We Are Not Sacrifice Zones: The Truth Behind Iowa’s Dirty Secret
I was part of the documentaryIowa’s Dirty Secret: The True Cost of Burning Coal. For me, that was never just about being in a film. It was about speaking to something our communities have been living with for years, even when many people around us did not yet have the words for it. The documentary follows families living near Iowa coal plants, doctors who have seen the health impacts of coal pollution, and advocates pushing people to face what this industry has really cost all of us.
And the truth is, we are being used as sacrifice zones for these companies.
That is what this is.
A sacrifice zone is a place that is knowingly burdened with pollution, sickness, and environmental harm so that others can benefit from industry, electricity, and profit. It is a place treated as expendable. A place where the health of the people, the safety of the land, and the future of the community are treated as acceptable losses. For Indigenous, Black, Brown, and rural communities, this is not new. It fits into a much longer history where our lands and our bodies have been treated as useful when others want something from them, and disposable when we speak up about the harm.
Here in Siouxland, that truth sits near Port Neal. Many of us see these plants every time we travel to and from Sioux City, their smokestacks fixed into the landscape as if they belong there. MidAmerican’s George Neal North and George Neal South coal plants operate near Salix and south of Sioux City, and the Iowa Environmental Council’s reporting identifies them as the remaining Siouxland coal plants. Public reporting and plant records place Port Neal North’s operation beginning in 1975 and Port Neal South’s in 1979. That means our region has been living with pollution from these facilities for about fifty years.
That history matters.
Because when something has been in place for decades, people stop being told to question it. They start being taught to see it as normal. Jobs. Growth. Industry. Economic development. Progress. That is how these plants are often talked about. And yes, that is part of the story. But it is not the whole story. What rarely gets said with the same honesty is that this so-called progress came at the cost of our health, our wellbeing, and the safety of our communities.
Pollution does not stay where a company puts its smokestacks. It moves. It settles into our air, our land, and our water, and into our bodies. The Iowa Environmental Council’s Coal in Siouxland report says the communities most affected by prevailing winds from the Neal plants include Dakota City, Sloan, and the Winnebago Reservation, and that the pollution crosses state lines into Nebraska and South Dakota. That means the burden does not stop at a fence line, and it does not stop at the Iowa border.
That is part of why sacrifice zones are so dangerous. A company can place the source of pollution in one location, but the harm spreads outward to the people downwind and downstream. And too often, the people left carrying that burden are rural communities, poor communities, and communities of color. Communities like ours.
Air
It starts with the air, because the air is what we take into our bodies every single day whether we think about it or not.
The Port Neal plants release pollutants tied to serious health harm. The Iowa Environmental Council identifies sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fine particulate pollution, and other hazardous air pollutants from these plants, and links them to asthma, COPD, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, and premature death. These same findings say Woodbury County has the highest adult asthma rate in Iowa.
These are not small numbers or vague concerns. The Coal in Siouxland materials report 13,105 tons of nitrogen oxides and 23,681 tons of sulfur dioxide from George Neal North and South over the period they summarize. They also say Siouxland coal plants were directly associated with 92 premature deaths, and that a census tract less than two miles north of the plants ranks in the 91st percentile nationally for low life expectancy.
So when our people talk about asthma, breathing problems, heart issues, chronic sickness, and cancer touching family after family, those concerns are not coming from nowhere. I would not say every illness in our communities comes from these plants alone. That would be too simple. But it would also not be honest to ignore that these plants have been part of the pollution burden forced onto our region for decades, and that the pollution they release is linked to exactly the kinds of sicknesses our families are living with.
For our people, air is not just something around us. It is breath. It is life. It is spirit. It is something we are supposed to protect, not poison. When the air is harmed, our people are harmed.
Land
And it does not stop with the air.
The land carries this burden too. Coal ash, what is left after coal is burned, is stored in ponds and landfills, and the Iowa Environmental Council reports that it contains toxic substances including arsenic, mercury, and cadmium. The same reporting says groundwater near both Port Neal plants exceeds federal health standards for arsenic.
Which matters because contamination does not just sit in one place and politely stay contained. It settles into the soil. It affects what grows. It affects plant life, the ecosystems around us, and the places our children grow up on. It affects the land our people have always been connected to.
For Indigenous people, land is not property. It is relative. It is memory. It is responsibility. We are supposed to care for it, protect it, and pass it on. When the land is contaminated, that is not only an environmental issue. It is a cultural issue. A spiritual issue. A generational issue. It changes what can grow, what can live, and what remains safe.
Water
And then there is the water.
When coal ash breaks down, it creates leachate, a contaminated liquid that can carry toxic metals and other pollutants through the soil and into groundwater. MidAmerican’s Port Neal North antidegradation analysis says wastewater from Port Neal North is discharged under an NPDES permit and that certain outfalls release water to the Missouri River, including water from former coal combustion residual impoundments and the process water pond.
That means what starts in a pond or landfill does not necessarily stay there. It can move into groundwater, threaten aquifers, and reach the waters our communities depend on.
This is the water our people fish from.
The water our children play in.
The water that supports plant life, animals, and the wider living world around us.
And when that water is threatened, everything connected to it is threatened too.
I am not saying every place our people fish or swim is automatically unsafe. But I am saying we deserve to know what we are being exposed to. We deserve to understand the risks. We deserve transparency about what is in our water and what decades of pollution may be doing to it. Iowa DNR says most fish in Iowa are safe to eat, while also maintaining fish-consumption guidance because contaminants such as mercury and PCBs can be present. Iowa DNR’s draft 2026 Missouri River assessments near Sioux City also say some segments do not support primary-contact recreation because of indicator bacteria, even while fish-consumption use in those segments is assessed as fully supported.
For our people, water is sacred. It is life. We are meant to hold and protect it, not watch it become another place where industry hides its waste and expects us to live with the consequences.
The Full Harm
When you look at it this way, air, land, and water, you begin to see the full picture.
This is not one issue.
This is not one exposure.
This is not one sickness.
This is a system of harm that touches every part of how we live.
And for Indigenous people, that is everything.
This did not begin with coal. It began with a long history of Indigenous lands and Indigenous communities being treated as expendable. Indigenous communities were forced from our homelands, pushed into places others considered less valuable, and then those same places were targeted again for extraction, pollution, and industry. The pattern is always familiar: take from our Indigenous people, burden our people, and then ask our people to prove the harm.
That is one reason places like ours are picked. We are rural. We are Indigenous. We are too often treated as politically easier to ignore. And when the burden falls on BIPOC and low-income communities, companies and systems have historically counted on that silence.
But we should also mention that this was never just about geography. It was about power.
Sacrifice zones are created where decision-makers believe there will be the least resistance and the least accountability. That is why these burdens so often land near Indigenous communities, Black communities, Brown communities, and poor rural places. It is environmental racism dressed up as economics. It is profit dressed up as progress.
What makes this even harder to accept is that this harm is not inevitable. Iowa’s own recent energy reporting shows that cleaner generation has grown while coal’s role has declined, and the Iowa Environmental Council’s 2025 energy report argues that shutting down Iowa’s remaining coal plants and replacing them with wind and solar would reduce health and economic harms. Cleaner options exist. Yet these coal plants remain, and communities like ours are still expected to live with the consequences.
That is why this cannot just be talked about as economics or development. Too often, it is the rich getting richer while poor, rural, and tribal communities are left to breathe the pollution, carry the sickness, and live with the consequences. Our communities should not have to trade health, life, and future generations so corporations and wealthy industries can keep profiting off outdated and harmful energy.
And now all of this sits inside a larger crisis Iowa can no longer pretend not to see. The 2026 Cancer in Iowa report estimates that 21,700 Iowans will be diagnosed with cancer this year and 6,400 will die from it. University of Iowa reporting says about 175,290 cancer survivors are now living in Iowa, and a 2026 interim report says Iowa had the second-highest rate of new cancers in the country for 2018 to 2022.
Again, no one should reduce Iowa’s cancer crisis to one single cause. That would be too simple. But communities living near major industrial polluters have every right to ask hard questions. We have every right to ask what fifty years of coal pollution has meant for our air, our land, our water, and our bodies. We have every right to ask why our people have had to carry these risks while others got the electricity, the profit, and the talking points about development.
That is why this documentary matters.
It puts faces to what too many people have ignored. It shows that the cost of coal is not abstract. It is not distant. It is not just a policy debate. The cost shows up in inhalers, hospital visits, chronic illness, fear, grief, and the quiet normalization of sickness in communities that should never have been treated this way in the first place.
Our communities deserve better than to be told this is just the price of doing business.
We deserve clean air.
We deserve clean land.
We deserve clean water.
We deserve honesty about what has been done here.
We deserve accountability.
And we deserve a future where Indigenous and rural communities are no longer treated as sacrifice zones for somebody else’s profit.
We are not disposable.
We are not acceptable losses.
And our people should never have been made to carry this burden.
To learn more about Iowa’s Dirty Secret: The True Cost of Burning Coal and the communities at the center of this story, visit https://www.iowasdirtysecret.com/.
To stay updated on local screenings and ways to get involved, follow https://www.facebook.com/cleanupmidam.
-Sunshine Thomas-Bear
Hisgexjį Horak
