Less than a week before Election Day, Kathy Robinson got into her car, ready to drive around Richmond and tell as many people as she could that she was running for mayor. Her aging white Volvo was decked out for the occasion, plastered with homemade campaign flyers. In her trunk were stacks of these same flyers, printed on computer paper at a friend’s shop. She’d been distributing them to potential voters at schools, churches, and businesses around Richmond. “It’s not…
As Wanda Cooper biked home through the thick haze of smoke rising from a fire at the Chevron oil refinery, her eyes began to burn and her throat to close up. “I couldn’t hardly breathe,” she says. Six years after a pipeline fire at Chevron U.S.A. Inc.’s oil refinery in Richmond sent Cooper and thousands more to the emergency room, the company agreed last month to spend more than $160 million to make major safety improvements at all of its…
Her family dialed 911. But when paramedics reached the seven-story affordable housing development, they found its elevators malfunctioning yet again. In fact, the elevators at this federally funded housing development had not been working for one week, residents say, and they often break down. The building houses some of the city’s most vulnerable residents — low-income seniors and people with disabilities.