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A year after an environmental disaster in Texas, chemical company executives face charges

by PennyQuimby58 Posted on September 5, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hurricane Harvey struck southeast Texas last August with 130 mph winds and dumped more than 50 inches of rain across the region. In the aftermath of the second-costliest storm in recent American history, a Category 4 nightmare that left at least 88 Texans dead and forced thousands to flee into shelters, government agencies have finally begun reckoning with Harvey’s environmental cost. The storm contributed to the release of more than 8 million pounds of air pollution and more than 150 million gallons of wastewater.

Arguably no city was hit harder by the environmental devastation during the storm than Crosby, a 2.26-square-mile satellite of Houston with fewer than 3,000 residents. Chemicals left in refrigeration trailers at a plant owned by the multinational chemical manufacturer Arkema Inc. in the northeast part of town caught fire on August 31 and September 1, sending toxic clouds of smoke billowing into the air. More than 200 neighbors evacuated their homes, and 21 first responders sought medical treatment for the nausea, vomiting, and dizziness they experienced after exposure to the chemicals.

Along with hundreds of residents, those first responders have sued Arkema in a pair of class-action lawsuits for negligence, charging that the company did not properly safeguard its chemicals or inform the community of the “unreasonably dangerous condition” created by their release. Harris and Liberty counties have separately sued the company. Arkema has fiercely denied any wrongdoing, but now, a year after the disaster, its leaders may have more to worry about than fronting a huge payday for disgruntled residents.

On August 3, a Harris County grand jury indicted the company’s chief executive, Richard Rowe, and the Crosby plant’s manager, Leslie Comardelle, for “recklessly” releasing chemicals into the air and putting residents and emergency workers at risk. “Companies don’t make decisions, people do,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statement. “Responsibility for pursuing profit over the health of innocent people rests with the leadership of Arkema.”

“These criminal charges are astonishing,” Arkema responded in a statement. “At the end of its eight-month investigation, the Chemical Safety Board noted that Hurricane Harvey was the most significant rainfall event in U.S. history, an Act of God that never before has been seen in this country.”

The series of fires at Arkema’s plant were far from the only environmental disasters to hit southeast Texas in Harvey’s wake. Matt Tresaugue, who studies air quality issues at the Environmental Defense Fund, says Arkema barely even cracked his top 10 list. More serious, he argued, was the cumulative impact of several lesser-known incidents across the region. But fairly or not, Arkema remains, for many people, the most public example of executive malfeasance in the face of environmental calamity during Harvey. Companies like Valero and Chevron, among many others, were sued over their actions during the hurricane, but only Arkema’s executives face possible criminal penalties.

Arkema was certainly not the only entity at fault during the storm, but in its lack of preparedness and defiant defense of its actions, the company struck residents — and Harris County prosecutors — as eager to prioritize its profits over safety. The firm’s history did not help.

The year before Harvey, Arkema was slapped with a nearly $92,000 fine after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found 10 violations at the Crosby plant related to its handling of hazardous materials. Previous incidents, including the release of sulfuric acid in 1994 that left a 5-year-old girl with severe burns, led one Crosby resident to tell the Houston Chronicle she had “a bitter taste in [her] mouth about Arkema.”

Perhaps most troubling, Arkema has twice before faced civil penalties for improperly storing organic peroxides, the same chemicals that caught fire during Harvey. In 2006, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality cited the Crosby plant for releasing 3,200 pounds of pollutants because a “pallet of organic peroxide was stored inappropriately” and burned up. The state imposed a $20,300 penalty five years later, after finding that Arkema was not maintaining the proper temperature in the devices it used to decompose dangerous gases.

Arkema’s passionate defense of its behavior has led its representatives to quibble over relatively minor concerns. Janet Smith, a company spokesperson, responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones by first criticizing other media companies, such as the New York Times and CNN, for using the term “explosion” to describe what happened last August at the Crosby plant.“The flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey led to a series of short-lived fires at our Crosby plant, but there was no explosion,” she wrote in an email. “We have repeatedly pointed this out to news media covering the incident, but the inaccurate coverage persists.”

Even as residents have begun the process of returning home and paying off storm-related debts, many neighbors still do not know the long-term health effects of exposure to the toxic cloud, because federal investigators could not figure them out, according to a lengthy U.S. Chemical Safety Board report published in May.

The models Environmental Protection Agency staffers used to track how local air and water quality were being affected by the Arkema fires “did not reflect the nature of actual dispersions that occurred,” the CSB found. Combined with “other practical difficulties,” the EPA was unable to draw any firm conclusions about the health threats brought about by Arkema’s plant.

In its public statements soon after the disaster, the EPA was also not clear about the risks posed to residents who were soon forced to evacuate. After testing water samples near the Crosby plant, the EPA announced that the results “were less than the screening levels that would warrant further investigation.” The agency’s inspector general’s office said on August 2 it would investigate how the EPA responded to accidents during Harvey.

The Trump administration played a role, too. Under President Barack Obama, the EPA proposed a series of rules designed to strengthen industry’s reporting requirements to mitigate future chemical disasters. Known as the Chemical Disaster Rule, the proposal was opposed by companies like Arkema and indefinitely delayed once President Donald Trump’s first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, took office. Pruitt defended his reasoning after the Arkema fires by claiming that terrorists could have exploited the information chemical companies would have been forced to give up under the rule.“What you’ve got to do is strike the balance,” he said, “so that you’re not informing terrorists and helping them have data that they shouldn’t have.”

For now, at least, that rule has been restored. On August 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned the EPA’s decision to delay the rule. Calling the agency’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” the court ordered the EPA to let the rule remain until the agency amends its requirements by standard regulatory action. That ruling may only prove temporary given the Trump administration’s commitment to rolling back dozens of Obama-era environmental regulations.

Whether the Chemical Safety Board even exists the next time another environmental disaster occurs is an open question. Embattled former chair Rafael Moure-Eraso was the target of a series of congressional probes into his workplace conduct during a five-year tenure that ended in 2015. Since taking office, Trump has tried to eliminate the agency twice in the White House’s budget proposals, but Congress has restored full funding both times. The resulting uncertainty has impeded “the CSB’s ability to attract, hire, and retain staff,” according to a report from the EPA inspector general’s office in June.

Stopping the next Arkema disaster will require more stringent oversight from federal regulators and a willingness by industry leaders to pony up the cash for frequent safety evaluations and up-to-date equipment. With industry-friendly leaders at the helm of the EPA and a CSB clinging to life, those reforms do not appear likely anytime soon.

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A year after an environmental disaster in Texas, chemical company executives face charges

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California’s most vulnerable were already breathing bad air. Heat and wildfires are making things worse.

by TitusMaur96 Posted on August 28, 2018

Carey Poindexter has been checking the air quality before deciding whether it’s safe to go outside for much of his life. The 19-year-old has such severe asthma and allergies, doctors predicted that he wouldn’t live past the age of 10. His symptoms are usually more serious in the spring and winter, but this year, summer has been worse. With record-breaking heatwaves and wildfires raging nearby, Poindexter spent most of his summer inside.

Poindexter.

“It really has been pretty rough for people suffering from lung disease,” he says.

It’s been a punishing summer in California. But it’s worse for those who live in the most polluted areas, and as a result are already at heightened risk for respiratory diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). By exacerbating this summer’s heat waves and wildfires, climate change is stacking health burdens on communities already breathing bad air.

On Monday, California released a Climate Change Assessment detailing the mounting risks the state faces as the planet warms. Among the report’s findings: Forests will become even more susceptible to extreme wildfires. By mid-century, heat waves could occur four to 10 times more frequently and last two weeks longer, leading to more heat-related deaths and illnesses.

And those findings spell disaster for people who are already struggling to breathe amid this summer’s climate-driven calamities. Hot temperatures cause lungs to strain as the body tries to cool itself. Heat speeds up the formation of smog. And forest fires also add pollution to the air.

“It’s just a snowball effect,” says Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician and a national spokesperson of the American Lung Association. On top of the immediate health effects, climate change can exacerbate inequities that compound health risks, he adds.

If someone has limited resources and lives in a polluted area, “for them to open the window because they can’t afford air conditioning becomes a health dilemma,” El-Hasan points out.

Barbour.SCOPE

Olivia Barbour is a 67-year-old resident of South Los Angeles who lives with COPD. Her home is on Imperial Highway, near the busy 110 and 105 freeways. “I don’t know if anybody else notices, but I think it’s even hotter closer to the freeways with all that traffic and smog,” she says. And she’s right — urban areas with lots of pavement and cars are hotter than surrounding areas. “I thought I could help myself by buying a portable air conditioner. However, I can’t afford to run the darn thing,” Barbour says. She found that it increased her electricity bill by $20 after using it for just one day.

The heat is also affecting her ability to work. Barbour sometimes does outreach for green grassroots groups like SCOPE or gathers signatures for political campaigns. But she says she can’t door-knock this summer because of the heat. And that in turn has made it harder for her to afford the health care she needs. “I was supposed to be taking five nebulizer treatments every day to manage my COPD,” Barbour says. “I just can’t afford it. So I stopped.”

Poindexter lives in one of the counties with the worst air pollution in the nation. This year, Riverside County ranked second for the most ozone pollution and sixth for the most year-round particle pollution.

“It’s so bad to where if you just look outside, you can see a greyish horizon,” he says.

The smog he sees is made worse by rising temperatures. Ground-level ozone, the pollutant that makes up a majority of smog, is created by a chemical reaction between pollutants released by vehicles, power plants, and refineries. Those chemical reactions speed up when it’s hot out.

What effect does increased ozone have on your lungs? “It’s kind of like giving a sunburn to the lining of your lungs,” says pediatrician El-Hasan. “It’s very irritating.”

Poindexter wasn’t just scanning the horizon for smog, but for smoke, too.

The Holy and Keller fires came pretty close to Poindexter’s home in Temecula. He and his mother decided to take a cruise to Mexico to escape the smoke.

Still, Poindexter knows he and others with lung disease can’t always get away from poor air quality. He voted for the first time this year, and he voted for clean air. “Whether it’s a proposition or an elected official, the first thing I look at is what they’re going to do for air quality,” Poindexter says.

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California’s most vulnerable were already breathing bad air. Heat and wildfires are making things worse.

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A 1,000-year flood in Maryland shows the big problem with so much asphalt

by MargotStrahan Posted on June 5, 2018

The rain started to fall in Ellicott City, Maryland on the afternoon of May 27. Nearby tributaries of the Patapsco River were already dangerously swollen from last month’s steady precipitation. The storm intensified, and floodwaters soon tore through Ellicott City’s main street, submerging the first floors of buildings, sweeping away cars, and killing at least one person.

The storm was a so-called “1,000 year flood,” meaning it had a 0.1 percent chance of occurring this year. But this “exceptionally rare” event is deja vu for residents — they’re still picking up the pieces from a similar flood that destroyed the area back in July 2016.

After that big flood, Robin Holliday spent months rebuilding her business, HorseSpirit Arts Gallery. She didn’t expect a flood like that to happen again, but she also didn’t think the proposed watershed management plan was strong enough. Discouraged, she started to think about leaving. The recent flood solidified her decision.

So what’s behind the propensity for floods in Ellicott City? Part of the problem is its vulnerable location: the town lies at the foot of a hill where river branches meet the Patapsco River. And, of course, climate change makes storms wetter and increases the frequency of severe, record-breaking weather. But there’s another thing people are pointing out: concrete.

When hard, impermeable concrete replaces absorbent green spaces, it’s much easier for floodwaters to overwhelm stormwater drainage. “That’s what happened in Ellicott City,” says Marccus Hendricks, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images

In Ellicott City, development has flourished.

“Nearly one-third of the Tiber-Hudson sub-watershed that feeds into historic Ellicott City is now covered by roads, rooftops, sidewalks and other hard surfaces that don’t absorb water,” the Baltimore Sun wrote in 2016.

In a press release, the Sierra Club’s Maryland Chapter called for a stop to development in the Tiber-Hudson watershed: “We may not have control over severe weather events (except by fighting climate change), [but] we can take ownership over the role that development played in this disaster.”

At a recent press conference, a local county official said that Howard County, home to Ellicott City, has been taking steps to prepare for more floods.

“We’re focusing on making sure that what has been approved is being done by the code and by law, making sure that stormwater regulations are being abided by,” said Allan Kittleman, the Howard County executive. Since the flood in 2016, he said the county has designed and engineered more stormwater retention facilities, but larger projects will take time.

This is far from the first time that development and asphalt have had a violent run-in with climate change. Last summer, Hurricane Harvey drenched sprawling Houston with trillions of gallons of water and caused $125 billion in damage. The area saw a 25 percent increase in paved surfaces between 1996 and 2011, according to Texas A&M professor Samuel Brody. Brody found that every square meter of Houston’s pavement cost about $4,000 more in flood damage.

And, rapidly developing or not, our cities are full of these paved surfaces. In the majority of the country, surfaces like pavement or brick make up just 1 percent of the land. Yet in cities, hardscapes account for upwards of 40 percent of land area.

Environmental change coupled with development will likely make this issue one of major national importance, Brody tells Grist.

“Every week, there’s some urbanized area that floods. We look up and say, ‘Oh that’s never happened before and it’s never going to happen again.’ But if you look at the big picture, it’s happening all the time with increasing severity.”

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A 1,000-year flood in Maryland shows the big problem with so much asphalt

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America’s fastest-growing urban area is stuck between a rock and a dry place

by jaunitarestrepo Posted on May 26, 2018

This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Latter-day Saint migrants arrived in Utah in 1847, a verse in Isaiah served as consolation to them in the desiccated landscape: “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”

Lately, the desert has blossomed nowhere more than the St. George area, in the state’s southern reaches. The city is a picturesque outpost, with red-rock desert framing bright green lawns and golf courses, all built around the stark white Mormon temple in the center of town.

Brigham Young’s adherents came here to grow crops, primarily cotton — hence its reputation as Utah’s Dixie. Today, that ceaseless sunshine is luring so many tourists, retirees, and students that St. George has become the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country. According to Census Bureau data released in March, the metro, home to 165,000 people, grew 4 percent between 2016 and 2017.

“Six million people visit the area every year. As people visit here, some of them decide to stay,” St. George Mayor Jon Pike said. The area remains a retirement community, “but we also have 33,000 students K through 12, and we have a fast-growing university [Dixie State University].” Healthcare is a booming industry, and, like many growing cities, St. George has a section of town earmarked for tech companies. Mixed-use developments are popping up downtown. The growth likely won’t slow any time soon: State demographers believe the area will surpass 500,000 residents by 2065.

As is the case with other growing desert burgs, St. George grapples with water-supply issues. But the challenge here is unique. Remarkably cheap rates mean that residents of an area with only eight inches of annual rainfall are using tremendous amounts of water. An average St. George resident uses more than twice as much water as the average citizen of Los Angeles.

Political leaders at the state and local level view this primarily as a supply issue. Their preferred solution is a gargantuan $1.4 billion pipeline that would connect the region with Lake Powell, a reservoir along the Colorado River. With the aid of pumping stations, the pipeline would shuttle water over 140 miles and 2,000 feet of elevation gain. The goal is to store 86,000 acre-feet a year in nearby reservoirs and aquifers — more than enough, officials say, to meet the demand of the growing population and decrease reliance on the dwindling Virgin River, currently Washington County’s primary water source.

“We certainly are committed to conservation, but we don’t think that gets you there alone, especially with the organic growth and the tremendous in-migration that’s occurring in the Southwest,” said Ronald Thompson, general manager of the Washington County Water Conservancy District, the wholesaler that supplies water to St. George and other cities in the county.

In 2006, the state legislature passed a bill to fund the Lake Powell project, but construction has been delayed since then by stop-and-go planning (at this point, pipeline approval is on hold due to uncertainty about which federal agency has jurisdiction over the project).

Multiple state and regional environmental groups say the pipeline is far too aggressive, and that basic conservation measures can meet the region’s water demand. Amelia Nuding, senior water analyst for Western Resource Advocates, believes regional leaders should focus on three strategies to achieve quick conservation success: better data collection, higher water rates, and building codes that require water-smart construction and landscaping. Not only would that meet St. George’s water needs, according to Nuding’s group, but it would avoid further depleting an already burdened Colorado River.

Utah typically uses less than its allotted share of Colorado River water, which is divvied up among Western states, but climate change and growing populations are taxing relations among the river’s interstate constituents. “Yes, [Utah residents] are legally entitled to that water from the Colorado River,” Nuding said. “But … I think that we should meet certain metrics of water stewardship before further depleting the Colorado River.”

Leaders have, for the most part, ignored environmentalists’ suggestions. Water-use data in Utah is scant; until recently, statewide water surveys took place only every five years. In 2010 — the latest state data available — the St. George region’s per-capita consumption was 325 gallons per day. More current numbers from the city suggest conservation; St. George proper uses 250 gallons per person per day. Nonetheless, it’s still consuming more water than other Southwest cities. Las Vegas takes about 220 gallons per person each day; Tucson, considered a regional leader, uses 120.

Water rates here don’t punish heavy use. A St. George household that goes through 16,000 gallons a month would see a $47 water bill; equivalent usage would cost a Tucson household $184. Washington County Water Conservancy District is in the process of raising rates 5 to 10 percent each year until baseline rates are tripled, but even then, they would be a bargain compared to some cities.

Utah’s water-delivery systems are largely gravity-fed, thus keeping costs down, and most homeowners have access to unmetered non-potable water for landscaping and irrigation. This, plus state oversight of water rates, keeps the rates low — and consumption high.

Any major reduction in consumption here will require a cultural shift. St. George is marketed as a desert oasis. Nine golf courses are located in the region, and it remains an agricultural stronghold. Local municipalities offer basic water-conservation rebates — St. George, for instance, helps cover the cost of replacing high-flow toilets — but nothing at the level of cities that, for instance, pay residents to replace sod with desert-appropriate landscaping.

Mayor Pike heralded developers who are voluntarily choosing water-smart appliances and landscaping, and cited the planned Desert Color community as an example. But that project’s water-wise cred has been questioned: Its centerpiece is an 18-acre artificial pond.

That said, St. George’s growth could inherently promote efficiencies. Apartment and townhouse construction is finally catching up with demand, which will keep some new residents from the sprawling single-family homes and yards that guzzle so much water. A good deal of new construction will take place on agricultural land where water is already allocated.

But per-person efficiency doesn’t mean less water use overall. Every St. George resident could cut her water use in half, but if the population more than doubles, the city is still using more water. Such is the conundrum of desert growth. “We’d be wise to diversify our sources,” Pike said. “If the Powell pipeline isn’t built, that would change things. … It would slow growth.”

Constructing the pipeline, oddly enough, might trigger cost increases that could curtail water use. While the state would cover the pipeline’s initial costs, locals are on the hook in the long run. In a letter to Utah’s governor, economists at state universities said that water rates would have to jump sixfold for the region to meet its repayment obligations. “Of course, increasing water rates this much would significantly decrease Washington County residents’ demand for water,” the economists wrote. “In our analysis, demand decreased so much that the [Lake Powell pipeline] water would go unused.”

If rates are going up anyway, conservation advocates think the pipeline talk is occurring too soon. “Why don’t they just try [raising rates] now, and see how much demand changes?” Nuding said. “From a water-management perspective, that makes all the sense in the world.”

In this blossoming desert city, leaders have a choice: Do they let the roses go brown, or pay exorbitantly to keep them?

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America’s fastest-growing urban area is stuck between a rock and a dry place

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Saving Tarboo Creek – Scott Freeman

by Myrna Posted on May 1, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Saving Tarboo Creek
One Family’s Quest to Heal the Land
Scott Freeman

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 24, 2018

Publisher: Timber Press

Seller: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.


“A moving account of a beautiful project. We need stories of healing in this tough moment; this is a particularly fine one.” —Bill McKibben, author of  Radio Free Vermont When the Freeman family decided to restore a damaged creek in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula—to transform it from a drainage ditch into a stream that could again nurture salmon— they knew the task would be formidable and the rewards plentiful. In Saving Tarboo Creek , Scott Freeman artfully blends his family’s story with powerful universal lessons about how we can all live more constructive, fulfilling, and natural lives by engaging with the land rather than exploiting it. Equal parts heartfelt and empowering, this book explores how we can all make a difference one choice at a time. In the proud tradition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac , Saving Tarboo Creek is both a timely tribute to our land and a bold challenge to protect it. 

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Saving Tarboo Creek – Scott Freeman

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Fracking harms the health of babies, study shows

by stuart1952 Posted on December 14, 2017

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The practice of drilling into the ground to release natural gas — known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking — first made national headlines in 2011 when drinking water taps in fracking towns in Pennsylvania began catching fire because flammable methane was seeping into water supplies.

Since then, fracking has been linked to earthquakes in Oklahoma and a myriad of health issues. Proponents of fracking say the practice has reduced energy costs and has created thousands of jobs. But environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, say that for people living near sites, fracking can have severe health affects such as respiratory illnesses and cancer.

A new study from the journal Science Advances found that infants born to women living near fracking sites in Pennsylvania were especially vulnerable to adverse health outcomes. “As local and state policymakers decide whether to allow hydraulic fracturing in their communities, it is crucial that they carefully examine the costs and benefits,” said Michael Greenstone, a coauthor of the study and the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, in a press release. “This study provides the strongest large-scale evidence of a link between the pollution that stems from hydraulic fracturing activities and … the health of babies.”

The researchers analyzed vital statistics of more than 1.1 million births in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2013. They studied infants born to women living 1 kilometer (or slightly over half a mile) away from fracking sites, as well as women living within 3 kilometers (or less than 2 miles), and women living between 3 to 15 kilometers (or less than 2 miles to 9 miles) away.

They found that fracking reduces the health of infants born to mothers living within 3 kilometers from a fracking site. But for mothers living within 1 kilometer, the affects were acute. The probability of low infant birth weight, meaning the infant weighs less than 5.5 pounds, increased to 25 percent.

Studies show that low birth weight can lead to infant mortality, asthma, lower test scores while school-age, and lower earnings as adults. The study also found that mothers whose babies may have been exposed to nearby fracking sites tend to be younger, less educated, and less likely to be married — factors that can also lead to poor infant health.

But there are significant differences between the mothers who give birth close to fracking sites and those who don’t. Black mothers included in the study were more likely to live nearest to fracking sites, exposing their infants to higher risks of pollution. “This difference arises because over time, more wells were drilled near urban areas such as Pittsburgh, where higher numbers of African Americans live,” the authors wrote. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, has 63 active fracking wells. Many other fracking sites are located in lower-income communities.

Nationwide, between July 2012 and June 2013, as many as 65,000 infants were exposed to pollution from fracking, because their mothers lived within 1 kilometer of a fracking site.

“Given the growing evidence that pollution affects babies in utero,” said coauthor Janet Currie, who is a economics and public affairs professor at Princeton University, “it should not be surprising that fracking has negative effects on infants.”

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Fracking harms the health of babies, study shows

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The Bay Area samples what life is like in Asian megacities — and for some of its own residents

by LakeshaWong Posted on October 13, 2017

As you might have heard, those of us who live in the Bay Area are breathing air this week that rivals Beijing’s, thanks to the fires raging across Northern California. West Oakland deals with bad air quality all the time, so I reached out to some folks there seeking perspective.

Margaret Gordon, a local grassroots activist, suggested I talk to Eryk Maundu. He’s a techie-turned-urban farmer who takes a data-driven approach to agriculture, and he had an inkling before most of us that something very bad was happening to the Bay Area’s air.

Just last week, he put up some new air quality sensors around his food plots. They registered a huge spike in contamination levels on Sunday night — three times worse than when he had tested the sensors around some friends who smoke. “I never thought I’d see it go higher than that,” he told me.

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Maundu thought he might have to throw the sensors out, until news broke Monday morning of wildfires tearing through Napa and Sonoma counties, about 50 miles north of San Francisco. Within the next few days, all of us in the Bay Area could see the same thing Maundu’s sensors were telling him: Our air was unhealthy to breath.

“The numbers are off the charts,” says Walter Wallace with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The big health concern: Particulate matter carried by the smoke sticks to our lungs and can cause breathing and other health problems. “It’s so small that our bodies can’t defend against it.”

Suddenly, everyone in the region is getting double dose of what the air is like in parts of West Oakland, where one of the country’s busiest ports brings in a steady stream of truck traffic, nearby highways ferry tens of thousands of cars every day, and asthma rates are some of the highest in the state. On Thursday, the air quality throughout Oakland was second-worst in the nation behind Napa, where fires raged.

NASA Earth Observatory

More than 20 blazes consumed more than 200,000 acres of land statewide, largely north of the Bay Area, where at last count 31 people have died, close to 500 are missing, and 90,000 have been displaced. The largest of the fires, the so-called Tubbs fire, which is primarily raging in Sonoma County, was just 25-percent contained as of Friday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The fires have destroyed homes and businesses in the region north of San Francisco often called “wine country.” In the Bay Area — which includes Oakland, where I live — we have been told to stay indoors. It’s a tall order in a part of the country where the predictable weather and the natural beauty begs residents to be outside. And our current predicament may continue through this weekend.

Anthony LeRoy Westerling, an environmental engineering professor at the University of California, Merced, says that wildfires are bigger, more frequent, and burn for longer now than they did in the 1980s. You’ll never guess what Westerling concludes is behind this phenomenon: A warmer climate that dries out forests. And more fires means more destruction where they burn and more intolerable air downwind.

The smoke blowing into the Bay Area has prompted a run on 3M N95 Particulate Respirator masks and air purifiers. Many who have the means have taken spontaneous road trips south or east to flee the particulate matter readings hovering around five times normal. Others are reporting headaches and respiratory problems. I suffered from childhood asthma, and spending about 10 minutes outside without a mask, breathing in air that smells like a campfire, made my lungs feel heavy.

All of this sent me to the Ace Hardware on 3rd St and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in West Oakland, where I joined a flow of customers buying N95 masks that sold for $2 a piece (I bought 12). The store has sold tens of thousands of masks in the past few days, struggling to try to keep up with demand.

“Yesterday morning was the big push, and then today has been even bigger,” the store’s general manager, Brian Altwarg, told me on Thursday. “And from what I see on the news, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

Florine Mims has lived in the area for nearly 60 years, and she arrived at the Ace around 2 pm on Thursday, riding and then pushing her electric wheelchair after its battery lost its charge. She has a number of health problems, including asthma, and hoped getting a mask would bring her some relief.

“They gave me two,” she says about the N95 masks she carried out of the store. “I’m hoping they’ll help me breathe better.”

Mims, and a significant percentage of West Oakland residents, are the group most at risk over the remaining days if fire containment, a change in wind direction, or rainfall doesn’t help clear out the noxious air, says John Balmes, a medical doctor and environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“A week of exposure to this level, it’s going to affect people with preexisting asthma, but it won’t cause their asthma to stay bad,” Balmes says. “They have bad pollution all the time in a lot of the megacities in Asia.”

While the regular air quality readings in West Oakland don’t quite rival those in places like Beijing or New Delhi, its residents are used to living with pollution. The community recently filed a federal civil rights complaint against the port of Oakland and the city for discriminating against the largely black part of town by allowing more development to creep into the area and ignoring pleas to monitor air quality.

For now, though, the experience of breathing in dirty air is a shared burden for people in the Bay Area. And that’s an irony that isn’t lost on those living in West Oakland, like Margaret Gordon.

“This whole thing with the fire was a real equalizer for everybody,” she says.

Source – 

The Bay Area samples what life is like in Asian megacities — and for some of its own residents

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‘Diablo Winds’ spark historic wildfires in California wine country

by JerrellLarcombe Posted on October 9, 2017

This post has been updated to include revised figures on the number of fires and death toll. 

It’s peak wildfire season in California, and Monday was one of the worst days in state history. More than 60 blazes are currently underway statewide.

At least a dozen wildfires sprung up Sunday night in and around Napa and Sonoma counties—also known as “wine country,” just north of San Francisco — prompting rushed evacuations of more than 20,000 people. In an attempt to speed the flow of relief and firefighting equipment and make the National Guard available, Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency.

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The Northern California firestorm has quickly burned nearly 100,000 acres, and is encroaching on neighborhoods in several places. At around 3 a.m. Monday, a Cal Fire official told a local television station that there was “no hope of containment right now.”

In total, the fires have killed 13 people and destroyed more than 1,500 structures as of Tuesday morning, making them some of the most destructive in state history. More than 100 people have been treated for burns and smoke inhalation at regional hospitals, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and more than 150 people are still missing. Nationwide, this year’s fire season has cost more than $2 billion, the most expensive on record.

Smoke from the fires is visible from across the Bay Area, with many residents reporting the smell of smoke and even ashes falling from the sky. The National Weather Service says that winds at higher elevations in some parts of Sonoma County exceeded hurricane force, with several areas reporting gusts greater than 50 mph.

Several of the worst wildfires in California history have sprung up during October, near the end of California’s months-long dry season. It’s this time of year when a combination of strong offshore winds and low humidity can quickly fan a seemingly innocent spark into a raging inferno.

These winds are usually formed by a strong inland high pressure center, which pushes air down mountainsides and through canyons, causing it to warm up and dry out — a perfect environment for fast-growing fires. In Northern California, they are generally called “Diablo winds,” after Mt. Diablo in the eastern Bay Area. A 2015 study said that climate change is making these wind events more frequent and more severe in California. According to the Bay Area branch of the National Weather Service, conditions will begin to improve starting on Tuesday morning.

One particularly frightening fire in Northern California, the Tubbs fire near Santa Rosa, jumped the 101 freeway, forcing a hospital to evacuate its patients. Officials report evacuation centers that have been set up have already filled to capacity. Aerial images of Santa Rosa on Monday showed widespread devastation of entire neighborhoods.

“People are running red lights, there is chaos ensuing,” Santa Rosa resident Ron Dodds told a local television station. “It’s a scary time. It looks like Armageddon.”

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‘Diablo Winds’ spark historic wildfires in California wine country

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Harvey’s record rains just triggered Houston dams to overflow

by caringk63 Posted on August 29, 2017

In 1935, a storm swept through Houston, turning parts of the city into a lake. It was a wake-up call to city officials; they needed to get serious about flood control. About a decade later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finished building two massive reservoirs west and upstream of the city. For the better part of a century, the Addicks and Barker dams have held back water that would have otherwise surged through Buffalo Bayou, the flood-prone waterway that snakes through downtown Houston before dumping into the Ship Channel.

This week, for the second time in as many years, a storm has pushed the Addicks and Barker dams to their limit. Early Monday morning, as Tropical Storm Harvey lingered over Houston and drowned whole swaths of the city, the Army Corps of Engineers began controlled releases from the dams, the first time they’ve done so during a major storm. By Monday afternoon, several neighborhoods near the reservoirs were under voluntary or mandatory evacuation as officials announced that releases from Addicks and Barker would continue for the foreseeable future. By early Tuesday morning, Addicks had topped the dam’s 108-foot spillway, leading to what officials call “uncontrolled releases” from the reservoir. Some homes could be inundated for a month.

Harris County Flood Control District meteorologist Jeff Linder called the releases the least-worst decision officials could make in light of floodwaters that continue to fill the reservoirs faster than they can safely drain. “If you are upstream of the reservoir, the worst is not over,” Linder said at a Monday afternoon press conference, warning that “water is going to be inundating areas that have currently not been inundated.” When someone asked him, via Twitter, whether the dams could break and trigger a Katrina-like disaster, Linder offered a one-word response: “No.”

That assurance comes despite the Corps of Engineers labeling the dams an “extremely high risk of catastrophic failure” after a 2009 storm that saw only a fraction of the rain Harvey poured on Houston this week. Officials insist that the hair-raising label has more to do with the breathtaking consequences of any major dam failure upstream of the country’s fourth-largest city than the actual likelihood of such a breach. In 2012, they detailed how a dam failure during a major storm would cause a multi-billion dollar disaster that turns the city into Waterworld.

Still, the Corps in recent years has implemented only piecemeal fixes to the earthen dams, including a $75 million upgrade that was underway before Harvey hit this weekend. Officials are barely even discussing how to fund a third reservoir that some experts say the region desperately needs.

This is the second year in a row that severe floodwaters have tested Addicks and Barker. Just last year, during 2016’s so-called Tax Day Flood, for the first time, the reservoirs hit and surpassed the level of a 100-year flood. That happened again this weekend, meaning the dams have seen two extremely rare flood events (at least one-in-a-100-year events) in just as many years. Last year was also the first time the National Weather Service ever issued a flood warning for the Addicks and Barker watersheds.

The dams are in some ways emblematic of how flood planning in the Bayou City hasn’t kept up with the region’s booming population and development, even as experts predict that climate change will dump increasingly severe storms on Houston’s doorstep with greater frequency. They were built in a region of water-absorbing prairie grasses that have in recent years been paved over by water-impermeable parking lots, driveways and suburban streets. The Sierra Club even sued the Corps in a failed attempt to stop construction on a nearby stretch of the Grand Parkway, a major toll road project that some opposed fearing it would coax development in an area that’s critical to the region’s flood control efforts.

Still, as the Texas Tribune and ProPublica pointed out in this 2016 investigation, Houston-area flood officials refuse to connect the region’s flooding problems to poorly planned development. As a result, every year people will keep building hundreds, if not thousands, of additional structures in Harris County’s 100-year floodplains, even as those “rare” storms start to hit year after year.

In a Monday press conference, Edmond Russo, an engineer with the Corps’ Galveston district, said officials wanted to keep high water from building up and going over the Addicks and Barker spillways, “because in that case, we do not have control over the water.” He’d hoped releases would stay low enough so that the already overtaxed Buffalo Bayou stays at the same level in the short term. In the long term, officials say it could take one to three months to totally drain the reservoirs.

Of course, that all depends on what happens in the coming days. Updating reporters on the reservoirs’ status Monday evening, Linder said more heavy rainfall or levee breaches upstream could change how fast the dams must release water downstream.

“Our infrastructure is certainly being tested to its limits,” Linder said.

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Harvey’s record rains just triggered Houston dams to overflow

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Sorry, Donald: Pittsburgh Thinks You Are Wrong About Climate Change

by HymanLeist Posted on June 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, President Donald Trump portrayed his decision to pull the United States out of the historic Paris climate deal as a key part of his campaign pledge to put America first. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” the president said.

There’s just one problem: The citizens of Pittsburgh are strongly supportive of climate action. According to a recent study from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 68 percent of adults in the Pittsburgh metro area support strict limits on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants—a key element of the US commitment under the Paris deal. For Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, that number is 74 percent. For Pennsylvania’s 14th Congressional District, which also includes Pittsburgh, it’s 78 percent.

Roughly two-thirds of Pennsylvanians—and Americans as a whole—believe the United States should remain in the Paris agreement, according to the Yale research.

There doesn’t appear to be any data on the popularity of the Paris agreement within Pittsburgh itself, but it’s worth noting that the city’s mayor, Bill Peduto, actually traveled to Paris during the 2015 negotiations to help press for an agreement. “Pittsburgh and other cities are on the front lines of the climate change crisis, and it is our responsibility to address the deep challenges it is creating for us, our children and our grandchildren,” he said in a statement at the time, according to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.

Peduto took to Twitter Thursday to express his displeasure with Trump’s comments:

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Sorry, Donald: Pittsburgh Thinks You Are Wrong About Climate Change

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