"EPA expressed alarm at contamination in a creek near a predominantly Black neighborhood. Then the agency eliminated its civil-rights office and has taken no further action." 

"DURHAM, N.C. — On a summer afternoon in Burton Park, hip-hop throbs from a car stereo over the backbeat of a basketball slapping on concrete. The sun bakes a grid of identical brick buildings, whose wheezing window air conditioners can barely keep pace with the 96-degree heat. Three young boys laugh and shout as they speed down the sidewalk on their bikes.

They stop and point at a creek. It lies stagnant behind an orange snow fence smothered in kudzu. 

“You can’t go in there,” one of the boys blurts. He pulls the collar of his T-shirt over his nose. “It stinks.”

Two years ago, in August 2023, the city fenced off the creek in east Durham after chemical distribution company Brenntag Mid-South detected high levels of acetone, toluene and ethanol in water at its property edge a half-mile upstream."

Lisa Sorg reports for Inside Climate News August 13, 2025. [2]