FAILING THE PARTICLE BOARD REVIEW Levels of soot in Houston now exceed the EPA’s longstanding annual limit: “The area of concern is along the Ship Channel, the only place in Texas where levels of the tiny particles surpassed the EPA’s annual limit from 2006 to 2008, according to the most recent data available. The agency uses a three-year average to determine whether an area is in compliance. Monitoring shows air near the Ship Channel is getting cleaner, thanks in part to new rules for idling trucks and the paving of gravel parking lots. But EPA and local officials don’t know whether the improvements will be enough to drop the rolling average below the annual limit of 15 micrograms per cubic liter of air, since that average includes higher 2006 levels.” [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot]
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What bothers me about this is that the majority of the region that doesn’t exceed the pollutant level gets branded as having horrible air because of one location.
Couldn’t the EPA use a neighboring agency (say the Census) to isolate the polluted areas by census tract or zip code? The NWS now does this for storm warnings versus blanketing one or more counties at a one time for an isolated storm that crosses county lines.
And I thought this was going to be about condos built with particle board! LOL!
My understanding is that there’s an insane amount of pollution caused by the ships docking along the ship channel. They can burn whatever fuel they want, so they burn cheapest, nastiest, dirty burning diesel fuel they can buy.
Gulf Coast ports need to get together and pass some laws like they have in California where ships are required to switch to cleaner burning diesel when they get within 100 miles or so of the shore.
The Port is huge job creator in the Houston area, but most of the economic value of the goods passing through the Port flow to the producers and consumers of the goods who are located hundreds or thousands of miles from Houston. Houstonians should not have to sacrifice their health to subsidize outside business interests. Clean the ships now!!!!!!!!
My understanding is that there’s an insane amount of pollution caused by the ships docking along the ship channel. They can burn whatever fuel they want, so they burn cheapest, nastiest, dirty burning diesel fuel they can buy.
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Actually, they burn fuels known variously as resid, heavy fuel or bunker fuel. Diesel is often part of the mixture, but much of it comes from the heavier parts of the petroleum as they are separated out in the distilling process. These tend to be the longer and more complex hydrocarbon molecules, and thus the most polluting. Diesel would be a vast improvement, pollution-wise.
kjb is spot on about the whole region being branded as polluted on account of a very narrowly-defined geographic area. And in the case of the ship channel pollution, the toxicity of the emissions declines geometrically relative to distance from a source point. With a handful of exceptions, our residential neighborhoods are pretty well geographically removed from the highest concentrations of source points.
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This is very different from places like Chicago (where numerous source points are scattered among urban neighborhoods), LA (where mountainous geography works against them), or Atlanta (where wind patterns frequently are insufficient to disperse the pollution).
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Not that anybody actually planned for the Houston area to be laid out with residential areas mostly-removed from heavy industry or for such a massive amount of pollution to be generated in a region with favorable geography and meterological conditions, but we certainly happen to have gotten the long end of the stick in numerous ways.