This is why we do what we do - hotspot monitoring is critical!

"Improving and expanding the pollution monitoring network and improving regulation compliance, especially in the communities where our most vulnerable populations reside, may reduce the risk of certain childhood cancers along with decreasing the risk for and exacerbation of other childhood health and developmental problems"

CEHN Articles Of the Month, January 2014 Issue: Childhood Cancer and Traffic-Related Air Pollution Exposure in Pregnancy and Early Life

Diesel Health Project Team learns to use a particle counter!

Thanks to Kevin Kennedy, director of the Children's Mercy Hospital Center for Environmental Health, several members of our team, including Leticia Decaigny of the Argentine Betterment Corporation and Global Community Monitor, a bunch of very talented KU students, and I got our first lesson in using particle counters.

This very educational and fun session was hosted by Chris Brown of the University of Kansas Environmental Studies Program on the KU campus, and attended by two very dedicated Federal employees from the Region 7 offices of the Environmental Protection Program.

With gratitude to everyone who braved frigid temperatures and helped make this happen!

We'll schedule a follow-on training session soon.

Intermodal trucks damaging Johnson County Roads

A press release from the Kansas Department of Transportation.

Intermodal trucks are damaging country roads. Apparently there are no legal limitations, so this is a request not do drive Heavy Diesel Trucks on those roads.

BNSF could require trucks entering their facility to meet any requirements they wish, including to travel on certain roads to reach the Interstate, but apparently has not done so.

From: Kimberly Qualls <kqualls@ksdot.org>

Date: November 25, 2013 1:20:03 PM CST

To: Kimberly Qualls <kqualls@ksdot.org>

Subject: I-35 BNSF Intermodal Facility COMMERCIAL TRUCK TRAFFIC ALERT in Edgerton (Johnson County) - November 25, 2013

The Kansas Department of Transportation would like to ask our partner agencies to share the following traffic alert information with any communication outlets that you feel would be beneficial in reaching the I-35 BNSF Intermodal Facility Commercial Truck Traffic (Edgerton, Johnson County, Kansas). Thank you!

---

TRAFFIC ALERT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 25, 2013

News Contact:  Kimberly Qualls, (785) 640-9340 or kqualls@ksdot.org

I-35

BNSF INTERMODAL COMMERCIAL TRUCK TRAFFIC via I-35: Beginning TODAY, Monday, November 25, all commercial truck traffic on I-35 traveling to/from the new Kansas City Logistics Park (BNSF Intermodal Facility) in Edgerton (Johnson County) should access this facility via the new I-35 & Homestead Lane interchange (Exit 205), not the existing I-35 & Gardner Road interchange (Exit 207).

Here’s why: Commercial truck traffic is currently utilizing the existing Gardner Road Interchange at I-35 and then following 191st Street west to the BNSF intermodal facility. 191st Street from Gardner Road to Waverly Road is a local Johnson County road and as an existing county road is not constructed to handle the heavy commercial truck traffic generated by the opening of the intermodal facility. This stretch of 191st Street is already experiencing damage to the roadway pavement due to the heavy commercial truck traffic use. (191st Street from Waverly Road west to the intermodal facility was recently reconstructed as a heavy haul road which can adequately accommodate the heavy truck traffic.)

The new diverging diamond interchange at I-35 and Homestead Lane was built to accommodate this heavy truck traffic. The I-35 and Homestead Lane Interchange, due to the free flow movements for heavy left turn movements through the interchange, provides a safer and more efficient route for commercial truck traffic.

This is the REQUESTED BNSF Intermodal commercial truck traffic route: Commercial truck traffic accessing the BNSF Intermodal Facility should exit I-35 at the Homestead Lane interchange. From there, commercial truck traffic will then travel north on the newly constructed portion of Homestead Lane and then west on 191st Street to access the intermodal facility.

###

This information is available in alternative accessible formats. To obtain an alternative format,
contact KDOT Transportation Information, Eisenhower Building, 700 SW Harrison, 2nd Floor West,
Topeka, Kan., 66603-3754, or (785) 296-3585 (Voice)/Hearing Impaired - 711.

Toxic Tour of Long Beach

Hello, Diesel Health Project members and friends,  This blog post, which originally appeared in the Moving Forward Network Blog, describes some of the Diesel Health Project activities in Kansas City, Edgerton, and Gardner, Kansas.  If you would like to get involved in the Diesel Health Project, please drop me at line at kirkendall1(at)gmail.com.

Thank you, Eric Kirkendall
---------------------------------------------------------


Our mentors, role models, and friends in California were hard at work Monday, touring Long Beach with a P-TRAK ultrafine particulate monitor.

This is the same monitor our Kansas City Diesel Health Project team members will begin using in December to monitor air pollution near the BNSF rail yards in and near Argentine, Edgerton, and Gardner, Kansas.

We are recently began monitoring with fixed monitors provided by Global Community Monitor, and are awaiting our first lab reports.  Use of P-TRAK handheld monitors will allow us to target 'hot spots' of particular concern, and get immediate feedback..

 Toxic Tour participants found alarming PM levels in Long Beach, as much as ten times the levels deemed  'safe'.

I doubt we find such high levels around the BNSF rail yards in our communities, though when BNSF reaches their projected 1.5 million container lifts per year in Edgerton - generating tens of thousands of new diesel truck trips per year, I fear we will.

The difference between Southern California and KC metro areas?  We will be able to begin to monitor pollution levels before Kansas City becomes “one of the largest (inland ports) in the world", and raise the alarm before health effects become as bad as West Long Beach, where almost 30 percent of households include someone with asthma.

Thank you Andrea Hricko, Angelo Logan, Gisele Fong, and the other wonderful folks at the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, and EndOil /Communities for Clean Ports, and other MFN organizations for leading the way!

And thank you Brian Addison for your excellent article, posted below.

STREETSBLOG  

'Toxic Tour' of Long Beach Showcases Most Polluted Areas of City

byBRIAN ADDISON 

 NOVEMBER 19 2013 13:05

in PLACE

7

 Comment 

NOTE: This is an abridged version of a story that originally appeared in LA Streetsblog. To read the unabridged version, click here.

Environmental experts, local health advocates, urban designers, and citizens took a bus around Long Beach on November 14 in what the Communities for a Better Environment call their Toxic Tours, an educational experience they have been offering throughout California since 1995.

California is home to more than half of the nation’s dirtiest cities—of which Long Beach and Los Angeles are two of the worst, largely thanks to the fact that the two cities’ port entries are responsible for taking in more than half of the nation’s goods. The Toxic Tour of Long Beach showcases the way in which marginalized communities are effected by the constant back-and-forth between industrial advancement and its corresponding effects on the environment.

The tour began at Century Villages at Cabrillo, a small neighborhood lining the Terminal Island Freeway and directly across from where BNSF Rail wants to build their massive (and controversial) Southern California International Gateway (SCIG) rail yard and just south of Hudson Elementary. A small, heavy contraption known as a P-TRAK was passed around, the number on its display continually bouncing between 23,000 and 35,000.

The P-TRAK was measuring ultrafine particulate matter (PM), the minuscule particles of pollution that are given off from the exhaust pipes of cars and trucks, or carried by the winds from nearby port complexes, auto body shops, power plants, and factories. Somewhere in the range of 3,000 particles per square centimeter is considered safe, in order to prevent respiratory problems. As a diesel truck roared by some 40 feet away, the P-TRAK skyrocketed to 33,800. Approaching a nearby patch of foliage in the Cabrillo community garden, the number then dropped again to 12,400.

The tour largely revolved around one simple point: it is one thing to know, in an abstract sense, the effects of pollution; of the way in which the shipping industry contributes to the creation of incompatible land sources (that is, polluting to such an extent that the land surrounding the pollution source is rendered unusable), but it is another thing entirely to see that pollution quantified, to see what is happening every second, in real time.

More tangible examples were given as the two-hour bus ride examined the largely disproportionate effects of pollution on Long Beach’s less affluent neighborhoods, from those near Union Pacific’s ICTF rail yard to those in Cambodia Town. While passing by the trash-intake facility where Route 47 and the southern tip of the 710 meet—40% of the trash it processes comes from Long Beach alone—tourists were each handed a thin, red cocktail straw, the type one commonly stirs their drink with. They were then asked to plug their noses and use only the straw to breathe through, thereby experiencing the physical stress and disability that is asthma.

The asthma exercise echoed the work of Dr. Andrea Hricko, a preventative medicine professor at USC whose studies have altered the perspection on living near freeways and port complexes in Southern California: not only did children who lived near corridors struck with perpetual traffic experience growth stunted by 20%, children who lived within a quarter of a mile of a freeway had a staggering 89% higher risk of asthma. At Hudson, which sits directly next to the proposed SCIG project, 250 of their 1,100 students already have asthmal. If the SCIG project is built, it will bring an additional 1.5 million truck trips past Hudson every year.

Cambodia Town—stretched along one of Long Beach’s key arterials, Anaheim—is home to the world’s largest concentration of Cambodians and Cambodian-Americans outside of Cambodia itself, and is also home to Long Beach’s highest concentration of auto body shops. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), auto body shops emit pollutants such as hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), particle pollution (dust), and volatile organic compounds (VOC). Chemicals found in paints, cleaners, and paint strippers can react in the air to form ground-level ozone (smog), which has been linked to a number of respiratory effects. Lead, chromium, and cadmium are all heavy metal toxins that form particle pollution during sanding and welding. Breathing particle pollution can cause respiratory problems and other harmful health effects. Diisocyanates, the leading cause of occupational asthma, are hazardous air pollutants emitted during painting operations. Oftentimes in Cambodia Town, houses and parks sit side-by-side with these shops, despite health agencies suggesting a 1,000 feet radius surrounding such businesses.

There was a silver-lining to the Toxic Tour: the fact that community and health organizations are attempting to educate citizens about their cities, the relation between consumerism and environmental affects, and encouraging involvement on a larger level.

For those interested in a Southern California Toxic Tour, contact Gisele Fong, Ph.D., Executive Director of EndOil / Communities for Clean Ports atgfong@endoil.org or call 562-424-8200.

Source: The Long Beach Post

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