Flooding from surging seas is likely to inundate thousands of U.S. hazardous sites in coming years as global temperatures rise, placing the nation’s most vulnerable at greatest risk.
As Seas Rise, So Do the Risks From Toxic Sites
Liza Gross / Inside Climate News
RICHMOND, Calif. (November 20, 2025) — On a sunny morning in May, Luna Angulo walked alongside a towering chain-link fence topped with razor wire on San Francisco Bay’s eastern shore. She lingered near locked gates posted with warnings to keep out of the “hazardous substance area,” where long-shuttered chemical plants had dumped toxic waste on marshlands, and recounted the refinery explosion that changed her life.
Angulo was just 12-years-old when a massive explosion rocked Chevron’s accident-prone Richmond refinery, four miles up the road. Towering clouds of black smoke darkened the skies for hours that summer day in 2012, forcing 15,000 residents to seek medical care for chest pain, headaches and asthma, among other ailments.
The catastrophic fire haunts the collective memory of this working-class town, where industrial accidents regularly plague largely Black and Latino neighborhoods surrounded by polluting railroads, deepwater ports and freeways. It also turned a generation of young people into climate activists.
“That fire was a big catalyst for a lot of us,” said Angulo, now 25, who co-founded the climate justice group led by gender-queer activists called Rich City Rays and organizes non-violent protests against Chevron, the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter in California.
Angulo, a first-generation Mexican-American, grew up with asthma. But she didn’t connect her breathing problems to Richmond’s rampant pollution until the refinery fire left so many gasping for air. Now she sees the oil-storage tanks blanketing the hills beyond her mother’s kitchen window as “symbols of harm along the hillside.”
And experts worry that the health costs of living in a heavily polluted city could reverberate for generations if little is done to curb heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. That’s because surging seas will increase flood risks for hazardous sites in Richmond and other overburdened cities along U.S. coasts, scientists at the University of California, China’s Nanjing University and Climate Central, a nonprofit science organization, warn in a study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications.
Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color face a disproportionate share of the risk, they found.
Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental-health disparities expert at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author on the study, has spent the past several years evaluating climate pollution’s likely impacts on low-lying industrial regions and vulnerable populations.
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