A Fresno-based health group and environmental advocates are asking the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to come up with a tougher plan to scour the smog from the San Joaquin Valley’s air.
Federal law set a limit on the amount of ozone emissions allowed during a one-hour period and required that the Valley attain the standard by November 2010. If the Valley failed to attain the standard, EPA and the local air district were supposed to develop a new plan to achieve prompt compliance with the one-hour ozone standard.
News
This page features excerpts from news about environmental justice advocacy in the San Joaquin Valley and links to their original sources. Use the features on the right to sort by topic, news source, date, key word or author. You may also subscribe to receive the news by e-mail or through an rss reader. Please note that links to original sources may expire over time.
In the ongoing campaign to clean up the air in California’s San Joaquin Valley, health and environmental advocates have returned to federal court to seek enforcement of the Clean Air Act. This latest action challenges the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) refusal to come up with a new plan to protect residents of the San Joaquin Valley from harmful ozone pollution.
A few weeks ago, the state told me there’s no regulation of a dangerous chemical in the San Joaquin Valley’s drinking water because the chemical can’t be detected at very low levels.
It sounded plausible but still a little crazy. Turns out, it’s not completely true.
The California Department of Public Health can detect very low levels of the chemical — 1,2,3-trichloropropane or TCP, which is linked to cancer. The state is still testing the detection method, so it isn’t being used officially yet.
The New York Times published a story this week about air pollution that San Joaquin Valley residents know very well — tiny specks that form when vehicle emissions mingle with organic particles.
The Valley’s winter-time plumes happen when ammonia from dairies combines with oxides of nitrogen from vehicles. It’s called ammonium nitrate, and it’s not new.
After a horrendous ozone season, where several monitors recorded more violations than preceding years, the Air Board scrambled to lessen the damage. The Air Board hates to see air pollution levels rising above previous year’s levels because it shows the public they are not doing their job.
I wrote that a possible cancer-causing chemical found in Valley drinking water could not be detected well enough to be regulated by the state.
A lawyer who is involved in the lawsuits against the manufacturers of the chemical says it can be accurately detected. His clients — water companies — can do it, he says.
So I asked the California Department of Public Health again about any advanced methods of monitoring the chemical 1,2,3-trichloropropane or TCP — which has been found in the water of Clovis, Fresno and many other cities.
The Public Health Goal for TCP is .7 parts per trillion — an incredibly small concentration because this chemical is so powerful.
CDPH indeed does have a way to detect TCP.
When Josie Nieto visits her relatives in Mexicali, Mexico, she luxuriates in long showers. And when she’s thirsty, she enjoys a glass of water straight from the kitchen tap. At Nieto’s own house, the water pressure is so low it can take her 45 minutes to shower and shampoo. And sometimes there’s no water at all, which is why some of her neighbors hoard water in buckets. It’s fine for laundry and houseplants, but Nieto isn’t keen on drinking the stuff.
As California’s attempt to curb climate-changing greenhouse gases ramps up, critical pieces of the landmark law remain uncertain, including the impact of the all-important auctions of hundreds of millions of so-called “emission allowances” that will serve as the spur for utilities, refiners and others to comply.
Over the next eight years, the quarterly auctions by some estimates are projected to raise between $8 billion and $41 billion, with the money going to everything from helping balancing the state budget to promoting the virtues of clean energy to giving breaks to millions of residential and commercial electricity customers.
In Lebec, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, there are two basic problems with air quality. One, the community sits in a valley next to Interstate 5 where thousands of diesel trucks pass by daily. Two, the air pollution which builds up around Bakersfield drifts up through the Grapevine into the Lebec area. Of particular concern is the location of the Tejon Middle School which sits adjacent to the freeway with only a chainlink fence blocking the diesel emissions from the playground.
In this video you can watch some of the monitoring efforts and hear some of the concerns of the Tri-Valley Watchdogs as they try to determine the extent of their air quality problem.
The whole Kern River oil field is fracked. Here, under the Panorama Bluffs, the public can see the operations up close. Bakersfield College is a quarter mile away from these scenes.