Jesse and Jessika Hernandez were barely a year old when the twins contracted asthma.
Now, at age 10, they grapple with the illness every day, missing school and ending up in a hospital, because of the poor air quality in their native Fresno.
The two were among several dozen that attended the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Sacramento hearing on national air quality standards Thursday. The agency is proposing a change to the annual standard for soot and is seeking the public’s input.
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Socorro Hernandez’s three children are all avid athletes. But when the air quality in Fresno, CA is bad—as it often is—her 10-year-old twins, both soccer lovers with asthma, and her 16-year-old football player are forced indoors even though they’d rather be at practice.
“Air pollution is preventing my kids from fully enjoying their youth,” says Hernandez. “Instead of running and playing with their friends every day, bad air is forcing them inside and in front of the TV. I want cleaner air for them so they can do the things they love without having to worry about their health.”
That’s why Hernandez and her kids are taking the train today from Fresno to Sacramento—a three-hour trip—to testify at a public hearing being held by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on fine particle pollution, commonly called soot. Hernandez, a member of Latinos United for Clean Air (LUCA), is joining a diverse group of families, doctors, community leaders and public health advocates from across the state to call for the strongest possible limits on this deadly air pollutant.
Central Valley leaders need to plan better and work together on land and water use to improve the quality of life here, a study of California’s ag-centered interior concludes.
For “The State of the Great Central Valley” report on the environment, released Wednesday, changes over five years were analyzed by researchers at the Great Valley Center, based in Modesto, and the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced.
The air turned scary corrosive for two hours in Fresno last Thursday. Even in the San Joaquin Valley, where breathing bad air is a way of life, this was dangerous.
The ozone overload on a steamy, windless day was the highest in nearly two years. And it triggered a now-familiar debate.
How are we supposed to know when ozone is that high? Ozone is not like dust or smoke, which you can see and smell. By comparison, ozone is odorless and invisible.
Maria Herrera grew up in a farm worker family, moving from Michoacán to Orange Cove when she was three. Like many migrants, the family made a living picking fruit grown in the area’s orchards and fields, be they lemons, tomatoes, oranges or stone fruit.
As she grew older the family moved on to other tiny towns like Cutler, Orosi and Sultana along the foothills in Fresno and Tulare counties, and she joined in the picking on weekends and during summers, plucking olives to collect in buckets and helping in the grape harvest.
But while the Central Valley’s produce grows hearty under the hot sun, the laborers who get the product from orchard to processing plant face an unpleasant runoff from their very livelihood: The local groundwater that provides well water for drinking is heavily contaminated with nitrates, a poisonous byproduct of fertilizers and other agricultural sources.
In my mind, an elderly woman with degenerative heart disease sat in her living room in Lamont yesterday afternoon with the windows open and a swamp cooler pushing moist cool air through the room and out the open door. She felt very tired. She dozed off and died a few hours later. Her brain simply stopped getting the oxygen it needed because the few alveoli left in her lungs were red and swollen from the high levels of ozone pollution in the area.
Her death certificate does not list the cause of death as air pollution. In fact, there was not even a violation of any ozone standard recorded in the San Joaquin Valley yesterday.
Unfortunately, the air board removed the monitor in 2010 that would have warned people like this woman about the danger of having the windows open yesterday. Had she known about the ozone violation that was searing her lungs she could have turned on the air conditioner with the high tech filter her son had given her.
Hanford City Council members are expected Tuesday to recommend expanding a hazardous waste landfill near Kettleman City.
The Chemical Waste Management Inc.-run facility has divided the small, unincorporated community into those who say it is safe and those who fear that it harms the health of farmworkers living there.
Local residents — subject to diesel exhaust, pesticides, contaminated water and other environmental challenges — experienced an unexplained spike in birth defects from 2008-2009.
Luke Cole would have been 50 years old today. Luke pioneered environmental justice law. Luke was killed in June 2009, when a speeding truck slammed into his small jeep near the entrance to a national park in Uganda.
Southern California soon will begin sending sewage sludge into western Kings County — up to 500,000 tons a year to a piece of farmland the size of Clovis.
It’s the San Joaquin Valley’s newest mega-composting project, mixing treated human waste from 5.7 million people and woody debris from area farming.
The compost will be used as soil nutrient on scrubby land at Westlake Farms to help grow cotton, wheat, pomegranates, pistachios and other crops.
But make no mistake about this enterprise. The Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County — serving 78 cities, including Long Beach and Beverly Hills — bought 14,500 acres of farmland so there would be a place to send these pungent truckloads.