For decades, vast quantities of cancer-causing benzene and other toxic emissions emanated from the dilapidated Tonawanda Coke plant on the banks of Niagara River.
Thanks only to a group of sick people who live near the plant, federal and state regulators have started cracking down on this facility. High-tech monitoring shows benzene emissions were 30 times what the plant was reporting.
And that was after the plant had started to clean up.
State inspections through the years failed to notice that required, rudimentary pollution-control equipment was missing. As NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports, there are huge gaps in the safety net that's supposed to protect people from hazardous air pollution.
