What's Polluting the Air? Not Even the EPA Can Say. (Portland)

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Charles Ornstein
@charlesornstein
What appeared to be an environmental catastrophe in Portland, Oregon, turned out to be bad data. And the EPA didn’t ask any questions or investigate. Great story by @AvaKofman:

What’s Polluting the Air? Not Even the EPA Can Say.
Despite the high stakes for public health, the EPA relies on emissions data it knows to be inaccurate. To expose toxic hot spots, we first had to get the facts straight.
propublica.org
3:49 AM · Dec 16, 2021

https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-polluting-the-air-not-even-the-epa-can-say

For decades, a factory on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, has churned out hulking metal parts for Boeing’s commercial airplanes. Despite the steady pulse of its machinery, the plant maintains a low profile; Oregonians more readily associate Boeing with its historic headquarters up north in Seattle. Perhaps, I reasoned last spring, this helped explain why no one had noticed that the company’s satellite campus seemed to have unleashed an environmental catastrophe.

In 2016, Boeing reported to the Environmental Protection Agency that it had massively ramped up the amount of chromium compounds it was pumping into the skies of eastern Portland. For anyone who followed Erin Brockovich’s crusade against the dangerous chemical in Hinkley, California, this should have come as alarming news. Hexavalent chromium, as the highly toxic form of the metal is known, can cause lung, nasal and sinus cancers, trigger pulmonary congestion and abdominal pain, and damage the skin, eyes, kidneys and liver. Although it is widely used in the aerospace industry to protect plane parts from corrosion, hexavalent chromium is such a potent carcinogen that in 2004 Boeing’s own environmental newsletter acknowledged that “it would be most desirable to eliminate the offending agent” altogether.

The only reason I’d heard about the issue at the Portland plant was because my colleagues Lylla Younes and Al Shaw, who have been reporting on toxic air since 2019, spent the past year calculating the cancer risks posed by industrial air polluters across the entire country. Their first-of-its-kind analysis of the EPA’s modeled data initially found that Portland — despite its reputation as an eco-friendly, farm-to-table mecca — was home to one of the worst hot spots of cancer-causing air in the country, all because of a single plant’s emissions.

The clues to how this slow-motion disaster unfolded were buried in technical paperwork. In 2016, Boeing’s Portland plant told the EPA that it had released 1,954 pounds of chromium compounds into the air — a 1,000% increase from the year before, when it emitted 164 pounds. In 2017, that amount soared to 5,556 pounds, where it hovered for the next two years. Because the factory makes planes, the EPA assumed that a fifth of the total chromium releases were hexavalent. When Al and Lylla crunched these numbers, they spotted a handful of elementary schools lying downwind of the factory. Our newsroom dispatched a team of reporters to investigate hot spots of cancer-causing air, and I was asked to look into Portland.

*snip*

[hunter]

1. At the EPA ignoring alarming data is possibly a feature, not a bug.

The numbers were reported, as required by law, but obviously there was nobody on hand at Boeing or the EPA who knew what these numbers meant.

I remember applying for Q.C. jobs in places where it was fairly obvious they were looking for people who did not know what they were doing or didn't care. They were paying people to show up for work and overlook problems, not find them.

Two jobs I had where quality control was critical were blood banking and making aircraft parts. Everyone working with the numbers knew what they meant. I never signed off on anything I didn't understand. Nobody did.

In this case it's obvious the people dealing with these reports didn't know or care what the numbers meant. They were just pushing paper from one inbox to another.