Many people are going to ask what significance this has here, and I simply point to the proposed Coal Plant.
Corpus air tests raising concern
Web Posted: 02/27/2005 12:00 AM CST
Anton Caputo
Express-News Staff Writer
CORPUS CHRISTI — Mavis Branch doesn't care much for the language used to discuss the air quality in the neighborhoods along refinery row.
Terms such as "parts per billion" and "effects screening levels" kind of miss the point, as far as she's concerned.
Branch believes the issue is better illustrated by her 80-year-old father, who drapes a towel around his neck and holds it to his mouth all day long to make breathing easier, or by the letter her doctor recently penned to the local Housing and Urban Development Department. In it, he asks officials to help Branch "obtain new housing" because of "multiple medical problems" and concerns "about environmental toxic exposures from neighboring refinery."
"Sometimes it's so bad you can't even come outside," she said, sitting on the front porch of her home in the Buena Vista neighborhood, a collection of about 60 trailers on Up River Road tucked between a refinery and a tank farm. "We've got to get out of here."
Branch was not surprised when a local activist recently knocked on her door to inform her of high levels of 1,3 butadiene — a likely human carcinogen that has been linked to kidney and liver disease and lung damage — detected in her neighborhood during recent testing.
The tests, conducted by Suzie Canales of the Corpus Christi-based Citizens for Environmental Justice and Port Arthur activist Hilton Kelley, are the first in a series the two plan to conduct in Corpus Christi this winter.
They're being helped by the National Refinery Reform Campaign and using testing equipment Kelley's environmental group won last summer in a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency.
What they found during hourlong testing in Branch's trailer park were levels of 1,3 butadiene between about 25 and 42 parts per billion. That's much higher than the state's long-term recommended standard of 5 parts per billion, an annual average that is supposed to trigger health studies.
And that standard — called an effects screening level, or ESL — is among the highest in the country, being dozens and even hundreds of times the level recommended by some other states.
That could soon change. The state has contracted with Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit organization, to assess how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality calculates its ESLs for the hundreds of toxic chemicals on the list. The organization could recommend changes in August.
Michael Honeycutt, the TCEQ's chief toxicologist, said he'd like to see the level for butadiene reduced to as low as 0.1 parts per billion.
Nevertheless, state regulators say they have no evidence of a butadiene problem along refinery row — a collection of seven refineries and several chemical plants on a roughly 10-mile stretch of the city's ship channel.
Butadiene is a chemical used to manufacture synthetic rubber and is often created as a byproduct in petrochemical refining. It gives off a gas-like odor.
State air quality monitoring results from 1993 to 2003, the latest available, don't show any high levels of butadiene. Even if the ESL were reduced, annual averages rarely exceed 0.1 parts per billion for the five local air quality monitors.
That puzzles Canales and Kelley, who were able to do ent high levels in four areas by simply picking spots downwind of refineries.
Honeycutt said the readings in the trailer park could be a problem if they were prevalent a long time — and if they're accurate.
"We would challenge the agency to go and see for themselves with the appropriate equipment, and we would be happy to put our stuff side by side with theirs," said Denny Larson of the California-based Refinery Reform Campaign. "We don't think it's possible to operate air monitoring downwind of these type of facilities and not come up with numbers."
The equipment Kelley and Canales are using is called the CEREX UV Hound. It costs about $35,000 and uses ultraviolet rays to detect chemical contaminants in the air. It feeds the information to a laptop computer and allows the operator to view the readings almost immediately.
CEREX President Thomas Wisniewski said he's reviewed the Corpus Christi results and vouches for their accuracy.
Canales and Kelley have asked the TCEQ to use its mobile air quality testing unit to track down the source of the butadiene they detected, but the state failed to address the request in its written response to the complaint.
TCEQ spokeswoman Adria Dawidczik said she didn't have further information on the issue.
Canales and Kelley will be out again as early as next week on their own for a second round of testing.
"Now that we have hard numbers, they can't continue to ignore this," Canales said. "People have a right to know what's in the air they are breathing."
Manny, coal fired power plants and oil refineries aren't remotely the same.
And the data that people who are opposed to expanding CPS (While San Antonio will need an additional 25 MW of power in the near future to keep up with growth) claiming dirty air in the Braunig Lake area, is there a link to that?
I don't think there's a broad link to all of the information. No. Most of what I've leanred on the issue has been learned at the public meetings.
~Manny
Let's go nuclear. Of course no one wants one and it wil take nearly 10 years to build.
San Antonio already is. CPS holds a (I think) 20+% share in STNP and is looking to secure more.
As TCEQ
Sits Idle, Polluters Double Illegal Air Pollution in 2018
Unauthorized emission incidents resulted in 135 million pounds of illegal air pollution, according to a new report by Environment Texas.
The oil and gas industry in Texas is largely responsible for doubling the amount of illegal air pollution in the state last year
Last year, approximately 270 companies, including Chevron, Dow Chemical, and ExxonMobil, reported 4,590 unauthorized emissions incidents in the state,
resulted in 135 million pounds of illegal air pollution, double the amount emitted in 2017. Contaminants spewed into the sky include human carcinogens butadiene and benzene; smog-forming nitrogen oxides; and particulate matter, which can cause heart attacks, strokes, and congestive heart failure.
The biggest release occurred on August 29, 2018, when the Beaumont Gas to Gasoline Plant belched 53 million pounds of carbon dioxide over five days.
“The data show the problem is getting worse, not better.
We need our state leaders to crack down on illegal pollution,
and stop putting the interests of polluters over the rest of us.”
https://www.texasobserver.org/air-pollution-illegal-2018-tceq/
hole TX run by bat Repugs, fully d to BigCarbon
polluters protected, residents exposed
I watch the air quality alerts much closer now for exercise purposes.
When Covid restrictions hit SA, and hardly anyone was driving, my father saw the Hill country for the first time again from IH 10 and said to me basically "OMG, I can see..."
That got my attention. And that was just a visual.
warnings either did not come or came too late
They used to let Organic Chemistry students use this stuff.warnings either did not come or came too late
by the time I took the class/lab you work with it on a computer screen.
Correlation is not causation, but that's an impressive correlation.
coal kills
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/pr...other-sources/Exposure to fine particulate air pollutants from coal-fired power plants (coal PM2.5) is associated with a risk of mortality more than double that of exposure to PM2.5 from other sources, according to a new study led by George Mason University, The University of Texas at Austin, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Examining Medicare and emissions data in the U.S. from 1999 to 2020, the researchers also found that 460,000 deaths were attributable to coal PM2.5 during the study period—most of them occurring between 1999 and 2007, when coal PM2.5 levels were highest.
Thestudy was published on November 23, 2023, in Science.
While previous studies have quantified the mortality burden from coal-fired power plants, much of this research has assumed that coal PM2.5 has the same toxicity as PM2.5 from other sources.
“PM2.5 from coal has been treated as if it’s just another air pollutant. But it’s much more harmful than we thought, and its mortality burden has been seriously underestimated,” said lead author Lucas Henneman, assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering at Mason. “These findings can help policymakers and regulators identify cost-effective solutions for cleaning up the country’s air, for example, by requiring emissions controls or encouraging utilities to use other energy sources, like renewables.”
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