Yep, Diesel Exhaust is Really Bad For You

In maybe the least surprising air quality news this week, a long-term study involving thousands of participants concluded that exposure to diesel pollution increases your risk of lung cancer significantly. For those most heavily exposed, the risk was three to seven times higher.

Because the subjects were all miners who were working eight or more hour a day in underground chambers full of diesel engines, the results were predictable to anyone tracking the science in the 20 years since the study began. But it was the association of disease with diesel pollution at even “low levels” that will drive the debate over how and where highways are built or expanded. There’ve been a rash of studies coming out over the last year or so linking road traffic pollution to asthma, heart attacks, strokes and all the other ailments caused by bad air.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the study is that so much energy was expended by the diesel lobby to keep it from ever seeing the light of day. To the point of requiring the the Department of Health and Human Services to turn over documents and be held in contempt for not doing so.

 

 

Pig’s Blood vs. Lead Poisoning: How Serious is Frisco about Closing a Toxic Menace?

 

Word comes today via the Dallas Morning Newsthat the City of Dallas has referred the notorious Columbia meat packing plant to the Dallas Board of Adjustment to begin amortization proceedings.The plant's crime was dumping pig's blood into the Trinity River .. and using an illegal discharge pipe to do it. While gross and potentially toxic to wildlife,Columbia posed no threat to human health, except maybe to its employees. On the other hand, the Exide lead smelter is spewing lead into the air every day that we know can lead to everything from learning disabilities to hearing loss to death. It's doing this in the middle of a densely populated area. It's doing this despite accumulating a longer record of serious environmental violations than 20 Columbia packing houses combined, including illegally disposing of hazardous waste and dumping lead into Stewart Creek, a tributary of Lewisville Lake, a drinking water source. After initially feigning a move toward amortization on January, the Frisco City Council hasn't been as worried about this toxic threat as Dallas seems to be about its pig blood problem. It's dragged its feet in referring Exide to its own Board of Adjustment for amortization and has so far refused to follow through. So here's our new office pool – which facility will be amortized by it municipality first – the meat packing plant or the lead smelter? Place your bets now and let's see if Frisco is as concerned about lead harming its residents as Dallas is about animal blood in its river. And by the way, there's an election in Frisco in May with choices to replace the current city  council members who seem to be dragging their feet.

Download New Flier on March 27th Citywide Organizing Meeting on Dallas Drilling

We’ve done something we’ve never done before with this front page. Down there at the bottom of the page, right below the last blog post, we’ve added a little Acrobat pdf icon that says ” 3.27 community meeting 1.0.” Click on it and you’ll be able to download a one-sided flier for the March 27th Citywide Organizing Meeting on Dallas Gas Drilling at the Center for Community Cooperation at 2900 Live Oak In Old East Dallas from 7 to 8:30 pm. Just like the one above, only full size. This meeting is your opportunity to come and learn more about the issue of fracking, and find out how to plug into the effort to make the new Dallas drilling ordinance stronger. We need folks from all over Dallas to help because the council vote on this new ordinance will be very close. This is the most important environmental issue within the Dallas city limits in the last 20 years. Don’t sit it out. 

Frisco Unleaded Demands EPA Reconsider New Lead Standard: No “Ample Margin of Safety”

 

Frisco Unleaded, the local citizens group sponsored by Downwinders, along with four other national and state environmental groups, have petitioned the EPA to reconsider the new National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for lead that's driving the nation's lead smelters to enclose their facilities and lower their emissions by this coming fall. And they're using our old friends at EarthJustice for their lawyers. In their petition filed today, the groups, including the national Sierra Club, California Communities Against Toxics, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and the national Resource Defense Council, told EPA that it erred in relying on a standard that aims only for an "adequate margin," when the official regulatory goal is supposed to be an "ample margin of safety" to protect public health from lead. Now maybe that sounds like so much bureaucratic nit-picking to you at first, but what it turns out to mean is that the EPA didn't consider the health effects of breathing lead on those people already living around lead smelters that emit lots of lead into the air. Hard to believe, and as it turns out, the EPA usually does assess harms from all kinds of exposure pathways. It just didn't do it for lead. It settled for a number that seems very strict – ten times lower than the old standard, when in fact, there was lots of evidence that the number should have been much lower, and that the technology to achieve it was already in use. According to the petition, "EPA reduced emissions no more than needed to assure that a source in the Secondary Lead Smelting source category would not alone emit to the extent that the ambient air concentration of lead would exceed 0.15 μg/m3. EPA did not assess each type of risk caused by lead emissions – including chronic inhalation and multipathway risk and other potential risks – independently from its assessment on the NAAQS, and it thus has failed to show how it considered the full impact of secondary lead smelters’ emissions on public health."One of the most important points made on behalf of Frisco residents was that the new standard wasn't written to be protective of people who've lived where there's been decades of lead smelter fallout."EPA’s reliance on the NAAQS has failed to appropriately take into account the ongoing impact of historic air emissions on the most-exposed people near secondary lead smelters, and has not assessed or explained how the NAAQS could provide ‚acceptable‛ protection in view of this history. The affected communities near sources in this source category have experienced persistent, bioaccumulative toxic air emissions for years, in the form of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs)." Specifically, the petition cites Frisco has an exceptional community, "For affected communities like Frisco, TX that have experienced years of past exposure, which in turn have increased current health risk, smaller amounts of additional emissions are even more likely to cause greater harm.  If you look at the other groups that filed today's petition, they're all well-established. Frisco Unleaded isn't even a year old yet, and it's already taking on the EPA. As organizational parents, we couldn't be more proud. 

Las Personas Se Están Envenenando: “Latinos & Air Pollution” Panels in Dallas and Ft. Worth Next Week

 

State Representatives Lon Burnam, Rafael Anchia and Roberto Alonzo, along with the American Lung Association, are sponsoring a DFW road show on either side of the Metromess next week on the important subject of Latinos and Air Pollution.  On Tuesday, March 13th, from 9:30 to 11:00 am at the Tarrant County Medical Society at 555 Hemphill in Ft.Worth, Adrianna Quintero of the Natural Resources Defense Council will discuss that group's recent report, "U.S. Latinos and Air Pollution: A Call to Action" on the disproportionate effect of air pollution on Latinos in the United States and what can be done about it. Frederick Lopez of The American Lung Association will discuss the ALA's report, "Luchando por el Aire: The Burden of Asthma on Hispanics" which looks at how asthma affects Latinos and what can be done to reduce and prevent it. Then from 12 Noon to 1:30 pm that same Tuesday, at the Center for Community Cooperation at 2900 Live Oak, the whole thing is being repeated for the benefit of a Big D audience.  In 2005 the CDC found that ER visits due to asthma were almost twice as high for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic Caucasians. These new reports should be able to update those kinds of trends and track existing disparities among US Latinos.Y'all come.  

MARCH 27th: City-Wide Organizing Meeting on Gas Drilling in Dallas

In preparation for what could be a vote on a new ordinance as soon as April, The Dallas Residents at Risk Alliance, which includes Downwinders, is hosting a 4-Alarm, All Points Bulletin, city-wide organizing meeting on Gas Drilling in Dallas, 7 to 8:30 pm Tuesday, March 27th at the Center for Community Cooperation, 2900 Live Oak in Old East Dallas. We’ll go through a brief overview of why fracking in densely urban areas is an especially bad idea, look at what the current situation is with gas well sites already in the pipeline, as well as what we know about the location of current gas leases. We’ll have members of the Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force who were our reliable allies in the process. We’ll look ahead at the work we have to do to get the industry-fueled last-minute rollback of protections set-aside by the Council in favor of more adequate safeguards. It doesn’t matter what part of Dallas you live in – you’ll be affected by gas drilling and your council member will be voting on a new ordinance governing how it should be done. Think climate change is an important issue? You can’t make a better investment of your time on the issue than seeing that Dallas requires mitigation of gas industry Greenhouse Gas pollution. Want to protect water supplies? Preventing a water-intensive industry from robbing Dallas blind of its own water and then causing spills and leaks that will contaminate surface sources of water is worth your effort for the next two months. Want to see less smog? According to the state of Texas, local gas industry sources now emit more smog-forming Volatile Organic Compounds than all the cars and trucks n DFW. Just about any global or national environmental problem you can think of has a connection, or is made worse, by fracking in Dallas. We need your help now. This is not a drill. Mark it on your calendar and be one of the active citizens that keeps this intrusion from becoming a takeover.

It’s a Wonderful Fight: Downwinders Wins First-Ever Green Source Environmental Leadership Award

From the tragically ridiculous, to the sweet sublimity of community…..Only hours after being kicked-out of Dallas City Hall, Downwinders Director Jim Schermbeck showed up at the first annual Green Source Environmental Leadership Awards dinner and ceremony to accept the honor, and terribly heavy piece of sculpture, that goes with winning in the Grassroots Organization category. For hours before then, he’d been in exile, watching on a computer screen as the Dallas Gas Task Force disassembled the progress he and others thought they had made over the last 6 month of work. He had lots of time to reflect on when he’d ever even come close to getting thrown out of a meeting before…..More than 12 years now, during an clean air planning session in Arlington with former Collin County Judge Harris presiding. Back then he and Downwinders members were trying to to tell officialdom that the Midlothian cement plants really did contribute to DFW smog, should be included in these clean air plans, and should be required to put on new controls. Crazy talk like that. Schermbeck would not shut up from his seat on the outside of the decision-making circle that the state was purposely underestimating the bad impact of the cement plants’ pollution. He and Harris almost took it out in the Hall. As it turns out, that same pair would later collaborate on the best clean air plan DFW ever cobbled together, and yes, as a matter of fact it did include new controls for those cement plants. So here Schermbeck was in 2012, taking on the gas industry juggernaut as it nudges its way into the City of Dallas. Adopting the crazy stand that allowing natural gas mining in Dallas without better controls will make already bad air worse, and put residents in harms way. That city Park land should not be Gasland. Openly quarreling with traditional allies. Going out on an unpopular limb – again. Schermbeck believed he’d done the right thing at City Hall in so publicly standing up against the last-minute roll back that was going on, but as an organizer, one always keeps a seed of doubt alive. Coming directly from the very late and frustrated ending of the Task Force into the Awards party already on-going at the new Eco-op near White Rock Lake, that seed of doubt withered. Beekeepers. Worm Ranchers. Eco-friendly event planners. Old-fashioned Hell-Raisers. Community icons. People who’ve been doing this for 30 years that you haven’t seen in 20. People you’re meeting for the first time but already have three friends in common. Approximately 120 of DFW’s most ardent green folk and activists were gathered together – and it wasn’t even an Earth Day event! And the crowd looked like Dallas itself does these days, with a more diverse collection of skin tones. And here they were in their own space, a real-life mortar and bricks expression of a commitment to needed infrastructure in the regional environmental scene. It was an overdue celebratory meeting of the tribe. When Downwinders’ name was read as the winner in its category, Schermbeck had a “It’s a Wonderful Life” moment. The enthusiasm of the reception caught him off-guard. He’s not used to being that popular in public, and of course, he’d just been so unpopular in public he was escorted out of City Hall. Even more than the title, or the award itself, it was that rousing reception from peers and comrades that turned out to be the biggest prize anybody could ever take home. And for that especially, the Staff and board of Downwinders at Risk sincerely thank the Memnosyne Foundation, Green Source DFW, and everyone who attended and voted for us for what we’ll take as a right-in-the-nick-of-time fateful affirmation of our mission to get out front and lead, even if that means occasional friction with the status quo, and alternative seating arrangements.