Breathing Wheezy

MARY SCHLICK PEVETO directed the legislators’ attention to a
color-coded map of the air quality at Portland’s schools. Schools in
Northwest and Northeast Portland stuck out as black marks—those
neighborhoods’ schools sit amid some of the most toxic air of any
schools in the country.

“This is a picture of a city that has sacrificial zones of toxic air
quality,” Peveto told the six state representatives and senators who
gathered on Friday, August 7, for the first meeting of the newly formed
Portland Air Quality Workgroup. “Oregon’s environmental quality is not
strict enough to provide protection for our children.”

Though it strives to be the greenest city in America, an exhaustive
USA Today study found that six of Portland’s schools were in the
worst percentile nationwide for air toxins. That puts Portland’s school
air quality on par with that of Cleveland, Ohio. Citywide, the amount
of benzene (a cancer-causing chemical found in gasoline) is 26 times
the safe standard set by the state’s environmental quality experts.

All this is frustrating to Peveto, whose daughter attends Chapman
Elementary School in Northwest, where the air safety rating is near the
bottom of the scale. Back in April, Peveto started organizing toxic air
meetings in her neighborhood and the group was quickly christened
Neighbors for Clean Air (pdxair.blogspot.com).

Fed up with what the group views as weak enforcement of air quality,
Neighbors for Clean Air decided to do its own research. Crunching
pollution numbers available on the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) website, group member Bob Holmstrom found that the ESCO steel
plant five blocks from Chapman Elementary had doubled its emissions of
metals into the air from 2002 to 2007. Though the emission increase did
not violate any laws, the news inflamed the neighbors.

“We’re not a radical environmental group. We’re parents and we’re
concerned about this other picture of Oregon,” says Peveto. “We’re not
really given a clear picture of what any given industry is putting into
the air we breathe.”

ESCO representative Carter Webb told the Air Quality Workgroup on
Friday that ESCO has made “major improvements” over time on some of its
emissions, and that “if ESCO disappeared tomorrow, it would have little
effect on air quality” citywide.

Meanwhile, Neighbors for Clean Air say they have gathered 1,200
signatures demanding the factory install the best air filtration
technology available.

Their petitioning was helped in part by a “significant odor event”
that haunted the neighborhood around Chapman Elementary during early
June. Numerous households called the Department of Environmental
Quality (DEQ) to complain that their homes and streets reeked of gas.
Peveto and Neighbors for Clean Air members suspected that one of the
hundreds of gas tanks stored in the industrial area north of their
neighborhood had sprung a leak. The DEQ never found the cause of the
smell that lingered for days.

Of concern to Neighbors for Clean Air is the fact that the DEQ
currently has only one toxic air quality monitor set up in all of
Portland—costing $125,000 a year to maintain and analyze. The DEQ
says cost is a major factor preventing the establishment of more.
Meanwhile, the DEQ is partnering with the EPA to test air quality at
one Portland school, Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy, this fall, but
the testing will only happen for 60 days. “You need a year to really
get comprehensive data,” admits DEQ Air Quality Administrator Andy
Ginsburg.

“This is so shocking, this is my district,” said North/Northeast
Portland Representative Tina Kotek, who sits on the Air Quality
Workgroup, at last week’s meeting.

“I would like to see more monitoring at school sites,” agreed State
Senator Suzanne Bonamici after hearing the neighbors’ and DEQ’s
testimony.

But even if Neighbors for Clean Air succeeds in rallying Portland to
clamp down on industrial pollution, a bigger source of benzene will
still be riding high: The car-clogged freeways that cut through town
cause 42 to 56 percent of the benzene in Portland’s air. In Northwest,
cars create 50 percent of the air’s cancer-causing benzene and
factories like ESCO only 16 percent, according the DEQ.

Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods’ Sylvia Evans pitched an
interesting idea to legislators last week to cut cars’ health impacts:
Mandate that a small percentage of new highway construction budgets go
into a health care fund. Evans lives in a North Portland affordable
housing complex next to I-5 and, like Peveto, urged legislators to make
Oregon live up to its green reputation.

“As trucks and vehicles move through our neighborhood, they should
be responsible for the toxins they leave behind,” Evans said.