Glades residents left behind: Nikki Fried’s ‘changes’ to cane burning served only Big Sugar

The only document detailing the changes showed up in defense of sugar companies in a lawsuit by Glades residents.

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Acrid smoke from burning sugar cane fields still clouded the skies over Glades residents into the heat of June this year, raining toxic soot on their homes, playgrounds and sports fields, keeping children and other vulnerable residents indoors.  

For a third year, the pre-harvest burning season had brought no sign to Glades residents of the “major” and “historic changes” to sugar-cane burning that Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried announced on Oct. 1, 2019. That day, Fried, who heads the agency with sole authority over agricultural burn permits and who now is campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for governor, called herself committed to “new approaches.”   

The announcement Fried made was profoundly misleading on multiple levels, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found.

POST/PROPUBLICA INVESTIGATION PART 1: The smoke comes every year. Sugar companies say the air is safe.

INVESTIGATION PART 2: ‘A complete failure of the state’: Authorities didn’t heed researchers’ calls to study health effects of burning sugar cane

PULITZER RECOGNITION: Post/ProPublica investigation on sugar cane burning a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

The changes were neither major nor historic. Somereworded existing rules with minor adjustments, and none had binding authority. None addressed objections to the burning that people living closest to the fires had raised for years and that residents had personally brought to her attention.  

Kina Phillips on Nikki Fried failing Glades residents for not stopping the burning
Glades residents asked Nikki Fried for help to end sugar cane burning. It never happened
THOMAS CORDY, THE PALM BEACH POST

The impetus behind Fried’s announcement was mystifying from the start. The changes were presented as the first revisions to agricultural burning policies “in 30 years,” but little detail was supplied that day. Her agency has never produced a document detailing the changes.

Sugar company attorneys, however, did produce a document detailing the changes, as Exhibit B, to show the industry was well regulated in a motion to dismiss Glades residents' lawsuit against cane growers over the burning. It was dated the day before Fried’s announcement. 

While the announcement of the guidelines served sugar companies, nothing in the guidelines themselves responded to residents’ concerns about the fires’ effects on health and property that had been recognized over the past three decades.

A 1991 article from The Palm Beach Post reports on tougher cane burning restrictions for when the wind blows east toward whiter, more affluent communities on the coast.
A 1991 article from The Palm Beach Post reports on tougher cane burning restrictions for when the wind blows east toward whiter, more affluent communities on the coast. THE PALM BEACH POST

Fried declined to be interviewed for this story.

Nearly 30 years earlier, changes to cane fire permitting hadspared whiter and wealthier communities to the east from the smoke and ash. They continue to do so.  

Fried’s “historic changes” did not address the stark issues of environmental racism raised by the state’s authorization of burns that have since affected only predominantly Black and impoverished communities in western Palm Beach County. 

The “enhancements” to the state’s burn program did not address concerns about the pollution released by the firesthat led other states and countries to abandon the practice. 

In reality, few of the guidelines pertained to sugar-cane burning at all.

The next year, as the COVID-19 pandemic took a heavy toll across the Glades, a second “phase” of guidelines from Fried in 2020 did not reflect research showing exposure to smoke from outdoor burning raised the risks of death from the virus. 

The guidelines did not address the detailed description of life in a burning zone provided by Glades residents who sued the sugar industry months before Fried’s announcement, seeking reparation and relief from what they had come to call the burning season’s “black snow.”

Nikki Fried's solution to cane burning? 'Grow hemp, it's better for the environment'
Nikki Fried said she did all she could do on cane burning. Otherwise, she told The Post Editorial Board, she could lose her power.
THOMAS CORDY, THE PALM BEACH POST

Fried that day delivered a blow to the hopes of other Glades residents who had met with her in the last days of her 2018 campaign for one of the state’s most powerful Cabinet positions. Fried promised change, they said. She was not the sugar industry’s favored candidate. They thought she would never take money from the industry that seemed at odds with her stated positions on protecting the environment.  

Fried’s political committee, however, did and does receive contributions from political action committees largely financed by the sugar industry. 

If input from those most affected by the fires informed the guidelines Fried announced in 2019, her office has not produced evidence of it.  

Her office also has offered no record of the science behind them. 

The “major changes” were never the subject of a public hearing or public comment that are required in the state’s rule-making process. Without those steps, following the guidelines was optional.   

Fried’s office has said the guidelines led forestry officials to reject more applications for cane burns than it had previously. State records show no significant difference in the number of fires and acres burned within two city blocks of residential neighborhoods each year.

HOW IT WORKS IN BRAZIL: Burning sugar cane pollutes communities of color in Palm Beach County. Brazil shows another way.

FRIED URGED TO EXPAND BUFFERS: Palm Beach County Democrats urge Nikki Fried to expand sugar cane burning buffers

THE LAWSUIT: Glades residents drop cane-burning lawsuit against sugar growers

In 2021, a Palm Beach Post/ProPublica investigation delved into deficiencies in air monitoring in the Glades as well as the Palm Beach County Health Department’s failures to examine the effects of the smoke on residents. In data gathered after all of Fried’s changes were in place, the investigation showed the fires continued to pollute the air that Glades residents breathe.  

In April, the Democratic Executive Committee of Palm Beach County condemned sugar field burning. The committee called the exposure to the pollution released only on the predominantly low-income, Black and Hispanic communities “a glaring example of environmental injustice and environmental racism in Palm Beach County.”  

The Democrats cited the Department of Agriculture’s failure to bring equal protection to Glades communities and called on Fried to use her authority.

Two sets of rules on who’s affected by pollution

In 1990, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency appointed a group of experts to evaluate disproportionate effects of polluted air, water and soil on racial minority and low-income communities. The group’s findings led it to define environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”  

The goal has remained elusive. In 2004, the EPA responded to a U.S. Office of Inspector General report finding that in the decade and a half since defining the term, the agency had not sufficiently addressed the disproportionate effects of environmental pollutants on low-income and predominantly Black communities. In its response the agencycited continuing challenges, but also quoted environmental justice pioneer Dr. Robert Bullard that “no community, rich or poor, Black or white should be allowed to become a ‘sacrifice zone.’” 

The term “sacrifice zone” describes communities where impoverished racial minority populations lacked influence to keep hazardous pollutants out of their neighborhoods.  

In 1991, complaints from the east about the effects of sugar-cane burning in South Florida would demonstrate how that worked. 

Residents of Palm Beach County’s growing and affluent coastal communities had been writing and calling local and state officials with increasing frequency about sore throats, coughing and breathing problems whenever the wind carried smoke from sugar-cane burns their way. Those residents, as far west as Wellington and as far east as Palm Beach, already had the benefit of at least a 30-mile buffer zone between the fires and their homes.  

That year a petition filed on behalf of the Palm Beach Garden Club, the Florida Audubon Society and the Florida Wildlife Federation sought to end the practice.  

A Florida Forest Service official warned the sugar companies that without adjustments they faced the possibility that burning would be banned altogether. 

By the end of the year, the forest service had found a solution: On days the wind blew toward the eastern communities, burning would not be allowed. When the wind blew toward the largely impoverished communities of Black, Hispanic and Caribbean-born residents closer to the sugar cane fields, the burning could continue. 

Environmental justice as a policy goal was in its infancy when Glades residents were left to bear the direct effects of sugar-cane burns alone and mostly in silence.

“When you’re marginalized and you’re poor, you’re not going to think about strategies and organizing to basically improve your health, because you have other worries you’re concerned with,” Colin Walkes, a former Pahokee mayor, says now. “Basically, eating, paying your bills, taking care of your children. Just trying to basically survive.”

Former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk sues the sugar industry

West Palm Beach resident and former Gov. Claude Kirk, shown displaying a vanity automobile license plate in 1970, sued the sugar companies over cane burning in the 1990s.
West Palm Beach resident and former Gov. Claude Kirk, shown displaying a vanity automobile license plate in 1970, sued the sugar companies over cane burning in the 1990s. State Archives of Florida

As Glades residents clean ash and soot from their porches, cars and roofs, the consequences of living in the midst of burning agricultural waste more than half of every year further impoverish their communities, Walkes says. The burning reduces property values, forces residents living on low income to run air conditioning during the coolest months of the year because they have to close their windows and burdens them with medical expenses, he says. 

The year after the policy change benefited residents to the east, the Palm Beach County Health Department released a study showing the number of Glades residents visiting the local public clinic for treatment of respiratory ailments climbed steeply during the months of fires. The study called for more research.  

Another health department-sponsored study found more small particle air pollution in Belle Glade than in Delray Beach during cane-burning months. Small particle pollution, harmful because it penetrates deeply into the lungs potentially causing lasting and deadly illnesses, is generated by combustion that can include car emissions and cane burning. While researchers noted that the more densely populated Delray Beach could be expected to generate more of that type of pollution than rural Belle Glade, they did not conclusively link the air pollution in Belle Glade to the fires. 

To this day, as studies have shown the effects of pollutants in agricultural fires on health and data has shown rising numbers of residents seeking medical care during burning season, the state has found no evidence that links these two findings conclusively enough to halt the practice. 

By 1995, former Florida Gov. Claude Kirk, a Palm Beach County resident and Everglades conservationist, had drawn his own conclusions. Hejoined with Glades residents to sue cane growers, saying their burns and use of pesticides were polluting the land, air and water, damaging property and making people sick. Sugar industry attorneys countered with two arguments.  

They said the industry was protected by the state’s Right to Farm Act. The law, enacted in 1979, restricts the grounds for what it calls “nuisance” lawsuits against agricultural businesses.  

The attorneys also argued that the state’s regulatory agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, have expertise that judges and juries don’t have, can best determine whether industry practices cause harm and have the authority to stop them.  

“It doesn’t take a lot of judicial labor to determine whether soot is blowing through the windows of our clients and into the lungs of their children,” Jack Scarola, the attorney for Kirk and the Glades residents, responded then. 

The case made its way to the Florida Supreme Court.

“For five years now,” Kirk told a Palm Beach Post reporter as the courts considered the case, “the children I started protecting against asthma are still being affected.”

In 2001, however, the Florida Supreme Court accepted the industry’s argument, and in throwing out the suit, told plaintiffs they should take their complaints to the agencies.  

Scarola was not optimistic about that route. 

While nothing changed in Florida by 2006, Argentina, Australia, South Africa, Brazil and the state of Louisiana were responding to research indicating pollution from the burns was harmful to health and the environment. All were phasing out burning. Asked about local plans that year, a spokesperson for the Florida Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative said: “We would prefer to continue to be able to burn sugar cane. It’s not a real big nuisance anymore.”  

In recent years U.S. Sugar has produced reports supporting that view.

Its second annual State of Our Air Report for the 2020-2021 season, released this year, “shows that the Glades communities have air that is good, safe and clean,” according to company President and CEO Robert H. Buker.

But U.S. Sugar was already was making limited use of the same “green harvesting” alternative to burning that other countries were adopting. The company was using it in the fields neighboring a Walmart in Clewiston, a city on the southwest edge of Lake Okeechobee, where census data shows more than 80% of residents are white, in deference to the business and its customers.

A call for change from Glades residents

Kina Phillips of South Bay met with then-agriculture commissioner candidate Nikki Fried in 2018 to tell her how cane burning was harming her community. The changes Fried announced, Phillips says, did nothing to protect Glades residents.
Kina Phillips of South Bay met with then-agriculture commissioner candidate Nikki Fried in 2018 to tell her how cane burning was harming her community. The changes Fried announced, Phillips says, did nothing to protect Glades residents. THOMAS CORDY/THE PALM BEACH POST

Kina Phillips was born in South Bay. The smell of smoke that often filled the air for at least six months a year, the sore throats and sinuses from it, the soot and ash that fell on clothes and cars, the friends and neighbors who struggled with asthma, had always been part of her life.  

In 2008, her daughter was in class at Rosenwald Elementary School, which Phillips had attended as a child as well, when smoke from a cane fire bordering the campus infiltrated the building’s ventilation system. Six children were taken to the hospital, while paramedics treated seven more inside the school. 

Phillips believes someone forgot to issue a warning that a burn had been scheduled and to close the blinds and windows. When the school was renovated a few years later, Phillips watched walls go up, enclosing the campus’ once open walkways. 

Phillips babysat her new grandson during burning season in 2013. Whenever she took him outside, he got short of breath. She took him to the clinic where she worked, where he was put on a machine, with a mask on his face, delivering medicine to help him breathe. She learned to keep him inside when the air smelled of smoke.  

Phillips and her friend Shanique Scott, then mayor of South Bay, had a mutual friend who was sick. Scott had heard the doctor ask her friend where she lived and then advise her that if she wanted to live, she needed to move away from the smoke. 

“Why should anyone have to move?” Scott says now. “Mind you, you’re telling people who have been in these communities for years. I can move, but what about my family? What about my 83-year-old grandmother?” 

The doctor’s warning to their friend was a call to action. 

Scott called the Sierra Club’s California office. The office put her in touch with a member in Palm Beach Gardens, who in turn met with Scott, Phillips and several more neighbors. The story they told moved the Sierra Club to send support that helped start the Stop the Burn campaign in 2015. 

“It was a cry out,” Scott said. 

She has heard their movement mischaracterized as one spurred by outside interference.

“It’s never been outsiders. We live here, we grew up here, we’re talking about people who have been living with this since birth,” Scott said. 

They had stayed quiet for too long, Phillips said. 

“When something is knocking on your door,” Phillips says now, “you have to answer the door.” 

Ag candidate Nikki Fried comes to the Glades

Kina Phillips (from left), Nikki Fried, Brittany Ingram and Shanique Scott when they met in 2018.
Kina Phillips (from left), Nikki Fried, Brittany Ingram and Shanique Scott when they met in 2018. Photo provided

In 2018 Nikki Fried, campaigning to be agriculture commissioner, traveled to Belle Glade. She agreed to meet with Phillips, Scott and Brittany Ingram, another co-founder of the Stop the Burn campaign. This was an unprecedented opportunity, Phillips says now. 

Phillips told Fried how, working in a Glades clinic, she had seen the spikes in visits from children who needed machines to help them breathe on burn days. Scott told her how other countries including Brazil had adopted alternative “green” harvesting, removing the tough outer layer of sugar cane with machines instead of fires.

The method was already being used instead of fires in a nearby city to protect a well-known business from clouds of smoke and ash, Scott said. 

“If you can green harvest around a business, you can green harvest around our homes. Have the same respect for us,” Scott said. 

Fried listened and agreed, Scott remembers now. “She appeared to be on board.” 

“Do you know how it feels to be sitting across a table from someone that has the power to bring change in your community, that has suffered with something they think they can never overcome, and are afraid to speak out on?” Phillips says now. “And now you have the opportunity to collaborate and connect with somebody who says they have your best interests at heart, and can bring that change?” 

No candidate for the office had met with the residents to discuss the effect of the burning before. Fried seemed to be a new kind of candidate. 

“She said she was going to change things, she was beholden to no one,” Phillips said.  

News reports after the election and into Fried’s first year in office refer to her having “declined” campaign contributions from the sugar industry. More recent articles have specified that she does not take “direct” donations. State campaign finance records show repeated donations to her Florida Consumers First political committee from other political action committees heavily funded by the sugar industry.  

When Fried won the office in a close race, Phillips believed the struggle for justice in the Glades was making progress.  

Eight months into Fried’s first year, Phillips sent her a letter, reminding her of their earlier meeting and asking if they could talk again.

“As a reminder,” she wrote, “we’re small communities surrounded by sugar.” 

Scott wrote as well, reminding Fried of their meeting and inviting her to come back. She attached the picture of the four of them when they met during her 2018 campaign. 

Exhibit B in sugar industry’s defense of lawsuit filed by other Glades residents

By meeting with and writing to Fried, Phillips and her neighbors were doing what the Florida Supreme Court had recommended 20 years earlier when it threw out Kirk’s 1995 lawsuit.  

The argument that state regulators would use their expertise to protect communities from harm, however, was growing old. Research into the health effects of sugar-cane fires and the alternative of green harvesting had evolved considerably since the court’s decision. The Department of Agriculture’s requirements for permits to set thousands of acres of cane fields ablaze had changed little.  

In June 2019, Glades residents not connected to the Stop the Burn campaign sued the sugar industry, this time with a federal lawsuit aimed solely at the sugar-cane burning. 

The only place where Nikki Fried’s “historic changes” to cane burning showed up was as a part of the sugar industry’s defense against a lawsuit over cane burning.
The only place where Nikki Fried’s “historic changes” to cane burning showed up was as a part of the sugar industry’s defense against a lawsuit over cane burning. The Palm Beach Post

Four months later, Fried announced the “enhancements” to the state’s burn permitting program on the first day of the pre-harvest burning season. 

With the headline “Commissioner Fried announces major changes to prescribed burning,” the announcement was confusing from the top.  

“Prescribed” burning is a statewide, uncontroversial and occasional measure to lessen wildfire threats and curb the spread of invasive vegetation. The announcement, however, used the term incorrectly, according to burn experts. Sugar-cane burning, used solely to lower industry costs of harvesting cane, and prescribed burning are different in purpose, consequences and frequency. 

Fried then referred to “prescribed burning, a practice with strong scientific basis,” in a sentence touting “the first changes in nearly 30 years to some of these procedures,” an apparent reference to sugar-cane burning.

The first three changes in the news release addressed prescribed burns. After those, the announcement singled out four changes it said were “related to sugarcane burning, effective immediately”: 

  • A minimum 80-acre buffer on dry, windy days – about two city blocks – between uncultivated lands and burns in sugar-cane fields to reduce the threat of wildfires.
  • Special approval would be required for burns after sundown and before 9 a.m.
  • Burns would not be permitted before 11 a.m. on days when fog advisories had been issued.
  • Muck fires, flames from smoldering waste in the ground, must be extinguished within three, rather than four days. 

Oddly, the measures addressing minor procedural changes at most did not appear to be of the broad public interest that their presentation in a press conference implied.  

The department already had a rule requiring a “two-field buffer” between wildlands and burning, with the understanding that each field is 40 acres. Nighttime burning was already banned under Florida law with no reference to “special approval.”  

State law also already barred open burning “when the Division of Forestry determines that atmospheric or meteorological conditions indicate improper dispersion of smoke that threatens public health, safety, or general welfare.”  

If technical or administrative revisions had been made, for example, to the amount of wind that would require a buffer, or to the level of staff authority required to give special approvals for burns, as the department has since asserted, they did not appear to have been written down.

They also did not represent the first changes in nearly 30 years to cane burning guidelines, which had been updated and entered into the Florida Administrative Code less than a decade earlier.

The changes Fried called “historic” were not recorded in rules or statutes, nor on the agency’s website and were not provided in response to public records requests.

They had, however, been provided to sugar industry representatives. 

Fried mentioned that day that the revisions had been  shared with sugar companies to ensure they could “adapt” to the changes.

The day before Fried’s announcement, representatives of the Florida Forest Service had met with a group of them in a Broward district office to discuss the changes. That day, John Sabo of the Forest Service sent an email to Agriculture Department staff in Tallahassee, including to those who would draft the press release. The email, obtained by The Post, details the changes to be announced. 

On Oct. 18, 2019, three weeks after Fried’s announcement, the guidelines described in that email made their first and only appearance as a publicly available and formal document. Dated Sept. 30, 2019, that documentwas attached as evidence supporting the sugar industry’s defense against the Glades residents’ lawsuit.  

The motion cited “Kirk v. U.S. Sugar,” the case brought by the former governor that the Supreme Court had thrown out on the grounds that the state had greater expertise than courts to monitor industries they regulated and could be trusted to prevent industries from harming communities. 

Sugar company attorneys, who also attached a copy of the press release heralding “major changes,” argued that the document and announcement together demonstrated that the state agency was regulating the industry and continued to make “refinements” to its rules. 

The defendants’ motion duplicated another defense used against Kirk’s suit, citing the Right to Farm Act, which limits “nuisance” lawsuits against agricultural businesses.

In April 2021, the act would be amended, after extensive lobbying by the sugar industry to protect agricultural businesses from liability for activities that release small particle pollution, like that produced by sugar-cane fires. 

A week after sugar industry attorneys submitted Fried’s Oct. 1 announcement and the details of the changes it introduced as Exhibit B, Fried’s political committee Florida Consumers First received its first donation from the Florida Prosperity Fund, a PAC heavily funded by the sugar industry. By the end of the month, the PAC had donated $45,000 to Fried’s committee. As the year ended two months later, Florida Consumers First had amassed more than $100,000 from six PACs largely supported by sugar industry donations, four making their first contributions to Fried's political committee.

Belle Glade mayor: Sugar industry crucial to boost the community

Belle Glade Mayor Steve Wilson says the sugar industry is crucial to the economy of the Glades.
Belle Glade Mayor Steve Wilson says the sugar industry is crucial to the economy of the Glades. BILL INGRAM/THE PALM BEACH POST

Belle Glade Mayor Steve Wilson, who has called the sugar industry “the economic engine of our community” and led a group that traveled to Tallahassee to voice support for the revisions to the Right to Farm Act – is quoted in Fried’s announcement, approving her action.  

“This improved process for sugar-cane burning,” his statement said, “will mean less smoke and ash impacts for our community, improved air quality, and enhanced safety from wildfires.”  

U.S. Sugar spokesperson Judy Sanchez, also voiced immediate approval of Fried’s announcement, in a statement on the company’s website. At the same time, the spokesperson confirmed the guidelines did not represent “change,” major or otherwise.  

“With today’s enhancements,” the statement said, “Commissioner Fried has formalized into the statewide open burn program a number of ‘best practices’ that many of Florida’s farmers and ranchers have been utilizing for years in sustainably managing their lands.”

Glades residents, who had campaigned for four years to draw attention to the effects of fires, also did not think the guidelines introduced change. 

Kina Phillips
It was a slap in the face.

They noted that Fried’s announcement described a buffer between fires and neighboring vegetation but included no mention of a buffer between burns and populated communities.  

“It was a slap in the face,” Phillips said. 

At a rally in front of the Belle Glade forest service office a month after Fried’s announcement, resident leaders of the Stop the Burn campaign called for a 27-to-30-mile radius no-burn zone around their homes, schools and churches. 

The plaintiffs suing the sugar companies also were unimpressed with the changes cited in the industry’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.  

Their attorneys noted the misuse of the term “prescribed burning,” responding,  “Defendants’ conflation of sugarcane burning with prescribed burning suggests that sugarcane burning is somehow endorsed, or even required, by the State of Florida, which is not the case.” 

The attorneys also argued that the Department of Agriculture’s actions confirmed concerns about the sugar industry’s political influence.

They noted that Fried had apparently referred to all burning overseen by her department as “a national model,” the attorneys added: “Plaintiffs would posit, with all due respect to Commissioner Fried, that where Florida is consistently ‘the top contributor’ to carbon emissions nationwide, ‘largely due to the harvesting activities,’ ... burning may not always be a great national model.” 

With the 2019 burning season just beginning, 2020 would raise the risks to Glades residents.  

COVID pandemic highlights heightened risks from smoke 

Retired NFL wide receiver and Pahokee High School star Anquan Boldin speaks during a press conference with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a COVID-19 vaccination site at Anquan Boldin Stadium in Pahokee. It was in 2021 in the height of the pandemic when the Glades was a hotspot for the virus.
Retired NFL wide receiver and Pahokee High School star Anquan Boldin speaks during a press conference with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a COVID-19 vaccination site at Anquan Boldin Stadium in Pahokee. It was in 2021 in the height of the pandemic when the Glades was a hotspot for the virus. Greg Lovett, The Palm Beach Post

At the start of January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, reported in China the month before, was gaining momentum. The highest rates of illness and death from the new virus, scientists reported, were among people already vulnerable and frequently marginalized – older people, people with complicating conditions that included cancer, heart disease and respiratory ailments and people routinely breathing polluted air. 

By March, COVID-19 had landed in Florida.  

The Florida Department of Agriculture issued its first news release about the new virus on March 3 with a quote from Fried: “Floridians should adhere to warnings and guidelines from federal, state, and local officials and public health personnel.” 

Fried issued more than 25 news releases and announcements responding to the pandemic in the next month.

On April 7, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health released the results of a study finding that U.S. residents living in counties with higher levels of long-term air pollution from fine particulate matter were more likely to die of COVID. 

Within three weeks, more than 210 organizations, nonprofits, businesses and churches in the Glades cited the Harvard study and other international studies linking air pollution to greater risks of illness and death from COVID. They called on Fried to ban burning.  

On June 16, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a document describing public health risks of agricultural and backyard burning, referring to both as “open burning.”  

The document warned that people who had or were recovering from the virus who were exposed to smoke from open burning were at increased risks of respiratory problems and advised state officials to consider a temporary ban on open burns. 

Attorneys for residents who sued the sugar growers in 2019 noted in a June 22 court filing the new CDC recommendation for temporary burn bans and attached a map showing smoke from 58 approved burns across 2,012 acres over Glades communities on the day before Gov. Ron DeSantis had ordered a lockdown. 

In a letter to Fried, the leadership of the Stop the Burn Campaign also highlighted the CDC recommendation and the disproportionately high toll of the pandemic in the Glades. The campaign asked Fried again to consider including a minimum 27-mile radius burn-free zone between fires and populated areas.  

The 2019-2020 cane burning had ended by then. The CDC recommendation, however, offered powerful support to the buffer residents were calling for, notes Gil Smart, executive director of VoteWater, which promotes the election of candidates with records and positions responsive to environmental issues. 

"That would have been the time to try. The whole world was terrified,” Smart said. “Would there have been objections? Absolutely. Would anyone have thwarted her? Maybe – but it would have been the time to try. It was a missed opportunity.”  

It also turned out to be a narrow opportunity.  

Redrawn zones an improvement, Ag Department says

Instead, on Aug. 4, Fried announced a second phase of “improvements” to the state’s prescribed burning program, again covering changes to permitting both for wildfire control and sugar industry harvesting practices under the term.

Again the “improvements” came with no buffer between sugar-cane field fires and residential communities. The recommendations did not mention the CDC advisory. 

The news release described an existing program for burn managers in terms that suggested it was new. It was, instead, a change to the state’s training for certified prescribed burn managers, offering but not requiring sugar-cane burners the opportunity to take the course. 

The announcement alluded, again, to rules established nearly 30 years earlier. The zone boundaries that had left Glades residents to bear the brunt of sugar-cane burning alone had been redrawn, to create two additional zones, the announcement said.  

“By nature of having more zones with their own corresponding criteria,” Assistant Agriculture Commissioner Shelby Scarpa wrote, in answer to questions about what the zones had accomplished, “we have much greater and precise control over implementing restrictions.” 

The department is not, however, able to measure the amount of particulate matter residents are exposed to, Scarpa said.

She added that the addition of the Air Quality Index as a factor to be weighed in burn permitting does take particulate matter into account.

“We know that these changes reduce smoke impact overall by virtue of fire science,” she wrote. A requirement for using fires against prevailing winds, and the addition of restrictions for redrawn zones, she wrote, “does and will reduce smoke impact.” 

The latest guidelines were not formalized in any way that would make them enforceable, leaving their application up to agency interpretation and discretion. 

The release of the second phase of guidelines drew the attention of Friends of the Everglades, which sent a letter to Fried, adding their voice to calls for the 27-to-30-mile buffer. 

“Redrawn zone boundaries announced as an overdue solution to growing populations in affected areas do not clearly ensure equal protections from county to county,” the letter said. 

The organization pointed to “the incongruous nature” of Fried’s stated commitment to keeping Floridians safe and allowing burns affecting residential communities during the pandemic. 

CDC guidelines change after letter from ag group

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. David Goldman/AP

On Sept. 25, 2020, a letter, since obtained by The Post, addressed to then-CDC Director Robert Redfield from a recently formed organization called the Florida Ag Coalition arrived at the agency. 

“We respectfully request that the CDC clarify their guidance” the letter said. Specifically, the writer requested removing any reference to agricultural burning.  

Incorporated in April 2020, the coalition now comprises 25 members representing agricultural interests, including dairy, poultry, citrus and sugar. In the year that followed, the new coalition would lobby heavily for the most recent revisions to the Right to Farm Act. 

The coalition’s letter was followed a few days later by a letter from the Florida Forestry Association, an older organization, which also urged Redfield to “clarify CDC guidance on open burning.” 

The pre-harvest season had begun with no new restrictions on burning. Then on Nov. 13, 2020, the CDC released a revised version of the guidance and deleted the June 16 version.

The new version removed “agricultural burning” from the document, which now defined “open burning” solely as “backyard” burning and “burning of household or yard waste.” Still advising that “open burning” produces smoke containing pollutants that can worsen heart and lung conditions and raise risks for people with COVID, it eliminated fires across thousands of pesticide-laden acres at a time as a source of those pollutants. 

With no buffer zone between residents and burning fields, the 2020-2021 sugar-cane burning season went on to see 11,293 authorized fires across 383,156 acres, an area about 10 times the size of West Palm Beach. 

Pulitzer finalist news investigation shows threadbare air monitoring

If the second “phase” of revisions to guidelines lessened the effects of pollution from fires on nearby residents, as Assistant Agriculture Commissioner Scarpa said, they did nothing to eliminate them.

Between December and April that season, The Post and ProPublica worked with air-quality and public health experts from universities across the United States to place outdoor air sensors in the Glades that measured particulate matter and to analyze cane burn permits and plume data from the Department of Agriculture. 

The air sensors caught spikes in pollution, often associated with cane burning. Those spikes are not recorded in data gathered in 24-hour averages by the only monitor in the Glades. The news organizations’ data showed short-term spikes, lasting less than an hour, that reached four times the average pollution levels in the area. Experts in health and air quality who examined the data said the exposure posed both short and long-term health risks. 

The Post and ProPublica published the first part of the Black Snow investigation on July 8, 2021. 

Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried speaks  during a campaign stop in West Palm Beach as she runs for governor.
Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried speaks during a campaign stop in West Palm Beach as she runs for governor. GREG LOVETT/THE PALM BEACH POST

Two weeks later, promising to “break the rigged system in Florida,” Fried videotaped an announcement that she would run for governor.

Her campaign has highlighted her commitment to environmental issues. “Clean air and pristine waterways are more than just central to our economic well-being” the section on environment starts, continuing, “our environment is what makes Florida special.” 

She recognizes those special aspects of life in Florida are not equally enjoyed by all. 

“It’s no secret that those affected most by dangerous toxins in our environment are those who have been traditionally disenfranchised.” As governor, she adds, she would direct the state Department of Environmental Protection to set “aggressive timetables” to remedy disparate harms from pollution. 

While Fried no longer touted or promised changes to cane burning in the Glades, attorneys for the residents suing the sugar industry responded to repeated defense motions to dismiss their case.  

Then suddenly, on Feb. 25, Glades residents dropped their suit permanently under terms that bar it from ever being refiled in the Southern District of Florida. This left only two sources of relief from the fires for people in the Glades – the state agriculture commissioner and the sugar industry.  

On April 7, Palm Beach County’s Democratic Executive Committee called on both to end the practice with a resolution describingcane field fires as “a glaring example of environmental injustice and environmental racism.” Saying that Fried had failed to modify the current sugar-cane burning rules equitably, their resolution urged the commissioner to put in place the buffer between burns and communities, and on the sugar industry to switch to green harvesting. 

In a West Palm Beach gubernatorial campaign stop, Fried introduced herself to The Post editorial board the day the resolution was released.  

As the lone Democrat in Tallahassee, she said, she risked being stripped of her power if she did more than she had to change the rules governing cane burning. She said she had encouraged the sugar industry to adopt green harvesting and also had encouraged the major sugar companies to grow hemp instead.  

She pointed to the 80-acre buffer that had tweaked an existing rule to improve wildfire prevention and to the redrawn zones as responses to the 30-year-old rule protecting only coastal residents, which she called “discriminatory on its face.” 

She acknowledged the need for changes to the current rules. 

“And so, we want to do a third phase, and I’m out of time on doing a third phase,” she said. “The third phase was supposed to be done at this point. And we’re working on that.” 

In June, the Democratic Environmental Caucus of Florida adopted the Palm Beach County Democrats’ resolution.  

By the end of the month, however, the caucus also endorsed her, citing “her work on Environmental Justice in communities of color.”  

That work, DECF President Russ Conn said, included drawing attention to deplorable conditions in a Hillsborough County housing development home to mostly Black residents and greater electricity costs for mostly Black residents of another. He acknowledged that those examples do not meet the common definition of environmental justice, which addresses equitable relief from air and water pollution. 

As for the continuing effects of sugar-cane burning in the Glades, Conn said, “I think some of the failures are in the office, not her.”

Glades residents: 'Nothing has changed' since Nikki Fried's cane burning announcement
Former Pahokee Mayor Colin Walkes says the smoke and ash only put more burden on already impoverished communities. Cleaning it up is costly in addition to the pollution.
THOMAS CORDY, THE PALM BEACH POST

Fried has opposed some measures that have been vigorously promoted by the sugar industry, including amendments in the past year to the Right to Farm Act that protect the industry from cane-burning lawsuits. At the same time, of the more than $6.4 million raised by Fried’s Florida Consumers First political committee since its May 2018 launch, political action committees funded heavily by the industry contributed more than $500,000. The great bulk of the contributions followed the Oct. 1 announcement of “major” and “historic” changes to burning practices.

‘She did not put anything in place to protect us, the people’

The longest  burning season in recent years ended on June 16 with a fire across 51 acres that started at 9 a.m. and continued two hours past sunset. 

“Nothing has changed for my community, nothing at all,” former Pahokee Mayor Walkes said. “She did not put anything in place to protect us, the people, even though we were suffering even further from a pandemic. And that would have been a good opportunity for her as Ag secretary to say, ‘You know what, let’s do something that’s meaningful.’” 

Walkes, who joined the Stop the Burn Campaign shortly after its launch, said he felt sorry for Fried when he heard she had said she couldn’t do more without risking being stripped of her power. 

“How can you be stripped of your power? The people gave you that power, not the industry,” he said. 

Like Scott and Phillips, Walkes emphasizes that their campaign seeks only to end burning. The sugar industry is not their enemy, he says, but they would like it to be a better neighbor.  

Kina Phillips has a sign protesting cane burning in the front yard of her home. She says she has given up hope that Agriculture Secretary and gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried will make changes that spare her community from the effects of the practice.
Kina Phillips has a sign protesting cane burning in the front yard of her home. She says she has given up hope that Agriculture Secretary and gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried will make changes that spare her community from the effects of the practice. THOMAS CORDY/THE PALM BEACH POST

In Kina Phillips’ front yard a sign says, “Stop the burn, we deserve better.” 

Her backyard looks out on a green field that stretches across the horizon. On a recent July day, the sky, bright, clear blue, meets the field midway. It is a pastoral piece of paradise, until the fires, coming again, bring the falling soot and the emergency room visits, the nebulizers, and the days and weeks indoors. 

Phillips has given up expecting change from Fried.  

“We were just a pit stop,” she said.  

Former Palm Beach Post investigative reporter Lulu Ramadan, whose reporting on cane burning in the Glades was recognized as a Pulitzer Prize finalist and who launched the “Black Snow” project with ProPublica, laid the groundwork for and contributed greatly to this report. 

Palm Beach Post staff writer Chris Persaud contributed to this report.

Antigone Barton is an investigative journalist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at avbarton@gannett.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

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