Decades back, when Raul Reyes Jr. would go to football practice in high school in West Dallas, the air outside was filled with a burning stench. The harsh smell came from the GAF asphalt shingle factory not far from the school. Now 47 years old, Reyes said a whole lot hasn’t changed since then.
“That’s every morning,” Reyes told the
Observer. “That’s not just during football season. That’s every freakin’ morning.” Reyes is also the president of West Dallas 1, a coalition of neighborhoods in the area, which was created to amplify the voice of the community. One of its main focuses is environmental justice.
End of Shingle Mountain in Dallas’ southeast Oak Cliff neighborhood brings music to residents’ ears
A pop-up classical concert marked the end of more than 3 years of roofing debris looming over this neighborhood.
Shaun Martin performs outside of Marsha Jackson s home in Dallas on Friday, Feb. 26, 2021. Quincy Roberts, the contractor who moved Shingle Mountain, surprised Jackson with the concert. (Juan Figueroa/ The Dallas Morning News)(Juan Figueroa / Staff photographer)
For the first time in more than three years, Marsha Jackson shed tears of joy outside her southeast Oak Cliff home.
On Friday, she sat in a folding chair on the dirt road in front of her house of 25 years, flanked by her daughter, granddaughter and supporters.
As Dallas works to move the mountain and get through its lawsuit with Jackson, neighborhood residents are trying to ensure that another environmental disaster doesn’t end up right outside their windows. But, they say the city isn’t listening to them. We just want our community to be green again, so we can enjoy our animals, our pets and be able to grow us and feel what it’s like to have a garden, Jackson said. Jackson is also the president of Southern Sector Rising, a nonprofit that deals with systemic racism in Dallas’ zoning practice.
There were gaps in city of Dallas zoning changes made throughout the ’80s, which were intended to protect people from hazardous industrial uses. But the measures left out and damaged majority non-white neighborhoods. As a result, land next to these residential areas became industrialized.
KERA
A yellow bulldozer carries a pile of shingles on Thursday morning. This is the first day of a long removal to teardown Shingle Mountain, a giant pile of toxic waste that s been located in southeast Dallas for nearly three years.
After a years-long fight to remove Shingle Mountain, about ten trucks on Thursday morning began to haul away the six-story pile of roofing shingles in southeast Dallas.
City officials say the teardown is expected to be completed by March 2021.
Read more stories about how Shingle Mountain is affecting Dallas residents and the city s plan to remove it.
Starting at 8 a.m., large trucks from Roberts Trucking Inc. began to haul shingles away. The crew estimated there were over 100,000 tons of them on site.
The city says it will take 90 days to clean the pile, located along the 9500 block of South Central Expressway. Make sure we do everything safe, we got monitors inside and outside, so it was not an easy process to get something started, but as of today you are seeing, it took a couple years of litigation but now it s coming down, that s the good part, it s coming down now, Atkins said. Right now we really can t get overjoyed as much as everybody else because we have seen this start before, constantly before. And it started before, and it stopped. And here it is again, Marsha Jackson, who lives alongside the pile, told NBC 5.