By Ananya Chetia

Oregon native Arjorie Arberry-Baribeault always had a razor sharp eye for styling hair. But when her daughter Zion was diagnosed with cancer at thirteen years old, followed by her best friend's son a few years later with the same diagnoses, Baribeault left the beauty industry for good in 2020.

“Doing hair wasn't fun after my daughter started to lose her hair, I didn't care what anybody's hair was doing. I didn't care if it was thin on this part, or if they didn't like the color, if it was graying too fast,” Baribeault said. “It's not fair to do that to my clients.”

Bairibeault dug for answers online and discovered JH Baxter, a wood treatment facility in West Eugene, Oregon, was using wood preservatives like creosote, pentachlorophenol and arsenate threatening to one's respiratory system and organs. She and her family lived near JH Baxter, along with eight other industrial sites for years.

Oregon's Environmental Health Assessment Program found that cases of Hodgkin's lymphoma, the cancer Zion had, was slightly higher in neighborhoods surrounding JH Baxter compared to the county or state in 2008.

Today, Zion is cancer free and JH Baxter pleaded guilty in January to emitting hazardous waste beyond the limits set by the Clean Air Act and working without a permit, a violation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The company's president, 61-year-old Georgia Baxter-Krause also pleaded guilty to making false statements to Oregon inspectors on how the facility handled releasing hazardous waste and was ordered to pay $1.5 million in fines.

Judge Michael McShane sentenced Baxter-Krause to 90 days on April 22. Baxtet said she was ashamed many times and felt remorse everyday at the sentencing. She apologized to Bethel residents, the neighborhood across from JH Baxter, and admitted she needed to be more honest with regulators, said journalist Brian Bull, who attended the sentencing.

West Eugene resident Lisa Dion said she couldn't feel her feet after hearing the weak sentence and a rush of “anxiety, nervousness [and] anger” kicked in. McShane said a causal link between Baxter plant emissions and health issues from locals could not be established, according to reporting from KLCC.

Lisa's husband, Eric, is in treatment for diffuse leptomeningeal glioneuronal tumor, a rare slow growing brain tumor that mostly affects children for the last three years.

The couple are convinced living next to the facility led to Eric's cancer. Eric, who grew up right across the facility, still remembers the pungent odor stinging from JH Baxter in the 1980s.

“I paid no attention to it,” Eric said about the smell.

JH Baxter violated environmental regulations for decades but was only charged based on actions committed between Jan 2, 2019 and Oct 6, 2019. There are over 20 instances where three environmental agencies warned JH Baxter for going against air and water quality standards and hazardous waste regulations, according to a timeline from Oregon State University's research team. Nearby residents filed over three thousand complaints between 2002 to 2022 about the facility's smell.

Two class action lawsuits were also filed in 2023, which includes thousands of clients living near JH Baxter "whose health or properties were allegedly affected by its operations,” according to reporting from KLCC.

JH Baxter is a 205 acre wood treatment site in West Eugene, Oregon that treated wood products like railroad ties, utility poles and crossarms for 79 years until 2022.

North of JH Baxter is the Bethel neighborhood where Eric was raised. The poverty rate is over 20% in Bethel and the median household income is $42,500, over $20,000 less than the median household income for Eugene city.

Within three miles of the facility is Kalapuya High School, a public and alternative high school for students not succeeding at traditional schools. Students at Kalapuya have come to classes with hives, rashes and asthma, said Kelly Ferguson, the high school biology teacher there.

Using student self-reported data and research from state nonprofit Beyond Toxics Waste, Ferguson teaches her students about the impact JH Baxter has on residents through a combination of biology and humanity subjects.

She also relied on the EPA's Environmental Justice Screening tool, which points out what areas in the nation are vulnerable to pollution, floods and other climate related issues. But with the Trump administration removing the tool,, Ferguson said it has been difficult to show how JH Baxter impacts the surrounding area.

“We have a basic right to clean air, soil and water. That's our human right,” she said.

Nationally, over 6,000 public schools are within 1.8 miles away of a Superfund site.

Research from the Urban Institute shows health effects are most likely to happen within a 1.8 mile boundary around a Superfund site.

Among those 6,000 schools near hazardous sites, our analysis shows that nearly 10% of those schools are located in low-income counties.

A 2023 report from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that seven residential yards had soil “with dioxin concentrations over 40 parts per trillion (ppt).” This meant children under six years old in contact with bare soil for a year or longer were at high risk. DEQ found an additional four more yards with dangerous levels of dioxin concentration a year later.

“DEQ has completed residential yard cleanup at seven of the 11 yards identified,” said Dylan Darlings, a public affairs specialist at the DEQ.

The DEQ has spent about $2.6 million on cleaning up yards and all activities related to it. The agency relied on the Orphan Fund, which is used to cover the clean up costs. But JH Baxter is the responsible party for the cleanup and has been billed to pay, Darlings said. The site also owes over $350,000 in fines to the agency which increases with interest.

JH Baxter's recent case focused on none of this. The court found that JH Baxter transferred wastewater to a wood treatment retort to "boil it off” between January 2, 2019, to October 6, 2019 and would send the remaining waste to an offsite for disposal. The site did not have the permit to remove the waste which violated the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

Retorts are cylindrical vessels where chemicals are forced into the wood to preserve the material and make it resistant to insects.The wastewater would discharge into the air which meant the facility dismissed the Clean Air Act emissions standards for hazardous air pollutants, according to court records.

When the DEQ asked how many times JH Baxter used the retorts and requested for a documented record of the process, Baxter-Krause wrote back that "[J.H.] Baxter does not have specific dates when this practice occurred.”

The court found employees actually had "detailed daily production logs for each retort,” and the facility boiled off hazardous waste for 136 known days using multiple retorts. Baxter-Krause previously emailed only one retort was used.

After the sentencing, Baribeault walked up to Lisa and they both hugged.

"[She] cried & I cried with her," Lisa said. "Lots of anger for the weak sentence."

The EPA proposed JH Baxter to be on EPA's Superfund's National Priority List last September, a list of hazardous waste sites that are considered to be the nation's most serious uncontrolled or abandoned releases of contamination.

The agency can use federal funding called superfund for cleanup and enforcement on hazardous sites. The boundary of the superfund site can extend beyond JH Baxter but it is too early to say whether homes will be in the site boundary right now, said Alice Corcoran, a public affairs specialist with the EPA.

Click here to read my methodology

This story started with dataset I built from scratch.

I found a list of proposed and current Superfund sites in the National Priorities List by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA identifies these sites for long-term cleanup due to the presence of toxic waste that poses a risk to human health or the environment.

I then found all U.S public schools listed under the National Center for Education Statistics. The NCES also lists data on demographics.

Using GeoPandas and buffering method, I joined the two datasets and discovered 1792 public schools are within a mile away from a current Superfund sites. I also joined proposed Superfund sites with public schools.

That's where I discovered JH Baxter and reached out to locals to understand more.

One of the main questions I always wonder as a reporter is, how has this impacted residents and how are they responding?

This piece answers both.

There's more to how this story came to life. We can chat about it, you can email at ananyabchetia@gmail.com or check out my GitHub.