As part of my role as senior editor at NeonTommy.com, I helped launch two new special projects on the site in the past few weeks.
The first is an ongoing project examining the clean-up efforts at the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach, two of the largest and most pollution-clogged ports in the country. I wrote a piece on the dramatic health cost of air pollution and its correlation to high asthma rates near one Long Beach elementary school:
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Some days, the air drifting onto the playground at Elizabeth Hudson School smells gaseous and sulfuric, carrying a bitter tinge of burnt rubber.
Outside at recess, unprotected by their classrooms’ air filters, Hudson students breathe the worst air in Long Beach, and it sends them clamoring to Nurse Arnold’s office for their inhalers. There are so many that she has a separate cabinet for them.
“The asthma traffic is really bad right now,” Suzanne Arnold said as the sixth child in half an hour came in for his medicine. When Arnold worked at a Glendale school, she would treat one or two asthmatics per day. “We have students who never had asthma before who suddenly develop asthma when they move here.”
Wedged between the Port of Long Beach, two rail yards and the exhaust-spewing roads that service them, Hudson is in the heart of what locals call “the Diesel Death zone.”
The students breathe a toxic soup of truck emissions and gasses from the oil refineries that dot the region. They are also the living evidence of a recent flurry of medical studies that prove what environmental advocates have long suspected: pollution from cars, ships and refineries is a direct cause of asthma and an array of lung diseases.
A study released last month by the University of Southern California found that 9.3 percent of the cases of childhood asthma and 40 percent of asthmatic bronchitis episodes in Long Beach are directly attributable to living near a major road.
More than 1,600 Long Beach children would not have asthma if they lived elsewhere. The same study found that nitrogen dioxide, the compound in auto exhaust and ship emissions that clouds the Long Beach sky with brownish haze, also caused 930 emergency room visits and 22 hospitalizations.
Hudson second-grade teacher Boyd Hendricks counts seven asthmatics in his class of 20. Arnold says that of the 1,100 students at Hudson, 185 of them – 17 percent – are asthmatic. Nationwide, 9 percent of children currently have asthma, a 2006 health survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
“We’re seeing that the strongest effects are very local,” said Ed Avol, a professor of clinical preventative medicine at USC and a co-author of the November study. “The very fresh emissions that come out of a tailpipe are the highest near the roadways and then they drop off.”
State law forbids the construction of new schools within 500 feet of a major roadway, but 90 L.A. Unified schools already exist within that zone.
And Hudson has the worst lot, geographically. Some 500 trucks pass by the school on the Terminal Island Freeway every hour, but the ships in the port five miles away are also a major culprit. Largely unconstrained by environmental regulations, the ships burn unrefined bunker fuel in their massive four-story engines.
The air near Hudson contains nearly twice the level of elemental carbon, an indicator of diesel particles, as areas farther from rail yards and roadways, according to averages from the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s monitoring stations.
Every few days, the AQMD measures the level of toxins in Hudson’s air by pulling it through white paper filters. After 24 hours, the filters come out black.
Last year Arnold testified at the California State Senate that when families ask her why their children got asthma soon after enrolling at Hudson, she reassures them by saying they’ll be fine while they’re breathing the school’s filtered air.
“But what I’d really like to say,” she said in her speech, “is, ‘Move! Get out of here’.” [read more at Neon Tommy]
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And just this week, we launched “Is that even legal?,” a series lasting all week in which Neon Tommy reporters will examine some of the most contentious legal issues of the day. Mine is a piece on how corporations use copyright law to hide controversial parodies on the Web.