East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice
Addressing Health Costs at a Goods Movement Hub
6/07/05 by Jeni L. Miller et al
The I-710 freeway from the Ports of Long Beach/Los Angeles (L.A.) into Commerce, California leads through a continuous thick gray haze, and maneuvering the freeway means edging between massive 18 wheelers. Located at the intersection of the I-710 and the I-5 freeways, Commerce also hosts not one, but two large rail yards. Commerce is the place where many of the goods coming into the U.S. via the third largest port complex in the world move from trucks onto trains, to get distributed around California and the nation. True to its name, a lot of business gets done via Commerce.
Unfortunately for local residents, most of that business currently entails inordinate amounts of unfiltered diesel exhaust. Over the last fifteen years or so, many members of this tightly knit community began to feel that the health costs have become way too high. Faced with a barrage of health problems in the area, in 2001, several Commerce residents gathered together to form the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. Their goal: to reduce the diesel emissions resulting from the trucking and rail industries that dominate the town, and therefore make the air cleaner for everyone in the community. They are starting to have an impact, as East Yard joins public health, environmental, and other environmental justice advocates to push for passage of a series of bills aimed at rail transport, trucking, and the ports, currently making their way through Sacramento.
“When folks started being diagnosed with throat and lung cancers at alarming rates, we became concerned,” recounts East Yard Director Angelo Logan. Once he and other community members started looking into the cancers, they discovered other health problems as well— severe asthma among many of the children, bronchitis, emphysema, and congestive heart failure.
Hardest hit by the pollution are those neighborhoods near the tracks, especially those in the triangle nestled tightly between the two rail yards, with the I-710 freeway on the third side. In these neighborhoods, many families have nothing more than a chain link fence or a short cinderblock wall between their yards and the trains. A neighborhood park, a preschool, a school, a youth center, along with many of the houses, are all within spitting distance of trains that pile up sometimes 15 at a time waiting to be loaded. In one instance, a train sat idling, spewing diesel exhaust, for four solid days.
Up on the freeway, traffic frequently backs up, with trucks sitting, emitting diesel exhaust, as they creep toward their exit. Increases in the size of containers and cargo loads exacerbate the problem, as engines struggle to accelerate from stoplights in town. Booming imports (according to the L.A. Times, imports into Long Beach increased by a staggering 35% in in January alone) threaten to overwhelm this already impacted city.
East Yard truly is a community coalition, founded, staffed, and supported by residents. Asked about East Yard’s membership, Logan explains that the very notion of membership “is kind of exclusionary.” They hold open community meetings, where everyone is welcome. At these meetings, they recap the issues and work East Yard has been doing, and then ask for new information and input from everyone. They then incorporate community input into the ongoing work plan. The steering committee that makes final decisions is made up entirely of community members, and operates by formal consensus. Says Logan, “There’s no distinction between us and the community.”
Though not funded by the CAFA Initiative, East Yard quickly understood that to fight the outdoor air pollution in Commerce, it needed allies working up and down the southern California goods movement chain. It found such allies in the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma, a CAFA local asthma coalition, and the CAFA regional center Physicians for Social Responsibility-L.A., among others. East Yard became an “unofficial” CAFA group, attending regional and statewide meetings, and putting to good use some of the resources and connections the CAFA Initiative made possible. Because of their single issue focus on truck and rail diesel emissions, East Yard, for its part, has brought to CAFA a group that carefully tracks hearings, legislation, community meetings, and the like related to this issue, and takes it upon itself to keep other coalitions and advocates informed.
Logan has been spending a lot of time in Sacramento. “We go and advocate at every hearing. We learned last time around. Every bill we showed up and advocated for passed. The one bill we weren’t there for, failed.” Back in January, at an L.A. Metropolitan Transit Authority hearing on the planned I-710 freeway expansion, several community residents, including Logan and East Yard staffer Sylvia Betancourt, testified to assure that Community Advisory Committee recommendations would in fact be implemented—just another step in the long advocacy process. Working tirelessly and working with its allies, East Yard insists that health and outdoor air quality be a visible issue, at a time when Governor Schwarzenegger is pushing to expand the goods movement industry in the state threefold. Right now, no less than six bills that address the health impacts of goods movement [see sidebar] are making their way through the state capitol. As the pressure of imports continues, this community keeps pushing to make sure that economic issues don’t overshadow a more basic need for equity and good health.
For example, the age-adjusted asthma hospitalization rate (mean (95% confidence interval)) during 1998-2000 for children ages 0-14, based on data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, was 17.71 (9.66-29.78) for zip code 90040 (Commerce). For more information and data for more zip codes in the Los Angeles region and around the state, please refer to the 2004 CAFA data projects (available from http://www.calasthma.org/about_cafa/hospitalization_rate_data/) and the CAFA California Asthma Advocacy Data Book (available from http://www.calasthma.org/about_cafa/advocacy_databook/).
Sidebar
To find out more about any of these bills, including their current status, go to www.leginfo.ca.gov and click on “Bill Information.” To voice your support for any of these bills, contact the offices of the author of the bill (name in parentheses next to the bill number, below). Contact information for all legislators is available at the same website; click on “Your Legislature.”
SB760 (Lowenthal) Container Fees at Ports
This bill would place a fee on each shipping container processed at the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach to reduce impacts on neighboring communities, including programs to replace and upgrade diesel vehicles and equipment.
SB 762 (Lowenthal) Port Congestion – Environmental Quality Commission
This bill would establish a joint-powers board in Los Angeles-Long Beach and another in Oakland to set up licensing systems for trucks serving the ports, limit the number of trucks serving the ports, and require those trucks to meet enhanced environmental standards.
SB 764 (Lowenthal) – No Net Increase in Emissions
This bill is a do-over of last year’s AB 2042, which was vetoed by the Governor. It would require the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to put a cap on net port emissions no matter how much trade increases and to roll back the pollution level to 2001 levels by Jan. 1, 2008.
AB 1101 (Oropeza) Diesel Magnet Sources
The bill would define “diesel magnet” areas as facilities such as ports, airports, rail yards, distribution centers and intermodal yards that attract diesel-powered vehicles. The bill calls for those areas to comply with the same standards imposed on traditional stationary sources.
AB 888 (de la Torre) Rail Yard Equipment Emissions
This bill would authorize the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) to establish a rail yard equipment emission reduction program.
AB 1222 (Jones) High-Polluting Locomotive Program
This bill would establish a pilot program for the remote sensing of locomotive emissions. |
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