Behind-the-scenes, many factors are driving the action between the City of Frisco and the owners of the Exide lead smelter that sits in the middle of town. We can only speculate for now. Meanwhile, let's look at some pressure points that entered the public record this last week on a collision course, and make the smelter's exit seem inevitable, no matter how much the state tries to stave it off. On Wednesday, for the first time in 20 years, the federal government lowered the recommended limit for lead exposure in young children, where it can often do the most harm. And it wasn't just decreased by the Centers for Disease Control  - it was slashed by 50%, from 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to 5. If those sound like tiny amounts, that's because they are. But the bad news is that the overwhelming consensus of environmental health specialists is that numbers even below this amount are doing cognitive and behavioral harm to children. Even the CDC itself states that there is no known safe level of lead exposure. Not that any amount will do harm necessarily, but that any exposure is statistically capable of doing harm based on the field studies coming in. CDC estimates there are 450,000 kids nationwide that don't meet the new standard for a poison that will not honor it. We don't know how many children in Frisco fall into this category, but we do know, thanks to Dr. Howard Mielke of Tulane University, that the children the state health services agency tested for blood lead showed that 1.6 times more kids living in Frisco had blood lead levels above 2 micrograms per deciliter compared to the state as a whole - 60% above the norm. Meanwhile, new monitoring results from around the Exide smelter show that it failed for a second month in a row to obtain the new federal standard for lead particles in air of .15 micrograms (Look under "Monitoring Data" and download). In March the three month rolling average for March was.19 and .22 for April. This would mean more if TCEQ had not granted a 13 month free pass to break the standard instead of enforcing a deadline in November of this year. Did we mention that the new air-lead standard is of course based on the science behind the old blood lead level of 10 micrograms per deciliter, and therefore instantly obsolete even before Exide has to comply with it? The regulations are forever chasing the science. It might take another 4 to 10 years to lower the lead-air standard. And then more research will show even more subtle effects of lead at lower levels of exposure and so on. People who live around facilities like Exide can never win. And sooner or later, Exide lawyers or its insurance companies will be explaining why its a really bad idea to keep operating a lead smelter in a densely populated area that includes gated communities where people can spend a lot of money on attorneys themselves. We hear that things are proceeding apace in some kind of "peace with honor" resolution to this train wreck between the city and he company. Surely this last week's news can't help but spur those discussions.   Read More

Although on any given day there's a lot of competition, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry might be the most irrelevant government bureaucracy going. Thursday it announced that the latest installment of its years-long "health consultation" of Midlothian will be the subject of yet another community meeting in that town on Thursday May 24th from 7 to 8:30 at the Midlothian Conference Center. The ATSDR evaluation started in 2005 at the request of Midlothian Citizens when TXI was still burning hazardous waste. It then was the subject of a 2010 Congressional investigation that revealed how the Agency mostly neglected to do any real science in the course of its evaluation. This new meeting concerns an analysis of air monitoring information that "will support public health evaluations for many of the pollutants of concern." Of that we have no doubt. Since ATSDR does no monitoring of its own, it's completely reliant on the monitoring done by theTexas Commission on Environmental Quality. Does anyone know of any instance where TCEQ monitoring has shown anything to be concerned about? If citizens complain about getting sick from industrial pollution, it's TCEQ position that it's the fault of anything but the pollution itself. No amount of empirical evidence collected by citizens in the field from their own sampling or experience can convince Austin otherwise. TXI quit burning waste in 2008. ASTDR's evaluation of Midlothian? It just might outlast the plant itself.   Read More

You may not know the name of the chemical, but you know it by smell. "Rotten eggs" is the olfactory indication you're being exposed to Hydrogen Sulfide. There's a reason it smells like that. Biological sources can emit it. Certain bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide as they decompose waste - like rotten eggs. It also occurs in geothermal situations. Hot water, steam and magma from inside the Earth carry heat, minerals and gases – like Hydrogen Sulfide – to the surface, liberating them in springs, geysers and volcanic lava. If you've ever been to Yellowstone, you know the smell. Industrial sources of hydrogen sulfide include oil and gas drilling, refineries, paper mills, large scale livestock production, waste water treatment and landfills. At high levels of exposure, Hydrogen Sulfide is linked with serious neurologic damage – including death. Lower levels can trigger eye irritation, fatigue and headaches...and asthma according to a new three-year study out of Iceland. Measuring levels of Hydrogen Sulfide near major intersections and power plants in the capital city of Reykjavik that turn geothermal energy into electricity and heating steam, researchers found a weak but constant association between the pollutant and asthma medication rates. It's one of the first studies to find respiratory ailments at low levels of Hydrogen Sulfide - much like you'd find in the Barnett Shale or any gas or oil patch. The fact that oil drilling has been around for over a century, and yet only now are we actually studying what happens when people are exposed ti it at exposure levels found in real life, tells you all you need to know about the risks of allowing drilling so close to people.   Read More

Prenatal exposure to high levels of air pollution double the likelihood of children becoming obese in a new study by Columbia University's School of Public Health released last week. Its one of the first reports to definitively link chemical pollutants to weight gain. Pregnant women who lived in areas where they were exposed to abnormal amounts of Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons, or (PAHs), were more than twice as likely to have children who were obese by age seven than women who had lower exposure to the chemicals. PAH's are a pretty common pollutant which come mostly from the burning of fossil fuels. This news comes on the heels of a new study of the danger of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors, which can reek havoc with a person's hormones. Animal studies had already shown that PAHs inhibit the release of fat in the body, decrease IQ increase behavioral disorders. And oh yeah, PAHs can also give you cancer. There are many causes for weight gain in the US. Could one of them have anything to do with our swimming in a sea of 80,000 chemicals, only a handful of which are fully understood, much less regulated to reflect the current science?     Read More

In today's New York Times, columnist Nicolas Kristof writes extensively about the threat of endocrine disruptors - those chemicals that, instead of killing you outright, do strange and horrible things to your hormones and reproductive systems like genital deformities, breast cancer, infertility, diabetes and even obesity. Endocrine disruptors are everywhere, in food, cosmetics, even the receipts you get at the grocery store or your ATM machine...and the air pollution from many kinds of facilities.  It's the hormone-wrecking properties of one such chemical - bisphenol-A, or BPA, used to line food cans - that prompted eight medial organizations representing MDs in the fields of genetics, gynecology, and urology to say BPA should be banned from the marketplace last year. But it's clear that there are many, many chemicals, including less exotic ones like lead, and dioxin, that also act as hormone disruptors in the body. As Kristof explains, scientists know that even the tiniest variations in hormone levels influence fetal development. Endocrine disruptors play a kind of birth defect roulette as they course around the mother's body and end up in the fetus' bloodstream. In making his argument, Kristoff uses the example of a very specific birth defect, Hypospadias - a misplacement of the urethra - is now twice as common as it used to be and cites a leading researcher linking this trend to increased exposure to endocrine disruptors.  Why is this important for North Texans? Because the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) found that the incidence of Hypospadias was approximately four times higher in Midlothian than the state of Texas as a whole. Remember, everyone is exposed to a constant sea of endocrine disruptors just from everyday living, so that wouldn't explain the much higher rate of a specific birth defect linked to the chemicals in Midlothian. But maybe operating three huge cement plants plus a steel mill could.  That same ATSR study - officially "inconclusive," also found a much higher rate for Microcephaly, where the newborn's head is more than two standard deviations smaller than the average, and Craniosynostosis, a condition in which one or more of the skulls' fibrous sutures prematurely fuses. That was only one study of a specific area. We know the Frisco lead smelter generates large quantities of dioxin. We don't know the impact of those releases. We know that gas drilling also involves a lot of chemicals identified a endocrine disruptors, but we don't how the last decade of urban drilling in the Barnett Shale has dispersed them or what their cumulative effect has been. According to Kristof, many scientists have seen enough proof and now want to better protect us from the dangers of endocrine disruptors. "For several well-studied endocrine disruptors, I think it's fair to say that we have enough data to conclude that these chemicals are not safe for human populations," according to Dr. Linda Vandenberg, who was the lead author of a new report we featured last month that concludes there are no safe doses for these kinds of chemicals. When it comes to the effects of chemical exposure, government regulations often lag far behind the science. How long will it take this warning to be implemented into public health precautions? And why don't we have a system that examines the possible impact to human health of a chemical BEFORE it's released into the marketplace?  Read More

About four or so years ago, Downwinders put out a nice little report that summarized decades worth of air pollution coming from all three Midlothian cement plants. For years, residents were told that the plumes they saw coming from the smokestacks of the kilns were " just steam." The point of the report was to prove that of course this wasn't true. You don't just emit steam and then report thousands of tons of air pollution to the EPA. So our report was titled "Not Just Steam" and you can download it from our "Cementpedia" page (look under "E" for "emission inventory"). Today some Colleyville and Southlake citizens, along with Oil and Gas Accountability Project organizer Sharon Wilson, released results from air testing they contracted a Richardson company to perform downwind while Titan Operations was fracking a natural gas well. Specifically, it was a time when the well operators were recovering the "flowback" from the well. Contrary to the recent claim from Chesapeake spokespeople that such gas well emissions are "just steam," this stuff was chock full of 26 chemicals, including Carbon Disulfide, a neurotoxin detected at twice the state level for short-term exposure, Benzene, a known carcinogen detected at 9 times above the state's short-term exposure limits, and Naphthalene, a suspected carcinogen detected more than 7 times above the state short term limit.  Carbonyl Sulfide, Dimethyl Disulfide and Pyridine were all also detected above safe limits for long-term exposure. In other words: No Just Steam. Here's the press release, at the bottom of which is all the technical information about the testing. Even though Colleyville prohibits "gases to be vented into the atmosphere or to be burned by open flame" this well is going great guns. It's also true that it's these very kind of drilling emissions that would have been stopped from new wells within the next 60-90 days under new federal rules as they were originally proposed. But they got changed by industry, so now they don't take effect until 2015. Old wells? Forgetaboutit. Why do we keep telling citizens that their environmental health is a do-it-yourself project? Because of situations like this where no government agency is keeping up with industrial abuses. There are an estimated 20,000 gas wells in the Barnett Shale.   Read More

For many years now there's been a entire theory of crime that blames a large part of the rise in anti-social behavior over the last 40 years on the exposure of millions of kids to lead paint and soil. Now comes a new study from Tulane lead expert Dr. Howard Mielke that concludes levels of airborne lead dust in cities have lead to spikes in the rates of aggravated assaults. So what does sunny suburban Frisco have in common with Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, San Diego, Atlanta? Thanks to the Exide lead smelter, they all have elevated levels of airborne lead. After controlling for other possible causes such as community and household income, education, policing effort, and incarceration rates, Mielke and his fellow researchers found that for every 1 per cent increase in tonnage of environmental lead released 22 years earlier, it raised the present rate of aggravated assault by almost half a percent. This latest information points "to a growing body of evidence that childhood exposure to lead dust causes permanent damage to regions of the brain that govern mood regulation, executive control and judgement."  Meanwhile, it's been three months since citizens THOUGHT the Frisco City Council was on track to amortize the almost 50-year old Exide smelter. But nothing has happened. No Board of Adjustment hearing per the usual course of action. On the other hand, Dallas has had no problem scheduling it's own Board of Adjustment hearing on April 18th concerning the slaughterhouse that dumped pig's blood in the Trinity River. Dallas is acting quickly to deal with its public nuisance. Frisco is not. with so much on the line, citizens should be asking questions.    Read More

A lot of people may think that the largest public health problems linked to horizontal gas drilling,or fracking, are all water-related. They are not, at least not yet. It's the huge amounts of air pollution fracking generates and its consequences for nearby residents, downwind dwellers, and the planet as a whole that are really pose the paramount risks to the most people. Take smog. Saturday's record-setting ozone levels remind us again that DFW is a 21-year old chronic violator of the Clean Air Act. Fracking generates both kinds of smog-forming pollutants identified by the EPA and the state - Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) from combustion sources, and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from the leakage and "upsets" of chemicals in tanks, pipelines, and other facilities and pieces of equipment. In 2006, NOx pollution from the gas industry was estimated to be over 68 tons per day by the state. That was more than all three cement plants in Midlothian combined, plus every other large stationary source of NOx pollution in the region. By this year that number is expected to drop by 2/3rds because of new rules by the state requiring more modern diesel engines and less drilling in the Barnett Shale in general. TCEQ believes NOx pollution has more of an impact on DFW ozone levels than VOCs, and so it got more serious about regulating the NOx pollution from fracking. But that theory is being seriously tested. This year, again according to the state, all the cars and trucks in DFW will produce 80 tons per day of VOC air pollution. Oil and gas production in DFW will produce 114 tons per day of the same kinds of pollutants - 34 more tons a day than all cars and trucks combined, and the largest emissions by far from any one industry in North Texas. TCEQ says not to worry about the smog impact of these gas VOC emissions because they're aren't as reactive or volatile as the kind vehicles emit and are less likely to form ozone. Independent scientists and regulators disagree, especially given the volume of the pollution. Denver officials believe that when already dirty air - from other urban areas, or coal plants or cement plants - combines with the VOCs from the gas industry, it actually makes the gas VOCs more volatile, and more likely to form ozone. This phenomenon has never been incorporated into the computer modeling TCEQ uses to predict ozone formation in DFW. In 2011, DFW had its worst smog season in five years, even as the state refused to significantly cut VOC emissions from the gas industry. You don't have to live near a gas well to feel the effects of the drilling going on in North Texas. All you have to do is breathe.  The same VOCs that cause smog are also the most responsible for making near-by residents ill with their toxic fumes. Benzene, formaldehyde, and other VOCs are routinely released or escape from gas facilities. A recent Colorado School of Public Health study found a resident's cancer risks increased 66% when they lived within a half mile, or over 2000 feet from a fracking operation. Many of the chemical exposures recorded residents near wells by way of state-issued hand held canisters are exactly the same ones Midlothian residents found when they used the same canisters to test their bad air downwind of the cement plants when they were burning hazardous wastes. And the official response is the same as well. Despite the fact that the resident is testing the air when he or she is feeling the health effects of air pollution, the levels of poisons never seem to reach above mandated levels of concern that would trigger action. But of course those levels are based on theory and never put to the test in any epidemiological way - except when residents' experience contradict the theory - and then its the residents who must be mistaken, not the theory. If you live next to a fracking well operation, you live next door to a hazardous facility that's capable of generating toxic air pollution just like a hazardous waste incinerator, a chemical plant, or refinery. Finally,  the same air pollution from gas operations that causes smog and sick people also contributes to climate change.  Fracking, along with gas processing, and especially compressors to generate pressure instead of wells and pipelines produce very large volumes of Greenhouse Gases. A recent EPA survey of GHG from all Texas facilities shows compressor stations spewing anywhere from 10,000 to over 90.000 tons of GHG pollution. Industry spokespeople say not to worry because most of this is methane that is relatively short-lived compared to other kinds of Greenhouse Gases like CO2.  The problem with that argument is that while it might have a shorter life span, methane is many times more potent in its greenhouse effect. So much so that a recent groups of climate change experts recently said that the best thing we could do in the short term for negating climate change would be to concentrate on reducing methane and particulate matter pollution. This is most relevant to Dallas because of all North Texas cities, it's the one that has officially pledged to cut its GHG pollution along a specific timetable. Just one compressor station within its city limits and any hope of meeting those goals is lost. So one kind of air pollution from the gas industry is responsible for all three impacts - local, regional and global. That's why the Dallas Residents at Risk alliance has endorsed off-setting, or balancing any increases in GHG emissions caused by the gas industry with industry-sponosored reductions in Dallas that keep our total air pollution burden from skyrocketing. It's the first time this strategy has been advocated and it is the only brand new idea to be included in the Dallas Gas drilling Task Force as a "suggestion" in its cover letter to the City Council. Even its members saw the collision of City of Dallas promises to clean the air with opening the door to fracking. Gas isn't cleaner than coal in DFW. It's just as bad or worse.   Read More

A new report by the American Association for Cancer Research finds that women whose diets contain higher levels of cadmium are at greater risk of developing breast cancer than those that ingest less of the toxic heavy metal. Already a well-known carcinogen, cadmium is now also known as an "endocrine disrupter"  for its ability to mimic or alter hormonal responses in the body - in this case fooling the body into thinking cadmium was estrogen. The latest research follows two other studies, published in 2006 and 2010, that first singled out cadmium as a factor in breast cancer. Those studies measured cadmium in the urine of smaller groups of pre- and post-menopausal women, and found that those who had high cadmium exposures were more than twice as likely to develop breast cancer as those with the smallest exposures. Locally, the Bell Helicopter plant in Grand Prairie, Sabre in Alvarado, and the Ameristeel Steel Mill in Midlothian were the largest point sources of cadmium in North Texas in 2010.  Read More

Pregnant women who inhale air contaminated with chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are more likely to have children who develop behavioral problems by the time they reach school age, according to a new study by the Children's Environmental Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. The same group of researchers had previously linked exposure to PAHs with possible chromosomal damage and IQ loss. PAH's are organic chemicals that are less water soluble, and so less likely to evaporate, than other ingredients of particulate matter pollution, or soot, which they often hitch a ride on into your lungs. PAHs are produced from incomplete combustion of carbon-based fuels  - like any internal combustion engine or industrial boiler or furnace - and include acenaphthene, anthracene, benzo(a)pyrene, and fluorine. Their toxicity varies and depends on how the PAh's were made. Some are carcinogens, others mutagens, and some are completely non-toxic. The problem is your lungs don't have a filter to distinguish the bad ones from the benign ones.    Read More