PASCAGOULA, Miss.—When Julie Hambey bought a roomy three-bedroom house in the Cherokee Forest subdivision of Pascagoula, Mississippi, she thought she’d won the lottery. It was 1995—a decade before Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the Gulf Coast—and Hambey remembers being taken with the neighborhood’s natural beauty.
“Those were the good old days,” said Hambey, a mother of four who works at the Walmart bakery in nearby Ocean Springs and is now raising her grandchildren along with her youngest daughter. The house was a short drive away from the beach, she explained, and the properties around the subdivision were lush and green.
Thirty years later, Hambey’s affection for the neighborhood has given way to fear. Days in Cherokee Forest are often punctuated by chemical odors that linger in the hot, humid air, giving Hambey and her family headaches and causing their eyes to sting and water. Flecks of soot and silver paint routinely appear on her car windshield and other surfaces around her property, and her grandkids complain of burning eyes and raw throats after playing outside.
Hambey also suffers from persistent brain fog that always seems to clear when she leaves the subdivision.
“I feel much better when I get away,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on May 21. “I don’t have to have coffee to get me motivated, like I do at the house. But sometimes that still don’t work.”
To Hambey and other neighborhood residents, the source of the smells and dust around Cherokee Forest is no mystery. Less than a mile from the subdivision sits Bayou Casotte Harbor and a sprawling industrial park with multiple facilities, including a massive Chevron oil refinery and a Bollinger shipbuilding yard. The area is also home to a Rolls-Royce manufacturing plant and a federally managed Superfund site.
The facilities emit an array of hazardous air pollutants—or air toxics—as part of their operations, some of which carry known cancer risks. In 2021, a ProPublica investigation confirmed the presence of various cancer-causing air toxics in Cherokee Forest.
Neighborhood residents have spent the past 12 years trying to connect the deteriorating conditions in the subdivision to nearby industrial activities. Since 2013, they’ve logged hundreds of complaints with state regulators and urged officials to test the air in their community, hoping to trigger broader investigations and possible enforcement measures against the neighboring facilities. They’ve also conducted their own assessments and polling and asked other organizations for help monitoring air quality.
Now, new independent research has further validated residents’ concerns about industrial pollution in the subdivision. Using commercial monitoring tools sensitive to various air toxics, university scientists documented “frequent and intense” air pollution episodes within the neighborhood over a six-week stretch last year. The episodes in Cherokee Forest were more common and severe than pollution detected elsewhere in Pascagoula, and they often coincided with resident reports of chemical odors and symptoms like nausea and vomiting.
“We really wanted to solidify the link between industrial pollution and the health impacts (residents) were facing,” Caroline Frischmon, a graduate research assistant at the University of Colorado Boulder and the lead author of the study, told the Mississippi Free Press on May 19.
The study offers some hope for Hambey and her neighbors, who no longer feel it’s safe to live in Cherokee Forest with industry operating at current levels. With community surveys documenting at least 23 deaths from cancer or heart and lung conditions in the last five years, residents hope to produce enough evidence of pollution to negotiate a buyout of the 130-home subdivision.
While a relocation of that scale is likely to require multiple funding sources, community leaders say corporations running the nearby industrial facilities should cover much of the cost.
“Industry needs to understand it’s their problem,” said Barbara Weckesser, a 15-year resident of the neighborhood and the co-founder of Cherokee Concerned Citizens, a community advocacy group. “You sent your trash in on us, because we was here first. And the way you’re going to clean up your trash is you’re going to move us out.”
Rolls-Royce declined to comment for this story. The Mississippi Free Press reached out to Bollinger but did not hear back by publication time. Chevron did not address the possibility of buyouts but emphasized its commitment to protecting communities and the environment.
“Our environmental policies stress open dialogue with our community, and we encourage comments and questions from our neighbors, like Barbara Weckesser and other neighbors in the Cherokee Forest subdivision,” Alan Sudduth, manager of corporate affairs at the Chevron Pascagoula Refinery, wrote in an emailed statement on June 19.
Validating Fears
In designing their Cherokee Forest study, Caroline Frischmon and her colleagues decided to combine community air monitoring with resident accounts of pollution in the subdivision. By incorporating these lived experiences into the research, the team hoped to bolster the overall findings and offer a more complete picture of conditions in the neighborhood.
The scientists also sought to capitalize on the growing availability of commercial air monitors, which offer some advantages over the reference-grade instruments that regulatory agencies favor. While they’re typically less reliable at detecting exact chemical concentrations, commercial sensors allow for near-continuous monitoring and frequent data collection—a critical feature for neighborhoods like Cherokee Forest, where suspected pollution events can last just a few minutes, Frischmon explained.
With commercial air-monitoring tools, “we can look at data every 15 minutes,” she said. “That’s really powerful in a community like this that has really frequently changing air pollution levels.”
To test for industrial pollution in Cherokee Forest, the researchers collected data from two commercial air-monitoring systems in the neighborhood between Feb. 7 and March 28, 2024. They also installed commercial sensors two miles west of the subdivision to provide a comparison point for their findings. By applying a derivative-based algorithm to the raw sensor data, the team was able to identify pollution episodes of varying length and intensity.
In all, the two monitoring systems in Cherokee Forest detected a total of 58 pollution episodes lasting a combined 47.5 hours. That compares to just 11 episodes spanning 5.45 hours in the area west of the subdivision.
The monitoring stations were sensitive to three categories of air toxics associated with residents’ reported symptoms: Ammonia compounds, sulfur compounds and volatile organic compounds, all of which are considered hazardous at high concentrations.
Frischmon’s team could not prove definitively that the chemicals flagged by the sensors originated at the industrial park. By comparing episode times against local wind data, however, the scientists were able to offer evidence that the pollution came from the direction of the complex.
As Frischmon and her colleagues gathered sensor data, neighborhood residents kept running logs of odors and symptoms they experienced during the study period. Many reports of nausea, rashes and headaches matched the dates and times of pollution episodes recorded by the monitors, with the highest number of complaints made between Feb. 8 and Feb. 12, 2024. The period came days after the Chevron refinery reported a permit deviation resulting in excess emissions and flaring, Frischmon said.
“Looking at the data as a whole … a month-and-a-half time frame isn’t that long,” she added. “And just within that time, there were so many reports, just day-to-day, of burning eyes or rashes or headaches. (It) was a lot to comprehend as someone who doesn’t live in the community.”
Despite its brevity, Frischmon hopes her study can serve as a blueprint for uncovering industrial pollution in other fenceline communities. She also hopes it will encourage deeper probes into air toxics in Cherokee Forest and their possible ties to industry, preferably by state or federal regulators.
“I would definitely like to see a study on a bigger scale,” she said. “More than six weeks of data and more accurate data would be really powerful for the community to have.”
In July 2024, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality was scheduled to begin a year-long air monitoring project in Cherokee Forest. A year later, that monitoring has not started.
MDEQ said in an email that it is still working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to finalize a “Quality Assurance Project Plan” and install multiple sensors in the neighborhood.
“Official monitoring and data collection will begin once the sensors are installed and immediately following the approval of the QAPP by EPA,” spokesperson Jan Schaefer wrote on June 4.
Creating an Exit Strategy
Julie Hambey, Barbara Weckesser and other Cherokee Forest residents aren’t holding out hope that state regulators will solve their predicament. After years of advocating for stronger pollution protections with little success, local leaders have determined that their best course of action is to relocate.
“There is no option other than to get us out of here,” Weckesser, the leader of the Cherokee Concerned Citizens, said on May 21. Neighborhood surveys have shown that 90% of residents are interested in a buyout, with nearly 75% stating that they wish to be relocated as soon as possible.
Since 2021, Cherokee Concerned Citizens has worked with various organizations to develop a viable buyout strategy for the neighborhood. The resulting proposal, dubbed “Relocation to Restoration,” calls for acquiring local properties on a voluntary basis and converting them back to natural habitat, creating a forested buffer with a range of ecological benefits.
The plan’s architects say the approach is meant to appeal to a wide range of stakeholders, allowing nearby industry to support a project that would make Pascagoula safer. Besides shielding other residential areas from pollution, a forested buffer along the coast would help dissipate storm surge and reduce flooding in the area, among other benefits, one organizer explained.
“We’ve created a multi-stakeholder project with lots of potential funding streams and sources,” said Jennifer Crosslin, a community organizer overseeing the relocation project. “This particular vision could be an opportunity for industry to be … a good neighbor.”
Crosslin said she has received preliminary feedback from industry representatives indicating they are interested in the proposed buyout plan. The restoration component has also drawn praise from some city officials, who signaled they would support the project with the right resources in place.
If Cherokee Forest gets bought out, “I would love it to become a natural area that could serve as a buffer for other neighboring subdivisions,” said Darcie Crew, a newly elected city councilmember who previously served as Pascagoula’s Parks and Recreation director. She noted, however, that it will be difficult to amass the funding needed to execute the buyouts in the first place.
Since early last year, Cherokee Concerned Citizens has raised over $500,000 in grant money through an array of federal programs. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the roughly $60 million that Weckesser estimates would be needed to buy out her neighborhood. She’s had a second house lined up in Kentucky since 2012, she revealed, but she’s determined to remain in Cherokee Forest long enough to see the buyout plan through.
“I could leave tomorrow and be gone. Matter of fact, I’d take a stick and dynamite and blow this house to smithereens,” she said. “But I was the one who started this. And I was told, ‘Barb, if you start something, you stay till it’s finished.’”
Just around the corner from Weckesser, Hambey says she can’t wait to leave the house that she once considered her dream home. One of her granddaughters has developed asthma, she explained, and she’s anxious to move her family out of the neighborhood before the condition worsens.
While some city officials have encouraged her to simply put her house on the market, Hambey says she’s reluctant to accept an offer that isn’t a planned buyout.
“I don’t want to give my problem to another family,” she said.
William Pittman created the interactive maps for this story. You can see a longer version of the Pascagoula story map here.
