Air Plan

Computer modeling in DFW’s newest anti-smog plan concludes that North Texas will reach historical – some would say ridiculous – levels of clean air next summer, only months after the region recorded its worst air pollution levels in half a decade.  

The so-called “budget crisis” in Austin this last legislative session gave industry and their favorite presidential candidate the opportunity to slash the budget of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. One thing they cut were the programs that offer incentives to get your older, dirtier car fixed or buy a new cleaner one. You may recall that the idea of “fleet turnover” among DFW residents was the one and only way TCEQ was suggesting North Texas could escape its chronic smog problem. That’s worked so well this summer that we’re seeing the worst ozone levels since 2006. But the point is that it’s the very strategy the TCEQ is promoting in DFW as a clean air solution has gotten gutted in Austin. So even if you were a true believer in TCEQ’s fleet turnover shell game, you’d be hard-pressed to defend the efficacy of that approach now that it’s been mortally wounded in the budget process. All they have now is a big box of nothing.

 EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has a young son with asthma. That’s one of the reasons she was such a passionate advocate for new, lower, tougher standards for ambient ozone pollution, or smog, before the rug got pulled out from under her by the President and his campaign advisers last month. In a newly released report that would have served as a preamble to a new 70 parts per billion (ppb) ozone standard in the Federal Register, Jackson and the EPA had formally concluded that the existing standard of 75 ppb endangered thousands of Americans, including people with existing respiratory ailments like her son. The Bush-era limit on ozone was “not adequate to protect public health,” and failed to take into account “newly available evidence,” according to the original EPA language. Such a report will be fodder for the new lawsuit filed by five environmental groups this week, which claims that the Administration’s retreat from Jackson’s recommendation was politically driven and not based on the best science. Meanwhile, because of the 2-year delay in setting a standard, chronic smog hotspots like DFW must now wait until close to the end of the decade to have any hope of getting safe and legal air to breathe.

Never doubt the ability of a small group of committed citizens to uncover government agency mistakes. Yesterday, a handful of Frisco residents met with EPA Region 6 staff about their local Superfund Site-in-progress known as the Exide lead smelter. The list of subjects to discuss was long and varied. Lead-paved streets, lead-lined creeks, lead contaminated waste water treatment plants, illegal landfilling of hazardous waste, modern pollution controls and the boundaries of the current two square-mile non-attainment area for lead in the middle of downtown Frisco. It was a productive meeting, with some new information coming to light, including the fact that those boundaries lines are not based on good science and need to be redrawn.  

In 1995, a Midlothian tire disposal company that collected, stored and shipped used tires for the near-by cement plants to burn in their kilns caught fire itself and burned for almost a month. It was located right across the street from the TXI plant. Black, toxic smoke wafted between high rise office buildings in Downtown Dallas for days. At the time, the fire was particularly and painfully ironic for Downwinders at Risk supporters who had been trying to tell people why burning tires in cement plants is a bad idea, as well as how Dallas air      could be affected by pollution from the cement plants despite the state saying they were too far away. Now, here in plain sight from Reunion Tower, columns of carbon black smoke thousands of feet high originating less than 2000 feet from TXI gave lie to the official assurances that the cement plant was too distant to affect DFW air quality, or that miniatures versions of this fire was supposed to be effective “recycling” of tire wastes. Oh yeah, the name of the tire disposal company? “Safe Tire.” 

 Jan Jarvis plays the Star-Telegram’s environmental reporter-for-the-day role and chronicles the updated inventorying of North Texas asthma rates as reported by the Cook Childrens Hospital’s Children’s Health Assessment and Planning Survey, or CHAPS.  Two years ago Downwinders was specifically invited to a presentation on the asthma data, because of a certain graphic that mapped where the worst rates of children’s asthma were in North Texas. It looked suspiciously like a graphic we’d been showing for years based on where the predominant winds push the pollution from the Midlothian cement plants. We report, you decide.  We’re Having a Really (REALLY) Bad Air Day

We’ve been attending the EPA hearing in Arlington all day, but like a lot of you, we’ve been getting those “Orange Alerts” for high ozone levels. What we didn’t realize until we looked at the individual monitors just now was HOW orange it was. We’re seeing some of the highest single-hour readings all summer: 110 ppb at 2 pm in Keller, 107ppb in Grapevine at 2 pm, and 112 ppb at the Dallas North site at 1 pm. In all, there were six monitors with ozone levels in the tripe digits as of 3pm. It’s too soon to say whether these will translate into any significant regulatory landmarks – new site highs, a new Design Value at Keller, etc, but one thing is certain. This last week of Ozone Season has been a microcosm of this entire summer, with higher ozone levels at more places throughout the region.