In the Bay Area in California the Chevron refinery is, naturally, in the poor part of the Contra Costa county. The nearest your average middle-class person gets to Richmond is on Highway 580 or Interstate 80, rolling up towards Sacramento or Marin County. The town of Richmond lies east across the Bay from the sad bulk of San Quentin prison, with a largely black population of around 100,000 whose grandfathers and grandmothers were mustered back in World War Two from the southern states to work in the Kaiser shipyards. These days the shipyards are long gone.
Unemployment is sky high.
The Chevron refinery sits on the end of Richmond, several hundred acres of tanks and pipe. You can see it from almost any front porch in town. The smell is always there, a chemical stink that's so thick that people say it sits like a lifetime weight on their chests. Breathing problems are a curse found in almost every family, most particularly among the very young and the old. All in all, Richmond offers as stark a parable of environmental injustice as you can find anywhere in America.