Mysterious Catastrophic Air Pollution Episode is Why DFW Needs its Own Air Sensor Network

Not quite two weeks ago, on Thursday October 19th, something happened to throw local air quality conditions into the red zone for most of the day.

There was a inexplicable smokey haze extending along the limestone escarpment from Midlothian to Dallas and then north to Denton, sending Particulate Matter pollution soaring to Beijing levels and ozone readings so high the whole regional average went up a part per billion. Countless downwind residents complained to officials, FaceBooked, and Tweeted about “the smell of burning plastic” enveloping their neighborhoods with the smoke, which was so thick many thought the problem was just down the street.

The 24-hour standard for Particulate Matter Pollution is 150 ug/m3. The annual standard is 12. 

70 ppb is the new ozone standard. 

The events took the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality completely by surprise. Commission computer forecasting had not predicted an Ozone Alert Day or warned of heavy PM pollution. Officials were playing catch-up for the rest of the day.

Now almost two weeks later nobody official knows what caused this Really Bad Air Day. Not the EPA. Not the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Not the DFW area citizens who breathed in the dirtiest air their lungs have seen all year.

Despite the sophisticated technology available to us in 2017, a single unexpected incident upwind of DFW can throw the entire North Texas air shed into the danger zone with no warning and no clue as to what initiated it. 

Readings from state monitors were of no help until damage had already been done. As usual they were two hours or more behind in reporting. The numbers they were displaying at 12 noon were actually taken at 10 am. You had no idea what was going on in real time so that you might better protect yourself or family.

There are only three or four Particulate Matter pollution monitors in all of DFW. Even if you’d wanted to use the state’s current monitoring system to track this mystery plume, you couldn’t have done so. It doesn’t have that capability.

As inquiring reporters called, the TCEQ staff found a variety of things to blame. TCEQ suggested the smoke was from a Bastrop forest fire near Austin.  But readings from monitors between Bastrop/Austin and Dallas show there was no problem south of Midlothian that day, while there was a huge problem north of there at the same time. Eyewitnesses who saw the plume on Thursday reported a thick narrow ribbon of a plume you’d see coming off a near-by source, not the sort of diffused cloud you’d expect to witness after  traveling more than a hundred miles downwind. And then there’s that “burned-plastic smell.”

Then it was maybe one or more “controlled burns” in the Midlothian-Mansfield area. As it turns out, neither fire department found evidence of any permitted controlled burns in their own jurisdictions that could have cause so much pollution. Midlothian’s single permitted fire for the day was “the size of a coffee table” according to a department employee.

According to the Mansfield Fire Department “a fire” was reported to be located at Kimball Road and Hwy 287 just north of the Midlothian city limits. This is what’s at that intersection:

Please note the caution against open flames. Could a fracking site have produced the kind of particulate matter pollution and haze we saw on October 19th without methane or other kinds of pollution being released en masse as well? It doesn’t seem like it could. But what if the fracking site had been turned into a temporary waste incineration site for the day?

That’s not all. A satellite pic of the intersection and what’s around it reveals Kimball and Hwy 287 to be a kind of rogue’s gallery of potential suspects:

Besides the fracking sites you can be see in mid-drilling on this Google street level tour, the road leads to a Trinity River Authority Wastewater Treatment plant and the back door of the giant Ash Grove cement plant. 

TRA is a shadowy, 60-year old regional bureaucracy that owns millions of acres of land, reservoirs, landfills, and wastewater-treatment facilities. It’s been in environmental hot water before. Wastewater treatment accumulates a lot of solids, and the TRA handles a lot of trash. It’s not inconceivable that it had something to do with the October 19th incident by thinking it could get away with an open burn on its own property.

Ditto for Ash Grove. Like the other two cement plants in Midlothian, Ash Grove’s kiln is allowed to burn industrial waste, including used oil, tires and plastics – remember the oft-cited “smell of burning plastic” citizens reported on the 19th? Waste-burning cement plants have had their wastes combust and cause huge fires before and each plant has its own emergency response crew which might be able to put out a fire without calling Midlothian.

There’s no proof Ash Grove, TRA or the fracking sites were the cause of the October 19th public health disaster. But there’s also no proof yet they didn’t cause the problem.

The truth is: there’s no official explanation for what made the air so dangerous to breathe on October 19th .

More truth: As of Friday, October 27th the TECQ had not even opened an official investigation into this matter – which again, sent Particulate Matter pollution to levels not seen outside SE Asia and single-handedly raised the regional ozone level.

This is why Downwinders at Risk filed the first of what we’re sure will be a series of Texas Open Record Act requests last Friday seeking:

“Any and all printed or electronic documents and electronic media containing information concerning or related to ozone, particulate matter and/or haze air pollution readings and levels in the Dallas-Forth Worth non-attainment area on Thursday, October 19th 2017, including official ozone action warnings issued, complaints filed about air quality in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that day, photographs, satellite images, computer modeling, as well as all material related to any questions, inquiries, or investigations about air quality in DFW on October 19th anyone in the TCEQ, or contracted by TCEQ has been tasked to perform since October 19th or is still performing currently, and e-mails, letters, reports, telephone logs and notes, memos and all other material about October 19th air quality from 6 am Tuesday October 19th to Wednesday October 25th, 2017.”

TCEQ has until November 10th to respond. We’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, this episode becomes Exhibit A in why DFW needs to catch-up with other metro areas and build its own network of high tech air quality sensors. 

If such a grid had been in place, there would have been a real time warning of the PM and ozone pollution being generated shortly after the it started. There would have been a way to locate the source of the pollution right away and do something about it before it got worse, and there would have been a way to predict the plume’s course and warn those in its path before it got there – not two hours after it arrived.

In this sense a modern sensor grid is actually a pollution prevention device, an investigative tool, and an early warning system all rolled into one. 

In a metropolitan area that’s been out of compliance with the Clean air Act for 27 years and counting over 14 million lungs are being held hostage by a state air quality monitoring system left over from the 1990’s. It’s being maintained by a state agency that’s run by polluters, officially thinks smog isn’t bad for you, and is cutting its air monitoring budget.

There’s no desire in Austin to update this obsolete system and no money to do so. If DFW officials want to utilize 21st Century technology to help them clean their air, they’re going to have to build their own network of air monitors – exactly the proposal the DFW Air Research Consortium was trying to get funded with a National Science Foundation grant. Close, but no cigar.

Without the NSF grant, local officials are going to need to get creative. Are there private businesses who might want to sponsor an app that could tell give you useful air quality info in exchange for naming rights: “Brought to you by the Nissan Leaf DFW Clean Air Network.” Are there local foundations that would contribute? What about local high-tech billionaire Mark Cuban? For less than a million bucks, DFW could have 500 Particulate Matter sensors that would be capable of of pinpointing a problem down to the street address.

Baltimore, Chicago, Chattanooga, Louisville, L.A. , Oakland, and Lafayette, Louisiana are all way ahead of DFW in building out their own local dense grid of air sensors. They’ve done it with a combination of private, government and academic know-how and financing.

We have as much, or more technical expertise and money than any of those locales and we should have more incentive given our chronic air pollution problem. There’s no reason we can’t build our own modern, more protective, more useful way of monitoring air pollution – even if the state isn’t interested. Not only can we do it, but in light of the events of October 19th, it should be considered a necessary act of public health self-defense. 

Burning Plastic Campaign Gets “Stuff”ed

Say NO to Dirty #Energy Bag

Dow Chemical and Keep America Beautiful’s latest greenwashing scheme burns #plastic in a cement kiln and calls it “recycling.” We need reduction, not combustion! Take action NOW: bit.ly/dirtyenergybagDirty #energybag #breakfreefromplastic Video courtesy of The Story of Stuff Project

Posted by Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) on Thursday, October 12, 2017

 

Our efforts to stop plastic garbage burning in cement plants got a boost last week when the San-Francisco based Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives (GAIA) kicked-off a national campaign with a video from the The “Story of Stuff” folks accompanying a pledge of opposition to the practice you and your group can sign online.

In July, we reported on a plan by DOW Chemical and Keep America Beautiful to encourage you to bag up those “hard-to-recycle” plastics and send them to a cement kiln to be burned without the expense of all those environmental controls you’d have to deal with at a legitimate waste disposal site. The two were offering US communities at least $50,000 in subsidies to go along with the idea.

This is already happening in Omaha, where 8,500 homes have filled 13,000 “Hefty Energy Bags”  since the program’s launch a year ago. That’s resulted in more than 13,000 pounds of plastics being burned in a near-by cement kiln. 

Since DFW is home to the largest concentration of cement plant manufacturing capacity in the country, and since those cement plants already burn industrial wastes in an attempt to cut their high fuel costs, the expectation is that this practice will sooner or later be proposed for North Texas cities. And indeed, when DOW and Keep America Beautiful held a press conference advocating plastics burning across the country this summer, there was a big red star right over DFW as part of the project’s projected growth.

The Story of Stuff video from GAIA actually takes the video DOW used to introduce its “energy bags” earlier this year and tweaks it to tell the story of “dirty energy bags.”

GAIA’s plastics pledge looks like this and any individual or group can sign on:

The GAIA website makes the case that single-use plastics already crowd our landfills and pollute our waterways, but burning them offers a greenwashing “relief valve” to allow continued, or even increased production of this kind of plastic.

Burning plastics can release Mercury, Dioxins and metals into the atmosphere – and your lungs. Cement plants are not equipped with the same pollution controls as a single-purpose garbage incinerator, and so they emit many times more of this kind of pollution than even a single-purpose garbage incinerator.

Plastic is made from fossil fuels, and in order to make sure we have a liveable planet for generations to come, we need to transition to a circular economy where our products can be easily reused or recycled, not produced from scratch using greenhouse gases.

Send a message that you will not support the Hefty Energy Bag in your city, and let’s expose the truth behind the bag!

Please Go online and sign the pledge. 

It will take you all of 30 seconds, but it will send a message to stop this very bad idea before it gets too far.

And if you haven’t already, you can still send an email to the chair of Keep America Beautiful with our click ‘n send featured citizen action. Helen Lowman’s from Texas and maybe you can convince her this isn’t a very neighborly thing to do.

Meet the First Two Students of the Class of ’18

You might not think of Rap when you hear the name Downwinders, but the first two students enrolled in our 2018 College of Constructive Hell-Raising includes a local-Rhymensaurous-made-good who came home to do good for his Pleasant Grove neighborhood, and his longtime running buddy who aspires to build a new grassroots Southern Dallas constituency for change.

25 year-old Rikki Blu (on the right) has bounced around the nation following a musical career, including a recent stint on the West Coast where Sprite and SoundCloud featured tunes from his 2015 debut EP, Pleasant Grove.

But he moved back home to the Grove to raise a family and maybe, with some luck, organize a new group of South Dallas residents like himself who want more to see more progress made south of I-30. Joining him in this mission is his friend Marcellus George, an outspoken advocate for shaking-up the status quo. Together, they want to remake South Dallas politics with their non-profit Neighborhood Interest Committee.

They think the College of Constructive Hell-Raising can help them. “It’s a way to understand how not only to improve our own lives but others as well” said George.

He’s right. The College is North Texas’ only school devoted to teaching the principles of community organizing that can help whole neighborhoods better themselves. But it also helps its students think less like “activists” and more like “organizers,” encouraging the ability to imagine how a series of planned short-term steps can lead to larger, longer-term goals.

Besides learning the basics, a Who’s Who of veteran local community organizers fill gaps in recent DFW social justice history many students didn’t even know they had and provide successful examples in the real world of change on the ground – yes, even in Texas.

Veteran Dallas civil rights organizer Peter Johnson, local LBGT legends Don Maison and Patti Fink,  environmental justice leader Luis Sepulveda, peace and anti-nuke organizer Mavis Belisle, original Bois D’arc Patriot John Fullenwider, and Sara Mokuria, co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, are some of the advocates students will have access to during the course. As this list might suggest, although Downwinders at risk is dedicated to cleaner air, the College isn’t aimed just at environmentalists. Anyone interested in learning how they can use the techniques of community organizing to further their own cause is invited to attend.

A great example is Clarice Criss, Class of ’17 featured just last week on Channel 8 for her organic community garden in South Dallas that provides fresh, non-toxic fruits and veggies to families on WIC assistance. Criss, from one of Dallas most historic and distinguished Black families, has said “The College confirmed for me that I want to spend the rest of my life organizing to help people in underprivileged communities. I cried at graduation.”

This week the College began public enrollment for the Spring 2018 semester. You can apply here.

There are ten sessions in all. We meet twice a month from January to May at the Meadows Conference Center, Tuesday evenings, from 7 to 9 pm.  A full schedule, the complete list of guest lecturers, and the application for the 2018 semester is online here.

Students are encouraged but not required to attend informal discussions with guest lecturers at the Bryan Street Tavern after class adjourns, over beer and pizza.

Preference will be given to existing DFW groups who want to better train volunteers or staff and help pay for enrollment with scholarships, but all are welcome. The cost is $200. It includes a book, and lots of reading material.  No payment is required to apply. Scholarships are available, and applicants can indicate your interest in getting a full or half scholarship on the application.

Rikki and Marcellus know what they want to do with their College education. What would you do with yours? Join us for the 2018 class.

Brown, Big: 1971-2018

After years of declining fiscal health, the Big Brown lignite coal plant finally succumbed last Friday.  An announcement was made by its most recent caretaker, Vistra Energy last Friday morning. The cause of death was obsolescence. It was 47.

Controversial from its birth, the 1. 2 Gigawatt Big Brown lived up to its name and was Texas Utilities’ flagship power plant for decades. It began by burning 100% Lignite Coal, the mud-like fossil fuel native to East and Central Texas. By the end however, it was importing thousands of tons of “cleaner” Wyoming Powder Basin Coal in long freight trains to comply with interstate pollution rules.

Along with other coal-fired power plants in East Texas, Big Brown was citied for causing acid rain to by SMU Chemist George Crawford as early as the 1980’s. It was then discovered to be a major contributor t0 Dallas-Fort Worth smog, a fact reinforced by a 2008 study from another SMU professor and former EPA Regional Administrator Dr. Al Armendriz,  and more recently by Dallas Medical Society’s Dr. Robert Haley in his 2015 report on ozone levels and public health in DFW. Public Citizen/Texas and the Sierra Club had been particularly hostile to the plant’s continued operation.

As coal lost favor as an energy source, Big Brown’s estimated lifespan had been the subject of countless rumors over the last decade. Towards the end the plant consistently refused modern technology which might have prolonged its life, such as Sulfur Dioxide scrubbers and Selective Catalytic Reduction for smog pollution.

The timing of the plant’s demise was seen as a major embarrassment to officials in the Trump Administration, who’ve promised to promote coal. On the same day as Vistra’s notice about Big Brown’s demise, Trump appointed known fossil fuel promoter Kathleen Hartnett White to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

It was the third Texas coal plant to expire in less than a week. Big Brown was preceded in passing by the Monticello lignite plant, which announced its departure on October 6th. Vistra said its smaller Sandlow power plant near Bastrop was to be closed in 2018 as well.

In 2016, these three coal plants emitted a total of 166 million pounds of sulfur dioxide, 24 million pounds of nitrogen oxide, and 21 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution. Their absence during the 2018 “ozone season” could be the first time DFW stands a chance of complying with the Clean Air Act in 27 years. 

Survivors, for now, include the coal-fired Martin Lake and Oak Grove power plants, as well as NRG’s Limestone power plant, southeast of DFW.