever gave them any information, or seemed to care.
Then one night in June 2019, the refinery exploded, creating a whole new set of hazards and issues for the neighbors to wrestle with."
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