For years, residents living amid Florida’s sugar fields have complained about cane burning, a harvesting method that produces more than half the nation’s sugar cane. Yet politically powerful sugar companies and state regulators have reassured residents that the air is healthy to breathe even though it chokes Black and Hispanic communities near the Everglades with smoke and ash.
The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica tested that proposition, finding those assurances rested on the shaky underpinnings of the country’s air-monitoring system, which leaves large swaths of rural America with little to no oversight.
Our investigation revealed that state regulators depended on data from a single monitor to track air quality across the sugar-growing region, despite telling their federal counterparts that the monitor was unfit to determine whether the air met standards set under the Clean Air Act. The news organizations also found that the current way in which pollution is measured obscures short-term spikes, a defining feature of Florida’s sugar harvesting process.
Of chief concern to public health experts is particulate matter, an inhalable mixture of pollutants and debris tied to heart and lung disease. According to the EPA, Palm Beach County emits more particulate matter from agricultural fires than any other county nationwide.
We did our own air monitoring, consulting with six experts in air quality and public health from universities across the country and installing sensors at homes in the Glades, a patchwork of low-income communities of color living amid the fields. The readings showed repeated spikes in pollution on days when the state had authorized cane burning and when smoke was projected to blow toward the sensors. These short-term spikes often reached four times the average pollution levels in the area – enough that experts said they posed health risks.
To gauge the effects of cane smoke in the area, we created a text bot that surveyed residents whenever our sensors detected a spike in pollution. Through the bots, some described coughing and trouble breathing while others shared pictures of smoke plumes looming over the area.
Experts told us that our air-quality results highlighted a need for more scrutiny from government agencies, which have access to better equipment and data.
Though regulators had done little to address Glades residents’ concerns before our investigation, we found that they had already banned burning when the wind blew toward the wealthier, whiter communities east of the cane fields. That area includes former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. It was only after we started asking questions that Florida officials replaced the unfit monitor we identified in the Glades, and federal lawmakers pressed to tighten the nation’s pollution standards. Moreover, the investigation prompted new research that will add air sensors in the Glades and examine health trends – something Florida has failed to do.
Another story in the series exposed how Florida ignored the recommendations of its own researchers to study the health impact of cane burning, despite decades of internal air-quality research and complaints from residents. To better understand health trends in the Glades region, The Post and ProPublica did their own analysis, using eight years of hospital and emergency room data provided by the state and focusing on patients from Belle Glade, the largest city in the area.
The review found that hospital and emergency room visits for breathing problems among Belle Glade patients spiked during cane-burning season – similar to a trend that local health officials first observed in clinics nearly 30 years ago. The seasonal difference in Belle Glade also was bigger than changes in other, similar populations where burning wasn’t present. Elected officials have since called on the state to conduct the health assessment that researchers recommended.
Throughout it all, Florida’s largest sugar companies maintained that burning was safe and could not be stopped without significant economic impact.
So we traveled to Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, where S?o Paulo officials largely phased out burning years ago, after residents there voiced concerns similar to those of Floridians today. We wrote a story and made a short documentary (which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqC3QPkdeYg) explaining how industry switched to another harvesting method, one that has paid off for companies in terms of profit and for the public in terms of health.