AIR POLLUTION: Battle still on for clean air

People who have lived for decades in the Inland region describe summer days in the 1960s and ’70s when burning eyes and painful lungs were routine, the price paid for living in what was then one of the most polluted regions in the nation.

Few dwelled on the long-term harm of breathing toxic air.

Air quality has improved dramatically since the 1970s, but still, on more than 100 days a year, Southern California is failing to meet clean air standards — and Inland residents are getting the biggest dose of pollution.

Children appear to suffer the most.

New avenues of discovery show that air pollution not only harms hearts, lungs and sinuses, it also penetrates the body’s natural defenses to invade brains and other vital tissues, laying the groundwork for multiple health problems.

Several studies focusing on the consequences of air pollution for Inland children have documented reduced lung function, a greater incidence of asthma and increased medical costs.

Even air considered clean under federal benchmarks may be causing harm.

“At the current levels we are still seeing health effects,” said Ed Avol, a preventive medicine professor at the University of Southern California medical school. “Everybody breathes, so in terms of the number of people who are affected, we are talking about millions and millions of people.”

The expanding list of serious health consequences is especially troubling in the Inland region, where civic and business leaders struggle to breathe life into an economy crushed in the Great Recession. Inland unemployment is about 11 percent, worse than the state’s 8.7 percent and nation’s 7.4 percent.

Some business and local government leaders say warehouses are the best answer, because of the region’s location, its freeways and rail lines, its cheap land and its vast need for jobs that can be filled by workers without a college education. Moreno Valley, with ample land available, has made warehouse construction one of its main economic development goals.

The down side is that warehouses bring diesel truck traffic.

Diesel trucks, ships, locomotives and other cargo-handling equipment account for about half the ozone and fine-particle pollution in the Inland region — and 93 percent of the region’s cancer risk from air pollution, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

The Inland region is hit especially hard by pollution because of weather patterns and topography. Emissions from ships, trucks, cars, construction equipment, power plants, refineries, manufacturing, dry cleaners, paint, lawnmowers and other sources throughout Southern California blow east with sea breezes. Blocked by the San Bernardino Mountains, the airborne muck collects over the Inland area, cooking in the sunlight to become more harmful.

In 2012, the annual averages for fine-particle pollution, a category that includes diesel soot, exceeded the federal clean air standards at monitoring stations in Mira Loma and Rubidoux in northwest Riverside County and Fontana and Ontario in western San Bernardino County.

Ozone, a corrosive gas, exceeded the federal standard 111 times somewhere within Southern California’s sea-to-mountains air basin in 2012. The most violations were in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, including 80 unhealthful days in Redlands, 47 in Jurupa Valley and 46 in Perris.

People living closest to freeways, busy streets and rail yards get the worst of it. Because of the increased health risks, air district officials recommend that homes and schools be located at least 500 feet from freeways and other heavy traffic areas.

The science documenting the harm of air pollution is vast.

It’s not just lungs that are affected. Like a Trojan horse, pollution carried inside the body in the simple, constant and necessary act of breathing is penetrating natural defenses and triggering an array of consequences.

In children, pollution can sabotage the biochemistry vital to the development of growing organs. In the womb, pollution is a suspected factor in miscarriage, birth defects and autism. And in a child’s formative years, breathing difficulties can develop and other diseases may take root in the brain and elsewhere.

Learning deficits have been found in children living in polluted areas. And new research finds that pregnant women exposed to certain pollution are more likely to have children who become obese, a condition with its own disease complications.

Children hurt by air pollution can face chronic illnesses, such as asthma, and a shorter lifespan than their own genes might have predicted.

Adults can suffer lung damage, cancer, heart disease, heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses.

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RAIL YARD REALITY

Increasing volumes of cargo flowing from the sea ports in Los Angeles have put more trucks on the freeways and more trains on rails — major veins in the nation’s commerce network. Some 80 freight trains pass through the Inland area daily, and the number is expected to increase as the economy improves.

Researchers from USC and Loma Linda University have visited Inland schools and homes over the years, taking medical histories and measuring lung function. Their conclusions: Asthma and reduced lung capacity afflict a greater percentage of children in areas with higher concentrations of air pollution.

In southwest San Bernardino, a team put together by Loma Linda University ran tests last year on nearly 500 school children who live in a neighborhood that shares property lines with a BNSF Railway cargo-transfer yard.

It had been a locomotive repair and maintenance station yard that was revamped in 1995 to be a hub for cargo transfers between trains and trucks. In 2008, a state analysis found that diesel pollution from trucks, trains and yard equipment exposed the neighboring community to the highest cancer risk of all the rail yards in the state.

Almost half the children examined had symptoms of asthma or had been diagnosed with it — twice the rate of children who lived five miles away in Fontana. By comparison, San Bernardino County’s childhood asthma rate is about 15 percent; the national rate is about 9 percent.

During a public presentation earlier this year, Rhonda Spencer-Hwang, an assistant professor at the Loma Linda University public health school who helped conduct the study, said she was alarmed by the findings, especially since many of the children were not being treated.

The study is pending publication in a scientific journal.

BNSF, which has questioned the researchers’ findings and methods, has invested more than $24.5 million to reduce air pollution at the San Bernardino yard and elsewhere in California.

The yard uses the newest and cleanest switch engines, the light-duty locomotives used to move rail cars to assemble freight trains.

The company has deployed its newest, cleanest locomotives to California at a cost of $1.8 billion, said Lena Kent, a BNSF spokeswoman.

The railroad also put new, lower-emissions diesel engines in 12 cranes used to lift 40-foot steel cargo containers as they’re moved to trucks or freight trains.

BNSF has invested millions more making changes to reduce the amount of time trucks spend idling in the rail yard; training employs in more efficient practices; and taking other pollution-cutting measures, Kent said.

The changes have slashed pollution from the yard by 54 percent since 2005, Kent said.

Residents of the neighborhood believe the air is still making them sick.

Cecila Hernandez, 52, is raising her son, Fernando, 12, and a grandchild, Daniella, 5, in a mobile home a half block from the rail yard’s fence.

The children take medications for cold-like symptoms that never seem to go away, she said.

“Daniella just keeps sneezing and sneezing, and her nose runs like water,” Hernandez said in Spanish. “They say it is the environment, that it is the contamination in the air.”

Fernando said he often avoids playing outdoors, because he gets the urge to sneeze and starts to feel ill when he is outside the family’s home.

A few doors down, Soledad Serapio,13, said she takes medication for chronically burning eyes and coughing. Her mother, Nohemi Hernandez, lamented that many trucks idle on a dirt lot next to the trailer park.

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Homes sit near warehouses and Highway 60 in Jurupa Valley. Warehouses have proliferated in western San Bernardino and Riverside counties on former dairy land in Jurupa Valley.

TOUGH BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

It is up to elected officials, with input from experts and the public, to weigh the risks and benefits of warehouses and decide what is right for the Inland region. Warehouses already have proliferated along freeways in western San Bernardino and Riverside counties and on former dairy land in Jurupa Valley.

Trucking, railroad and warehouse industry officials say air pollution reduction efforts threaten a necessary and job-creating sector of the economy.

California, for instance, has set an aggressive schedule for diesel truck owners to switch to newer models or retrofit their vehicles with special filters to cut diesel pollution. The rules cost the state’s trucking industry about $1 billion a year, said Michael D. Shaw, vice president of external affairs for the California Trucking Association.

Truckers have been forced to give up older trucks that are still strong road warriors or pay $10,000 to $20,000 to retrofit them, he said.

“We are very willing to do our part to reduce emissions and clean up the air,” Shaw said. “Trucks are 98 percent cleaner than they were 30 years ago.”

Truckers serving the Los Angeles County ports now must drive a 2007 model or newer.

In Moreno Valley, developer Iddo Benzeevi has said he welcomes input from air district officials on how make his proposed 41.6-million-square-foot warehouse complex as environmental friendly as possible.

Plans under consideration would allow only newer trucks to serve the World Logistics Center, as his project is known. He also plans to provide natural-gas fueling facilities and other clean-air measures.

Industry officials say they are frustrated that air pollution rules keep getting tougher every time the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revises health standards for various pollutants.

Inland economist John Husing blames such regulations for driving manufacturers out of Southern California. He contends that such regulations and community opposition now threaten the transportation and warehousing industries that the Inland region needs to provide thousands of jobs for workers without college educations.

Dora Barilla, an assistant professor at Loma Linda University’s school of public health, said the Inland region needs a balanced approached as it looks for ways to reduce air pollution.

Warehouses may attract polluting big-rig trucks, but they also provide jobs to help move people out of poverty, said Barilla, who has asthma. Poverty leads to poorer community health, she said.

“We need to bring together the different factions and have a rational discussion on how improve the environment as well as provide job growth,” Barilla said in an interview.

She added that a big part of the equation is improving education among the poor.

VULNERABLE BRAINS

A decade ago in Mexico City, Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas , a neuropathologist-toxicologist, started investigating the effects of Mexico City’s severe pollution on the brains of young dogs. She found that microscopic particles were able to move through the snouts of canines and into their brains — penetrating a defensive line called the blood-brain barrier.

She next began looking at children’s brains, through brain scans or by examining the brains of children who had died accidentally. She concluded that the brains of children exposed to high levels of pollution showed some of the same changes observed in the brains of people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Pollution may cause problems in children’s brains as the gray and white matter is growing, Calderón-Garcidueñas said in an interview earlier this year with Montana Public Radio.

“If anything goes wrong with these children at that period, you will have serious health effects later on,” said Calderón-Garcidueñas, an assistant professor at the University of Montana’s medical school.

She said the children exposed to high pollution levels could face intelligence and attention deficits.

In a 2012 article in “Frontiers in Psychology,” Calderón-Garcidueñas and co-author Ricardo Torres-Jardón advocate for a concerted effort to take better care of children, especially poor children, through better education, improved nutrition and less pollution in their environments.

“Unfortunately, while we wait for governmental sectors to address these endemic issues, there are no coverings for our children’s noses, nor for their lungs, hearts or vulnerable brains,” she wrote.

Many researchers have focused on freeway pollution.

Official air-monitoring stations are deliberately placed away from busy roadways, where pollution is highest, so that an area’s ambient pollution isn’t skewed by traffic emissions that tend to disperse within a few hundred yards.

In one study, rats exposed to freeway pollution in Riverside showed the earliest signs of brain tumors. The brains cells of the animals started producing genes associated with tumors. What’s not known is whether the body’s immune system can stop the tumors from developing, said Michael Kleinman, a UC Irvine environmental toxicology professor and co-author of the study.

Several recent studies have linked a woman’s exposure to pollution during pregnancy to a higher risk of having an autistic child.

The disorder strikes an estimated 1 in 50 children and, depending on the severity, can bring heartache for families and elevated costs for schools.

UCLA public health researchers studied records of more than 7,000 women in Los Angeles County. Those exposed to higher estimated air pollution levels during their pregnancies had a 12 to 15 percent greater chance of having an autistic child, according to the study published in March.

The results substantiated an earlier USC study that found children born to mothers living within about 300 yards of a freeway appeared to be twice as likely to have a child who developed autism.

In June, Harvard University researchers provided even more evidence supporting a link between air pollution and autism.

Based on a nationwide study, Harvard scientists found that women who live in areas with polluted air have as much as twice the chance of giving birth to an autistic child than those living in communities with cleaner air.

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Bryan Martinez, 9, and Kevin Cesena, 9, play soccer at the Nunez Sports Field in San Bernardino near the BNSF Railway San Bernardino Yard. Researchers have found that children exposed to higher pollution levels in the womb were twice as likely to become obese.

FAT CHILDREN

One of the newest avenues of study is air pollution’s possible role in obesity. Like autism, it’s a condition that has multiple causes and an array of related problems. In California, about 17 percent of low-income preschoolers are obese, according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers with Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found that when pregnant women were exposed to higher levels of a type of air pollution called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, their children were about twice as likely to become obese.

PAHs are hydrocarbons released when fuel burns.

The researchers followed 763 non-smoking African-American and Hispanic women whose children were born in the Bronx or Northern Manhattan between 1998 and 2006.

Each participant wore a small backpack containing a portable air monitor during her third trimester. They kept the monitors at their bedsides when they slept.

When the children reached their seventh birthdays, one-fourth of them were obese — the children exposed to higher pollution levels were twice as likely as the others to be obese.

“Higher prenatal PAH exposures were significantly associated with higher childhood body size,” said a paper published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The authors said laboratory studies have shown that PAHs interfere with the process of lipolysis, the breaking down of fats inside the body. The less fat a person can break down, the more it stays in the body.

Air pollution’s possible role in obesity and diabetes is an emerging area of discovery, and much more study is needed before it’s certain pollution causes or contributes to such health problems, said Avol, the USC scientist.

But its link to heart disease, lung cancer and other illness is well established.

When the EPA last year set a more stringent health standard for fine-particle pollution, its official statement said that “thousand of studies show particle pollution can harm human health.”

The agency summarized the volumes of research by saying that particle pollution shortens lives by impeding the function of blood vessels, leading to heart attacks, stroke and congestive heart failure.

In children and adults alike, the EPA said, it aggravates chronic respiratory diseases and causes short-term bouts of coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath.

LIFE AMONG WAREHOUSES

The literal fallout of poor public planning — decision-making that put residents in the path of harmful pollution — is plainly evident in a neighborhood called Mira Loma Village in northwest Riverside County.

The village’s 101 homes, built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, are surrounded by a 15-square-mile warehouse district that grew up around them in the Jurupa Valley, Ontario and Fontana.

The people who live there talk about illnesses and irritations they blame on the soot that invades the neighborhood.

Shortly after President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970, maintenance worker Gene Proctor bought a small home in the neighborhood and started raising a family. For Proctor, the landmark law has been an empty promise.

He and many of his neighbors say their air quality actually got worse during the past 20 years as they watched the farm fields and dairies around their homes disappear, to be replaced by warehouses. Mira Loma Village does not have an air-monitoring station, but the region’s air quality district confirms that truck traffic degraded the air in Riverside County between 1998 and 2005.

Diesel trucks hauling cargo to and from the warehouses incessantly roll up and down Etiwanda Avenue just outside the block wall surrounding the tract. Highway 60 is a block to the south, and Interstate 15 is a mile and half to the west.

The diesel soot leaves a fine black film that residents wipe from clothes lines and hose off of patios and cars.

For Proctor, now 72, retirement in 2006 from his job in Fullerton meant giving up jogging, since he could no longer run in the much cleaner air near the Kimberly-Clark factory where he worked.

Running at home was out of the question.

“If you’re able to run a seven-minute mile, here it takes you nine minutes,” he said, leaning on a chain link fence outside his home. “You feel a weight. My lungs would tighten up. And my heart would feel like it was going to jump out of my chest.”

Respiratory ailments have many causes, and it’s difficult to say with certainty that air pollution is to blame for a particular person’s illness. But some in Mira Loma Village believe the diesel fumes are making them sick.

LIFE AMONG WAREHOUSES

The literal fallout of poor public planning — decision-making that put residents in the path of harmful pollution — is plainly evident in a neighborhood called Mira Loma Village in northwest Riverside County.

The village’s 101 homes, built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, are surrounded by a 15-square-mile warehouse district that grew up around them in the Jurupa Valley, Ontario and Fontana.

The people who live there talk about illnesses and irritations they blame on the soot that invades the neighborhood.

Shortly after President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970, maintenance worker Gene Proctor bought a small home in the neighborhood and started raising a family. For Proctor, the landmark law has been an empty promise.

He and many of his neighbors say their air quality actually got worse during the past 20 years as they watched the farm fields and dairies around their homes disappear, to be replaced by warehouses. Mira Loma Village does not have an air-monitoring station, but the region’s air quality district confirms that truck traffic degraded the air in Riverside County between 1998 and 2005.

Diesel trucks hauling cargo to and from the warehouses incessantly roll up and down Etiwanda Avenue just outside the block wall surrounding the tract. Highway 60 is a block to the south, and Interstate 15 is a mile and half to the west.

The diesel soot leaves a fine black film that residents wipe from clothes lines and hose off of patios and cars.

For Proctor, now 72, retirement in 2006 from his job in Fullerton meant giving up jogging, since he could no longer run in the much cleaner air near the Kimberly-Clark factory where he worked.

Running at home was out of the question.

“If you’re able to run a seven-minute mile, here it takes you nine minutes,” he said, leaning on a chain link fence outside his home. “You feel a weight. My lungs would tighten up. And my heart would feel like it was going to jump out of my chest.”

Respiratory ailments have many causes, and it’s difficult to say with certainty that air pollution is to blame for a particular person’s illness. But some in Mira Loma Village believe the diesel fumes are making them sick.

Another resident, Socorro Ledezma, said she moved from Orange County about 18 years ago.

“It was more open and much quieter, and less people,” she said in Spanish. “But now, with all the warehousing, the traffic exhaust has been awful.

“When it is foggy and the cars get wet, you see the black stuff on the cars and on the concrete. … It is black when you wash off the car or the patio.”

Allergies worsened as truck traffic increased, and now she frequently feels ill.

“It started about 15 years ago,” she said. She used to get by with medications she could buy over the counter, but no longer. “Now I have to see the doctor to get prescription drugs for the allergies. I have eye drops for my eyes. And I have the nose spray. And I take pills.”

Her voice broke as she described how the ailments have changed her daily life. It’s difficult to do housework, or visit people or go to parties because of her constantly running nose and other symptoms.

Sometimes she feels better. “But it just keeps coming back again.”

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Big rigs travel along Highway 60 near Mira Loma Village homes in Jurupa Valley. Traffic has increased greatly since the housing tract was built, residents say.

DEVELOPMENT ON A ROLL

Cleaner air is an elusive goal for Mira Loma Village. Warehouses can’t function without the trucks that serve them. And more warehouses are on the way.

Already approved is Mira Loma Commerce Center, a complex of 1.1 million square feet of warehouse and industrial space on 65 acres just northeast of Mira Loma Village. It is expected to generate 1,500 truck trips a day.

A settlement this year of a lawsuit over the project’s environmental reviews requires the developer to pay $1,700 per home to install air filtering systems in every home in the tract.

The residents at least will have safe indoor air, said Penny Newman, executive director of the Center for Community Action and Environment Justice, which helped negotiate the settlement. Just as important, she added, are plans under review by Jurupa Valley city officials to route trucks away from the neighborhood.

Proctor said he has mixed emotions about the air filters. “I think they (warehouse developers) are just throwing us a bone. What are the kids going to do? Are they going to spend 24-7 indoors?”

Proctor, who said he hasn’t smoked in more than 40 years, said he has had trouble breathing and visited a doctor recently. Lung X-rays indicated he may have emphysema, a disease caused by damage to lung tissue. He has been putting off follow-up medical exams.

“I don’t want to face the music,” he said. “It is too late for me.”

This story originally ran in the Press-Enterprise on September 5, 2013.  Check out the story there for interactive graphics.

Rachel Lopez of Jurupa Valley provided Spanish interpreting for this article.

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