Good Neighbor Agreement

Many of you were in the room last May, at the public hearing on the statewide air toxics benchmarks, when Vice-Chair Williamson, of the state's Environmental Quality Commission, advised citizens that the most effective means of fighting a large local source of pollution was a "Good Neighbor Agreement."


My husband remarked that Williamson was just being honest, offering the kind of advice that your friendly college advisor might to help you deal with a particularly onerous prof threatening to fail you.


But Williamson isn't just a wizened observer.  He is vice-chair of the state's rule-making body for the Department of Environmental Quality. He can, and in fact should, see that if the state environmental regulations are ineffective in protecting public health, he and the others serving on the EQC have a mandate to change that. 


And, his advice falls flat for another reason, despite his statement GNA's are neighbor's "best" option, there are few, if any, success stories in Oregon.  So how is it that the state tells us our best recourse is one that has yet to prove itself attainable?


We are well on our way to a GNA with ESCO, I believe.  Without a formal legal contract between neighbors and the company (which is rare with GNA's in any case), many of the tenants of a GNA are being met:  meetings which bring neighbor representatives concerns into the internal discussion regarding pollution mitigation and increased transparency in discussing options and sharing information. With the first draft of ESCO's alternatives analysis on the table, the community is getting its best shot in years to consider what might be possible in the effort to reduce emissions.


The problem is that ESCO is just one of the 19 Title V permitted facilities in the city, one of hundreds of industrial air polluters, including 7 other steel processing facilities and 8 petroleum companies. According to a study published by USA Today, nearly all of our neighborhoods are affected by large sources of toxic air pollution, ranking 233 of Portland's 250 school in the bottom third of the nation due to exposure to dangerous industrial air toxics. There has to be a better way.  Sustaining the citizen involvement necessary for these efforts takes tremendous amount of resources to balance the scale of the financial means of those who will fight any type of pollution reduction effort at every turn.


I stumbled across an interesting third way, that is something other than direct citizen negotiation and dreaming for the time when stringent environmental regulations are enacted and enforced. In July 2008, the then outgoing mayor of Houston TX, sick of decades of inadequate environmental regulation that failed to stem the poisonous tide of air pollution in his city, took matters into his own hands.


In an essay written for the Texas Law Review, Ryan Hackney argues that Houston Mayor Bill White effectively substantiates his authority when he enacted an ordinance that gave the City of Houston broad powers to register and inspect polluting facilities within the City.  Hackney says: "local government may be the level of government that can address air pollution problems most effectively. When a state agency fails to take sufficient action to protect local populations from air pollution, the local government may be the only entity that can take effective action."


I am not advocating yet that our city take over the regulatory authority of large industrial polluters, or do what Houston's Mayor did in enacting a parallel matrix of permits, but I think there is a tremendous amount of room for the city to take a more active role in direct discussions with industry and their representatives to move pollution mitigation efforts beyond the current regulatory framework.  The city can exert influence in building permits, zoning, transportation infrastructure decisions, to ensure that equitable pollution reduction efforts are realized across the city.  In the interest of ensuring equitable livability standards for all residents, the city, could ask that air pollution sources be required to do environmental health impact analysis and monitoring so that citizen' right to know is protected, and everyone can understand what the local impact might be from the regulated sources of  air pollution in our city. Finally, the city can be part of enforcing nuisance ordinances and emergency response preparation, two areas where specifically the state fails to adequately provide timely and effective responses to upsets involving air polluters.


Air pollution problems are inherently local, the worst of them manifesting in "Toxic Hot Spots." Yet this is specifically the area where the Clean Air Act and the state regulatory framework has failed to protect citizens.  Ozone and smog are primarily the problems of cities, where sufficient concentrations of vehicles and industry can emit enough oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to create hazardous conditions. Likewise, toxic emissions are primarily an urban problem where industrial operations and residential populations exist in close proximity. Health experts are devoting increasing attention to the issue of toxic hot spots - highly localized areas of acute or prolonged toxic exposure. A January 2007 study by the University of Texas Health Science Center found a 56% elevated risk of acute lymphocytic leukemia among children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel.


Thanks to the hard work of citizen action groups like Environmental Working Group, Center for Health, Environmental and Justice, and Earth Justice, I am heartened to see new vigor brought to the federal debate around toxics and better enforcement of the the Clean Air Act after eight stagnant years under Bush. It seems that this should be accompanied with an honest discussion of preempting some of the state's authority, where it is so failing its mandate to protect public health, and transferring it into the hands of those closer to the problems.    If direct citizen negotiation is still considered the most effective means of addressing local toxic hot spots, citizens need stronger public advocates to work on their behalf. Portland should look to the spirit of what the Houston Mayor did, which was to say, the city is the best entity to look out for the equitable protection of all its citizens and should be creative in its ideas of how to engage on the issue.

Tank Farms: Grandpa must die

At the heart of the tank farm issue is the reality that a new tank, like the one operated by Chevron that was installed in 2007, emits half the deadly pollution than an older storage tank does, according to permit writer George Yun. The idea that some tanks are "grandfathered" in with allowable excess emissions rates makes no sense when regulating something as deadly as benzene emissions. Reasonable people would assume that there would be time limits explicitly stated for how long they may continue to operate with outdated dangerous  technology.  “Grandfathering” by its nature should guarantee that an end is imminent, it should not be a state of perpetual life support for old and deadly operations.

Thanks to the research of Cascadia Times' Paul Koberstein, we know the Northwest Industrial Sanctuary is home to 536 petroleum storage tanks with a 300+ million gallon capacity, and combined are responsible for spewing 1,392 tons of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) into our air shed. The majority of the tanks are old, between 40 and 100-yrs old. Due to the high public health threat of emissions associated with petro chemicals, including benzene a toxicant linked to leukemia, which has been identified at levels above health benchmarks across the entire Portland metro air shed, all storage tanks with the potential to emit this know carcinogen should be held to the strictest emissions standards, regardless of age of facility.  While I appreciate that this move would be a financial burden to the companies operating these tanks, I also believe it is unconscionable that they are allowed to co-opt public health by spewing 100s of tons of deadly emissions into our air shed.  

The public is currently being invited to comment on the proposed renewal of Air Quality Permits for Chevron, Kinder Morgan, and Shell (Equilon) petroleum storage facilities in NW Portland.  If you have not submitted comments, or did not provide testimony at the public hearing last week, please consider doing so before the deadline:  5pm, Tuesday, May 25th to Catherine Blaine.    Click here for the DEQ notice.

Some recommended "asks" from comments already submitted:


1.  Continual ambient air monitoring at the tanks.
2.  On-site, continuous, monitoring of wind speed and direction at each facility conducted by independent contractors.
3.  Recording/reporting of all "unburned fuel" and "gasoline" odors to all facilities, and attribution applied to tank farms in aggregate, without the requirement of citizens to name an individual source.
4.  Time frame to phase out all older tanks and/or require all tanks to adhere to the stricter emission standards achievable by newer tanks.
5.  Clarification of why some companies, including Kinder Morgan, are classified as something other than a storage facility, despite the near identical operations to the other 6 companies operating in the tank farm who are.  Citizens know that this allows them to skirt federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard public health such as the federal Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) database. TRI was established under the federal Emergency Planning Citizen Right-to-know Act, that helps protect communities in case of a disaster, by informing them of the nature and volume of volatile toxic chemicals that are stored, processed, and otherwise might create a public health threat in the event of a catastrophic emergency.  The tank farms in the NW Industrial Sanctuary are situated on a known earthquake fault line and in a flood zone. 

What is in our AIR?

There has been a disturbing trend of gasoline odors in the NW neighborhood this past year.  As neighbors to the Industrial Sanctuary in NW Portland, we are pretty accustomed to the onslaught of nasty odors.  We even have developed our own key of association, to better help identify where they are coming from.  Overwhelmingly, most people experience the industrial odors emanating from ESCO, described variously as:  burnt toast, burning metal, and burning rubber.  But these acute and persistent gas odors are a different animal altogether.  


My first experience with the gas odor was last spring on May 23rd, 2009.  As I finished a run at Lower Macleay, I was walking up the little cut through from Upshur to Thurman that would be an extension of NW 29th.  As I emerged from the brush I was assaulted by the strong presence of a gas odor - to me it smelled like the gas that comes when the burner fails to light and the natural gas to the stove is on.  I was therefore not surprised to see later that day the Northwest Natural Gas truck across the street at my neighbor's house.  She had also smelled it and was concerned there was a natural gas leak at her house or somewhere nearby.  I later learned that NWNG was called to the neighborhood over 100 times for the same reason.  It wasn't until neighbors saw the van outside that they realized this was not just their home. At that time we were able to put it together that this was something affecting the whole neighborhood.  Even as disturbing as that was, most troubling was that despite repeated calls, and the ongoing persistence over two weeks, the neighbors never got a response and most significantly never got a conclusive answer as to the source of the odor.  Many things were ruled out, including NW natural gas customers, sewer or water problems, the fuel burning at the airport which happened at a different time and the wind patterns did not support that fumes from which would have carried into the neighborhood.


Whatever the source, this needs to be stopped.  If this is coming from a stationary gasoline or petroleum source such as any of the 536 petroleum tanks (more info here) in the industrial sanctuary, we are potentially being exposed to dangerous levels of benzene a known carcinogen linked to leukemia and other cancers.  We already know, with our high levels of benzene in gasoline that is not due to be lowered until 2012 through federal legislation, people near freeways in Portland are breathing nearly 40 times the legal limits of benzene (more on the Wyden backed federal legislation can be found in a 2007 Blue Oregon article here). And of course without an adequate monitoring network in our city, we really have no idea what our exposure is.  It makes it all the more critical that the city or the state's Department of Environmental Quality has a plan of response, which includes:


1.  Establishing central response team that can receive citizen reports and send an investigator immediately.  Something that can react with the same efficacy as NW Natural Gas.


2. Establish real time permanent monitoring that can alert residents if there are dangerous levels of toxins in the air. 


3.  Find the source of these acute gasoline odor events in the neighborhoods surrounding the NW industrial sanctuary that most consistently and frequently report them.


To get this done, it is time to act.  We should write our Governor, our mayor, our state legislators, and the head of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality:


1. Governor Kulongoski http://governor.oregon.gov/Gov/contact_us.shtml
2. Mayor Adams: mayorsam@ci.portland.or.us
3. Representative Mitch Greenlick: greenlick.rep@state.or.us
4. Dick Pedersen (Director ODEQ): PEDERSEN.Dick@deq.state.or.us