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Curtis Bay residents deserve a coal-free future | GUEST COMMENTARY

Twenty-six months since the CSX coal-export terminal exploded in Curtis Bay, breaking windows and sending a thick layer of carcinogenic coal dust into the air, that dust still covers cars and clotheslines, stoops, slides and kids’ bicycles. Some of it was there before the blast: a dark sign of the everyday disasters that have cut lives short in this industrial community for generations, but which very rarely make the TV news. 

The 6-year-olds in my first-grade classroom did not have the privilege of ignoring it. As residents of Curtis Bay, they saw the thick dust everywhere. That airborne toxic matter made it so hard for little ones to breathe that many chose to stay inside during recess. If you know a 6-year-old, you know this speaks volumes. 

Schoolkids in Curtis Bay lose parents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, grandparents and friends to respiratory illness at higher rates than almost anywhere in Maryland. Since leaving the classroom in 2012, I have been studying the governing decisions behind this grim statistic.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. This month there is a chance to change conditions on the ground, when the Maryland Department of Environment opens public comment about whether a 14-million-ton-capacity, open-air coal pier is a reasonable imposition to force on residents of Curtis Bay.

The question would be laughable if the stakes were not so high. Besides the stress of living in anticipation of the next explosion and the knowledge that the dust that coats their homes is slowly killing them, residents have heard at least one mayoral candidate propose that a solution to pollution could be their mass displacement. 

Extreme measures like this have been advocated before. A quarter century ago, when things were blowing up across the “Carbon Belt” of Baltimore, conditions got so bad that residents of two local neighborhoods, Fairfield and Wagner’s Point, were moved to push for their own evacuation. They had no other choice; they could not make officials care about their health. It was too hard to prove that the ever-present dust — dust that turns the lungs of area crabs black — was harming them. Too hard to prove that their asthma, cancer and respiratory illnesses all had roots in local industry. 

What did work was pointing out explosions. And there were a lot of explosions. So, residents were left to pursue a campaign that left their actual sick bodies out of the discussion and instead dramatized their imminent demise in the next catastrophe. 

When they won financial recompense to leave their homes, after years and years of work, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development announced that officials were “happy the area is clear … no longer have to be concerned with the environmental risk that was there or any harm coming to residents.” That is one of the most chilling lines I have come across in over a decade of research. 

What officials then and now refuse to see is that every explosion is also an exposure — and that, when residents move, they carry years of embodied impacts with them, including heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other bleak prognoses. The spokesman’s palpable relief back then betrays deadly selective attention when it comes to environmental harm that continues to this day, given the fact that officials jumped at the chance to talk about the CSX explosion in 2021, but have done precious little to address residents’ exposure to coal dust every day for 140 years.

This big exhale — this “happiness” that comes with calling matters closed without addressing people’s real concerns — is the attitude that got us here. By making displacement the solution to environmental problems and settling on a course of action that did nothing to rein in industry’s embodied or explosive effects, officials all but lit the fuse that would combust at CSX. 

You have a chance to insist that today’s leaders do not make the same mistake. 

When MDE sets the terms of CSX’s operating permit this spring, they will be deciding who has a right to exist on this peninsula: A coal-export terminal owned by a multinational behemoth that has shown no interest in protecting health, or the living, breathing human beings who have long-term ties to Curtis Bay?

When they make this life-or-death decision, officials must pay attention not just to the booms but also to the everyday disasters — like the cumulative impacts of exposure to coal dust, and the impacts of coal on ecological crises. We cannot let them forget they work for little ones who want to play outside at recess, not for companies from out of state. They work for residents of Curtis Bay who are calling for a response that honors their fundamental right to have a future in the place they know and love. Those residents do not want to settle suits and then be forced out of their homes. 

They want the coal to go. 

They want to stay.

Chloe Ahmann (chloeahmann@cornell.edu) is a professor at Cornell and the author of Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore. Until 2012, she worked as a public school teacher in South Baltimore City.