David Field is a resident of Willard Beach in South Portland. 

Recently, the Boston Globe ran a story with a headline that says everything: “There’s
something in the air in South Portland, Maine (and it’s not good).” It gives voice to a
parent who wonders whether living near tanks means slowly poisoning their children.

A longtime resident’s tragedy — a cancer diagnosis, which he ties to decades of tank
fume exposure — is shared by too many neighbors to be coincidence. Their stories are
not outliers.

For over a decade, a trickle of residents surrounding every major tank farm in South Portland have done something courageous: stood before City Council and state bodies to describe illness, neurological damage and cancers they connect to living beside the region’s largest petroleum hub. They speak knowing it risks their property values — and they almost certainly represent far more neighbors.

It’s worth noting that Maine’s children carry some of the highest cancer rates in the country. South Portland has schools and daycares where young ones breathe fumes. Three federal emissions lawsuits — against Sprague, Global and Gulf/Sunoco for air pollution permits violations — confirm these facilities don’t always operate within even Maine’s permissive standards.

And South Portlanders have suffered, largely unknowingly, for decades. Now the fenceline data backs up what many suspected.

More than 600 tons of volatile organic compounds — including benzene, for which the
World Health Organization recognizes no safe level of exposure — are vented into South Portland’s air every year. EPA-approved exposure modeling shows elevated cancer risk from Bug Light Park to Cash Corner.

Maine’s standards, already 10 times more permissive than neighboring Massachusetts, are being exceeded at tank farm fenceline monitors, regularly. These are not projections. They are measurements.

The cancer-causing fumes’ dangers are compounded by additional hazards. Scientists
project 8.8 feet of sea level rise for the Gulf of Maine over the coming decades. Inundated terminals will force contaminated groundwater into surrounding neighborhoods. Also, these facilities store massive volumes of flammable material; catastrophic fire or explosion is not hypothetical for families in their shadow. They are also a terrorist target.

The tanks may not be here forever — but a plan that peers only 12 years ahead is not
looking nearly far enough. South Portland’s choices today will determine what kind of
city stands at the waterline at 2100 and beyond.

To its credit, the Comprehensive Plan Committee has conditioned development near tanks on a health study. But health studies look backward — at harm already done. What the plan must also require is forward-looking exposure modeling: atmospheric dispersion tools that map, with precision, where carcinogenic fumes spread. That technology exists and improves every year.

For a plan built for 2040, exposure modeling — not health retrospectives — must guide where growth goes and where it does not.

Which makes the current growth designations so alarming. There’s a school of thought
on the Comprehensive Plan Committee that upzoning land around the terminals will pressure the industry to leave. Using residents’ health as leverage to move tanks is not a planning strategy. It is an ethical failure. Packing development into corridors where the air already exceeds what Maine calls safe should not proceed on the strength of a health study. It should not proceed at all.

Until the tanks are gone, the committee should reclassify all these areas as low-growth, in keeping with the community’s long-held demand for petroleum harm reduction. In the Shipyard District, where Cushing’s Point still holds open space, a bolder path exists.

A new group, Save Our Shipyard, has proposed a Shipyard Open Space Monument — honoring the 30,000 Liberty Ship workers, including thousands of women, who turned the tide of World War II, and the 120 families who lost their homes on Cushing’s Point to make it possible. A living buffer for tank hazards and sea level rise. A source of civic pride. A way to protect the city’s last open waterfront and stimulate economic growth for local businesses.

We cannot move neighborhoods away from tanks. What we can do — right now, before
this plan is finalized — is refuse to march more neighbors into danger. The sea is rising.
The air is already compromised. The community has offered a solution rooted in history,
health and hard-won wisdom. The only question left is whether this committee and City
Council have the courage to choose it.