West Dallas residents fight to relocate shingles plant amid health concerns
WEST DALLAS – Some neighbors in West Dallas are fighting to get a roofing shingles plant out of their neighborhood.
While the plant argues it's safe and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not found any concerns, the neighbors' cries for help have now been heard across the state and have caught the attention of Texas researchers.
Neighbors who live near Singleton Boulevard tell CBS News Texas they have suffered from decades of sickness and hope to use science and data to get their voices heard.
"Everyone is frustrated and angry," said West Dallas resident Delores Burns.
She and her neighbor Vernon Childrese admit being outside on their porch is a simple pleasure, but it's become more and more difficult over the past several years.
"It's hard for me to stand up. I'm sniffling and wheezing," Burns said.
"Because of the smoke and stuff, it gets hard to breathe," Childrese said.
Both women say they suffer from respiratory issues, which they believe is due to decades of living in West Dallas on Singleton Boulevard. They believe the main culprit is the General Aniline & Film (GAF) plant, which manufactures roofing materials. GAF has resided in West Dallas since 1946, before much of the surrounding neighborhoods were built.
The area has other pollution sources, such as batch plants and train routes. Nearly 80 years later, roughly 8,500 people live within a mile of the plant and other industrial sites.
"The longer they stay open, the sicker we're going to get," said Janie Cisneros, a West Dallas resident who founded the group Singleton United to get GAF out of her neighborhood.
She claims her family and 4-year-old daughter all have breathing problems and hopes the new scientific study puts more pressure on the shingles plant.
"It's unethical, quite frankly, to be operating in a community where there's daycare, where there's public schools, where there's churches, where residents live," said Cisneros.
So, she and her neighbors banded together and convinced Texas A&M University to review the air quality, which looked at one sensor's data for the last half of 2023.
"These little particles can actually travel all the way down deep into the airways," said Texas A&M environmental health professor Dr. Natalie Johnson.
Dr. Johnson says the monitor's pollution levels exceeded the EPA's daily limit 35 times over those six months. More than a third of residents who responded to a survey from the group said they had been diagnosed with asthma, and less than half of those residents said they had had a respiratory disease in the past year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the national current asthma rate in 2021 was 7.7%, and the rate in Texas was 8.4%.
GAF did agree to speak with me and answer questions on a Zoom call that they asked not to be recorded. In that conversation, an engineer discussed why they believed the survey was invalid.
In a written statement, a Dallas GAF spokesperson calls their analysis misleading.
"This report's conclusions are false and are based on data that is faulty and misleading. The non-peer-reviewed report ignores data from three government-owned air monitors, which do not support its conclusions and contradict its self-generated data. The truth is that the West Dallas facility operates in compliance with its air permit and all relevant federal and state regulations and emissions levels. GAF is legally designated as a 'high' compliance company—the highest compliance category achievable by regulation—by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the agency responsible for regulating air emissions from industrial facilities in the state of Texas, and has been so for many decades. We will continue to work cooperatively with West Dallas community groups and elected officials to implement the agreed-upon plan to repurpose the land in the future in a way that supports the city's vision for West Dallas."
According to the EPA's air quality map, the closest federal sensor is three miles away from the plant, where the sensor A&M looked at was about 600 feet away.
"This data from this particular monitor is very important because it's in a relevant location and they are showing routine elevations that warrant further study," Johnson said.
GAF says it plans to relocate its West Dallas plant in five years, but Burns worries the plant could be the root of some of her health issues and five years might be too late.
"I might not live to see five years with all the chronic illness I am having now," Burns said. "It's not a safe place for us."
The EPA has also investigated GAF for air quality compliance more than 40 times in the past five years. However, no violations were ever identified. The EPA is currently doing its own impact study, looking at things like water and soil. The EPA says it plans to share those results with the state in the near future.