For Ward 10 residents, including the Washington Park neighborhood and parts of South Providence, some see the Port of Providence as a hassle to their community. “It’s been going on for a long time…I’ve been calling DEM [Department of Environmental Management] about odors and responding to different things. But it’s been an ongoing situation for years. Having lived here for over 45 years, I live in the shadows of the port, and I’ve been asking for help,” community activist and president of the Washington Park Neighborhood Association Linda Perri said.
Perri has been serving as a community representative since the Washington Park Neighborhood Association’s founding in 2015. One major concern that has been continuously brought up at meetings is the lack of knowledge about the port’s operations. In the past, residents of the Washington Park community would go to Perri with any questions or concerns. “The people don’t know what’s going on at the port. You know, when we have the sirens go off for a test, people don’t know what is going on. ‘What’s that? What is that siren saying? What is going on?’” Perri explained.
The Port is not the same as ProvPort
The Port of Providence extends along the coastline of the Narragansett Bay. Certain industrial businesses can be seen from Allen’s Ave and parts of I-95. But there is more to the port than what can be seen out a car window on a morning commute or while waiting in traffic on the 195 bridge.
The Port has been crucial to the city of Providence’s development, but it’s more complicated than it might seem. This presents an issue for the communities adjacent to the port, as the actual operations remain hidden through zoning laws, complicated legislation, and a host of economic and environmental impacts.
One part of the confusion is that ProvPort is not the same as the Port of Providence. With the recent renewal of the nonprofit ProvPort’s 30-year lease of the publicly owned sections of the port, there has been an increased interest in understanding the port’s operational hazards and its role in the larger city of Providence. Residents and lawmakers consistently confuse the nonprofit ProvPort with the entirety of the port in Providence, but ProvPort remains only a small part of the entire footprint. ProvPort is a nonprofit founded in 1994 in order to bridge a budgetary gap the city of Providence was facing.
In 2007, ProvPort entered a contract with Waterson Terminal Services, who manages the area leased by ProvPort; the overall port of Providence is much larger. “It encompasses an area zoned for heavy industrial uses along the Providence River. The port is primarily along the western bank of the river in the southern part of Providence but also includes two terminals along the eastern bank in East Providence, RI,” explained Julian Drix, a community activist and Chair of the city’s Sustainability Commission.
Drix added that, “The Port of Providence is one of only two deep water ports in New England, and is the second busiest port in the region after Boston.”
What is Loaded and Unloaded at the Port?
The port isn’t a container port, meaning it doesn’t import and export goods transported in the sometimes brightly colored, stackable shipping containers made of corrugated metal; rather, the main cargo goods coming in and out of the port are “bulk” and “break-bulk” goods.
Chris Waterson, President and CEO of Waterson Terminal Services (the company that manages ProvPort), explained that bulk goods are large shipments of material, “… Things like salt or sand or stone. Break bulk [are] smaller packages like bundles of lumber or steel.. Bulk can also be liquid bulk, like any kind of fuel product. In addition to that, we handle what’s called project cargo, which is usually big, heavy, oversized components.” This model of bulk and break-bulk goods, rather than container cargo, holds true for the rest of the port of Providence as well.
ProvPort’s largest imports are cement, asphalt, and road salt (depending on the winter weather). Each of these materials has its uses in Providence and beyond.When it comes to exports, the biggest by far is scrap metal. There are multiple terminals, both on and off ProvPort, for recycling scrap metal.
“We’re constantly tearing old things down and building new things, right? And that’s what produces scrap,” Waterson said. “It goes to, generally, places like Turkey, where they have really cheap power and really good deep-water ports. They bring in all that scrap, they melt it down and produce big blocks of steel, and then that goes to steel mills elsewhere in the world, to be rolled into new steel. So it’s a complete closed loop recycling process,” Waterson explained.
Environmental Impacts of Port Activities
While many agree on the positive economic impact of industries along the port, some residents and public health advocates have raised concerns about the impacts of industrial pollution on public health and quality of life in the abutting neighborhoods.
Monica Huertas, a resident of the Washington Park community and president of the People’s Port Authority, consistently has to drive her kids back and forth from the hospital to treat their health issues. Huertas was organizing long before she came to Washington Park; she heard about the detrimental effects of the port from the grassroots organization No LNG in PVD, the organization that would eventually become the People’s Port Authority, which she currently heads. No LNG in PVD began as a community activism group organized around opposing the liquid natural gas facility that was planned to be built across the street from the port. Huertas knew about issues around pollution and environmental racism before the campaign against the gas facility, but as she moved to Washington Park, Huertas and her child became directly impacted by the effects of pollution and lead contamination in her new neighborhood.
“As the baby grew, and as the no energy campaign grew, the baby was lead poisoned. We found out that he had lead poisoning. Mind you, he was breastfed, so we’re like, ‘What the hell is this?’ So, that’s when I started learning about soil contamination that we have in the neighborhood, and then air quality,“ Huertas said.
Today, almost 10 years later, Huertas is still dealing with the health impacts of pollution. Her children have been in and out of the hospital dealing with asthma attacks and relatively rare illnesses like Kawasaki disease. Kawasaki disease is a heart issue that causes inflammation in blood vessels affecting the heart arteries of children especially. According to Cedric Manlgiot and Brigitte Mueller of the National Institute of Health, “The pathogenesis of Kawasaki disease (KD) is commonly ascribed to an exaggerated immunologic response to an unidentified environmental or infectious trigger in susceptible children.”
While the cause of the disease is unknown, studies have found an association between Kawasaki Disease and prenatal exposure to ambient and industrial air pollution. Local organizations like the Racial and Environmental Justice Committee (REJC) point to the often disproportionate impacts of environmental pollution on predominantly BIPOC communities, like Washington park.. Monica herself began to develop asthma, something that she had never had as a kid. Even with years of community activism about the port’s health impacts on her community, Huertas still remains skeptical of the effects.
“Sometimes I would even wait to seek treatment because I feel crazy, because it’s like, it cannot freaking be that this child was just sick a month ago and now they’re sick again. Like it hurts me,” Huertas said.
The port’s emissions impact daily life for residents like Monica Huertas and Linda Perri. Perri frequently finds her days interrupted by the smell of thick diesel emitting from idling engines, “When they turn them on, and when they warm them up, and they’re running for half an hour, or they are working on their trucks, it stinks so bad I can’t use my backyard,” Perri explained, “And that smell is constant. I can’t even keep my windows open.”
At a 2023 press conference, Senator Tiara Mack called upon the importance of incorporating residents voices in the decision-making processes around the port, stating “What does it say for our state when we continue to use a neighborhood that is predominantly Black, brown, and low-income as the place for everything people don’t want in their own neighborhoods?”
Coming Up: A Thirty Year Master Plan for the Port
In order to better facilitate an open dialogue with the surrounding community, ProvPort has hosted two community meetings, with a third to occur in April. The community meetings are a part of ProvPort’s Master Planning process, which aims to “make recommendations for capital projects to improve operations, identify opportunities for expansion, promote community benefits and sustainability measures, and ensure coordination with city waterfront planning efforts.”
TAKE ACTION: The public is invited to attend the third community outreach meeting which will take place on April 3 at 6pm, at The MET in the Justice School’s Common Area, 325 Public St, in Providence.
Note: This article is part of an ongoing series by The Providence Eye in collaboration with Roger Williams University’s Communities of Hope program. The author is working in collaboration with a research team of fellow student interns. Stay tuned for articles covering issues pertinent to the Port’s master planning project, as well as the environmental impact…
Joshua Geaughan is a journalism and public health student at Roger WIlliams University. Through his experience working with Communities of Hope, a civic media group based out of the university, he hopes to approach news from a community first perspective.
