Sean McCann and Kalamazoo Mayor David Anderson. “As long as it’s not out there in Portage and all that, they don’t care.”Ĭollins and Crawford are both listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which alleges 33 various counts against more than a dozen defendants including Gov. They really don’t care about us,” she said. “I feel like we’re minorities to everybody. “I live right next to downtown on the west side, so I do experience it to the point that I’ll get headaches when I’m out walking the dog-my wife, her lips will burn from it-but it’s nothing in comparison to people who live closer.”Ĭollins believes that’s exactly why it’s taken so long to have their concerns heard, despite constant pleas from her fellow north-siders. “Kalamazoo is a really badly segregated community, with almost the entirety of the Black population of the city living on the north side,” Benac said. “And this is well after Graphic Packaging had a long record of violations both for environmental and worker safety issues.”īenac said the expansion made residents from outside the north side start to experience the effects of the gas, too. “The expansion was subsidized by the city, the county, and the state government, on a couple of different occasions to the tune of a couple hundred million in tax breaks over time,” Benac added. That $600 million expansion to GPI’s Kalamazoo paper mill was completed in 2021, with near-unanimous support from the city commission in every step of the process, according to the lawsuit.

“There really seems to only have been any action in the past two or three years, precipitated by the expansion, which made it much worse,” he said. That suggestion infuriated some of the city’s residents, many of whom have been complaining about the gas and their alleged resulting health issues for well over a decade.īut despite years of complaints, Benac said the broader citywide movement to fix the problem is rather new. It also issued a recommendation: “For community members with existing respiratory problems or sensitivity to odors, MDHHS recommends staying indoors and avoiding outdoor exercise or physical exertion when an environmental odor is present.” The environmental odors may cause nausea, headaches, insomnia and irritation of the nose, eyes and throat, the report said. However, little information is available about the health risks for chronic exposure.īut a long-awaited report from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, released in May after nearly three years of analysis, confirmed what residents have been suspecting for over a decade-that the gas is indeed a health hazard.

It’s known that acute human exposure to hydrogen sulfide can cause nausea, headaches, delirium, poor memory, tremors, convulsions and other health issues. On Tuesday night, hydrogen sulfide sensors at the mill-of which readings were made public earlier this year, as mandated by the state-showed levels as high as 33 ppb.

The EPA states that 1.4 parts per billion (ppb) of hydrogen sulfide in the air is the daily exposure limit that can be inhaled “without an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime.” Essentially, while research is limited, 1.4 ppb is the minimum risk level for exposure becoming potentially dangerous. So they’ve been a problem for a good, solid 20 years at this point.” “It was only a couple of years after that public comments at a city commission meeting started showing up about the smell. “Graphic Packaging got control of that facility about 20 years ago,” he said. Its notorious rotten egg odor is precisely what the residents say they’re smelling all over the city.ĭavid Benac, a city resident and history professor at Western Michigan University, says it’s been like that for about two decades. According to the suit, the main culprit is hydrogen sulfide, a foul-scented toxic gas that has been recorded in extraordinarily high levels around the GPI paper mill.

Insomnia cookies promo code