Module 7: Regional Case Example: SW Pennsylvania

Consider the example of air toxics in the Mon Valley — an exposure profile dominated by particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and coke oven emissions, concentrated in communities with disproportionate cancer and respiratory burdens.

Applying a systems lens to this single regional priority surfaces an unusually rich partner network:

• Impacted populations: Mon Valley residents (Clairton, Liberty, Braddock, and surrounding boroughs) and resident-led organizations such as Allegheny County Clean Air Now (ACCAN).
• Holders of data and scientific expertise: Regional academic and clinical research centers, alongside SWPA’s distinctive community-engaged and citizen-science infrastructure — most notably the Environmental Health Project (EHP), FracTracker Alliance, and Carnegie Mellon’s Smell PGH platform.
• Implementers and narrative-shapers: The Allegheny County Health Department’s Air Quality Program — one of the few county-run air programs in Pennsylvania — alongside the Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP), the Breathe Project, and other regional advocacy organizations.
• Policy influencers: County, municipal, state, and federal officials with jurisdiction over air quality and industrial permitting.
• Operational partners with sustainable-practice capacity: Regulated industrial facilities, regional employers, and county and university sustainability offices.
• Healthy-environment advocates, labor, clinical, and faith-civic partners: A dense ecosystem of regional advocacy organizations, United Steelworkers locals representing Mon Valley facilities, UPMC and Allegheny Health Network clinical practices, FQHCs, and Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light and its affiliated congregations.

A more comprehensive SWPA Partner Reference is available in the Resources section associated with this module.

A second priority exercises the same discipline in a very different geography. Beginning in the mid-2000s, the Marcellus Shale formation transformed SWPA into one of the most active natural gas-producing regions in the United States. Roughly half of Pennsylvania’s unconventional gas wells are concentrated in SWPA today, with the heaviest density in Washington, Greene, Fayette, Westmoreland, Armstrong, and Butler Counties. Active operations include thousands of well pads, compressor stations, gathering and transmission pipelines, and processing plants — feeding downstream into the Shell Polymers Monaca ethane cracker. The associated exposure profile includes BTEX compounds (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene), fine and ultrafine particulate matter, diesel exhaust, silica dust, hydrogen sulfide, and naturally occurring radioactive material in drill cuttings and produced water.

The same role categories populate with a different cast of partners:

• Impacted populations: Rural and exurban residents in shale-impacted counties (especially Washington and Greene), landowners with mineral leases, and school communities near well pads — organized through groups such as the Center for Coalfield Justice and the Mountain Watershed Association.
• Holders of data and scientific expertise: SWPA’s shale-specific research and community-monitoring infrastructure, anchored by the Environmental Health Project’s health monitoring program and FracTracker Alliance’s open mapping of regional gas activity, alongside regional academic and clinical research centers.
• Implementers and narrative-shapers: PA DEP’s Office of Oil and Gas Management and Bureau of Air Quality, the Pennsylvania Department of Health (which led the investigation into the Washington/Westmoreland childhood cancer cluster), and Earthworks’ optical-gas-imaging team.
• Policy influencers: State legislators, county commissioners (especially in Washington and Greene Counties), and municipal supervisors and zoning boards — whose authority was substantially shaped by Robinson Township v. Commonwealth.
• Operational partners with sustainable-practice capacity: Oil and gas operators, midstream companies, and sand and water service providers.
• Healthy-environment advocates, labor, clinical, and faith-civic partners: Regional advocacy organizations active in shale-impacted counties, building trades councils representing well-pad construction workforces, FQHCs and rural primary care practices, and rural and small-town congregations and school boards in directly affected districts.

A complete SWPA Partner Reference is available as an appendix to this module.

CENSWPA’s three-tiered Hub model — co-learning, mutual support, and co-created projects — is built explicitly on this principle. Its speaker series, working groups, and convenings deliberately bring together partners who may not otherwise share a table. This matters because environmental and occupational cancer risks rarely fit cleanly within any single sector’s mandate. Convening researchers, clinicians, community organizations, those impacted by cancer, and/or specific environmental exposures helps build capacity, evidence, and credibility that no partner can produce alone.

CENSWPA’s working groups, called Action Pods, function as exposure- or population-specific action teams to address a key need or opportunity to support environmental/occupational cancer risk reduction activities. Issue-focused efforts allow partners with a shared interest in a topic/strategy to collaborate, providing a low-barrier pathway into deeper engagement.

Direct partnership with the people most affected by environmental and occupational cancer risk is often difficult for cancer coalitions — the structural distance between public health institutions and the residents and workers carrying the heaviest burdens can be substantial, and trust takes time to build. Where direct engagement is possible, it is essential. Where it is not, working through community-based organizations that represent affected residents and workers is often the most impactful pathway. In either case, sensitivity and discretion are critical, and what constitutes authentic engagement is not a question settled once, but revisited continually as relationships, contexts, and priorities evolve as elevated in Module 5. Authentic engagement of impacted populations helps to root exposure reduction priorities, even if “cancer” is not seen as central to the conversation. This justice and engagement frame is central to CENSWPA’s annual Environmental Summit, in partnership with the Center for Pubic Health Practice, which takes on the topics of justice, science, and healing and is convened in partnership with academic and community-based organizations.

regulatory, surveillance, academic, and community-generated data infrastructure — including use of the Pennsylvania Cancer Registry, US Environmental Protection Agency datasets (such as the National Air Toxics Assessment Data in Module 3), and a wide range of community-based monitoring initiatives — paired with the Network’s analytical capacity to interpret it, gives partners a shared evidentiary foundation for identifying priority exposures and the populations most affected. These data assets and how the Network uses them to set regional environmental/occupational cancer risk reduction priorities are the focus of Section 7.2.