<\/p>\n
Ervin Laws poses for a portrait May 30 in front of his home in Colonial Hills, a Southaven, Mississippi, neighbourhood adjacent to xAI’s gas turbine facility.<\/p>\n
Kevin Wurm, REUTERS<\/p>\n
People affected<\/p>\n
In the Colonial Hills neighborhood of Southaven, the turbines can be heard around the clock, often firing off noisy bursts that residents compare to jet engines.<\/p>\n
Ervin Laws, a Colonial Hills resident in his 20s, said the noise wakes him up at night. “I can\u2019t do anything about it, because he\u2019s got more money than me,” he said, referring to Musk.<\/p>\n
The turbines were installed in communities already estimated to be facing relatively high respiratory disease burdens, according to a Reuters analysis of CDC data.<\/p>\n
In 27 of 28 census tracts within five miles of the site \u2014 spanning Mississippi and Tennessee \u2014 the estimated asthma rates were higher than their respective countywide figures. In 24 tracts, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease rates were also higher.<\/p>\n
Five miles is a distance commonly used in environmental health research to capture populations likely to be exposed to air pollution from a stationary source.<\/p>\n
A separate Reuters analysis of Census Bureau data found that the residents living near the facility are disproportionately Black. Because the five-mile radius crosses state lines, Reuters compared each side against its own county baseline.<\/p>\n
Within five miles of the facility in DeSoto county, Mississippi, where the turbines are located, about 46% of residents are Black, compared with 33% countywide, according to census data.<\/p>\n
Across the state line in Tennessee, where residents have no say in Mississippi\u2019s permitting process, about 94% of residents within five miles of the facility are Black, compared to 52% in surrounding Shelby County.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ervin Laws poses for a portrait May 30 in front of his home in Colonial Hills, a Southaven,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[29636,7949,20548,140,7431,55877,8059,42119,8736,2899],"class_list":["post-108103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-xai","tag-black-communities","tag-clean-air-act","tag-colossus-2","tag-elon-musk","tag-environmental-justice","tag-lee-national","tag-mississippi","tag-natural-gas-turbines","tag-pollution","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}