Of all of Houston’s national accolades, including being the most diverse city in the nation, one area the Bayou City leads the country in could be the death of us. Literally.
No city in the nation pollutes its air and thus its residents like Houston.
Air Alliance Houston was founded in the late 1980s to reduce the public health impacts of air pollution and advance environmental justice through research, education and advocacy. The organization, however, finds itself battling killer pollution-producing companies, regulators who turn a blind eye to cereal industry polluters and lax state regulatory laws that allow for levels of “legal pollution,” levels that would be deemed criminal by countless other states, while rarely punishing companies for exceeding those “legal” pollution levels
Why does this matter? Residents of communities in the Houston area with the greatest levels of air pollution, all of which are predominantly Black and Latinx, have a life expectancy in some areas that’s 20 years less than areas with the least air pollution (all of which are predominantly white).
Killer pollution stats
According to decades of data collected by the State of Global Air and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, they have been able to assess the proportion of certain diseases that can be attributed to air pollution. Here are the numbers:
· 40% Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD/respiratory illness)
· 30% Lower Respiratory Infections
· 26% Stroke
· 20% Diabetes
· 20% Neonatal Deaths
· 20% Ischemic Heart Disease
· 19% Lung Cancer
In other words, air pollution accounts for 26% of the reason why individuals suffer strokes, 20% of the reason behind neonatal deaths, and a whopping 40% of the casual factors leading to COPD.
“If we were to have healthy air, if our standards for particulate matter, ozone and other kinds of carcinogens were within healthy limits as set by the World Health Organization, as set by the Environmental Protection Agency, we could, in theory, reduce these proportions of disease,” said Air Alliance Houston’s Executive Director, Jennifer Hadayia. “We could reduce potentially the incidents or the severity of these diseases because we know air pollution contributes to those proportions.”
Hadayia, however, wants Houstonians to know that the diseases listed above are not the only damage done by air pollution.
“It makes logical sense that breathing in air toxics would affect your respiratory system, your lungs because that’s the pathway into the body,” said Hadayia. “But research shows definitively that breathing in those toxins short- and long-term also affects your reproductive system, it affects your cardiovascular system, and a growing body of research shows that it also affects diseases of aging, Alzheimer’s and dementia.”
Hadayia added that emerging research also shows that exposure to air pollution, short-term and long-term affects our behavior and can be a contributor to increases in crime.
“So, truly, air pollution contributes to every major health and social issue,” she said.
Ethnic Media Houston toxic tour
Seeking to raise awareness of this clear and present danger, Houston Ethnic Media in partnership with Air Alliance Houston sponsored an “Ethnic Media Toxic Bus Tour” of Houston.
Houston Ethnic Media is the local version of Ethnic Media Services out of California, founded by Sandy Close, which was founded to enhance the capacity of ethnic news outlets to inform and engage diverse audiences on broader public issues with the goal of building a more inclusive participatory democracy.
The tour was designed to visit three sites: The LBJ Hospital in Fifth Ward (Kashmere Gardens), Galena Park and the Houston Ship Channel.
Kashmere Gardens is a community that’s 96% people of color (73% Black, 22% Hispanic, 1% other). Roughly 33% of the population speaks Spanish and 64% of this community is low income. Kashmere Gardens is home to six concrete batch plants. According to Rice University’s Kinder Institute, concrete batch plants produce “a kind of air pollution called particulate matter that can penetrate deep into the lungs,” and is “just one part of the problem that concrete batch plants present.”
Because the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) grants them 24-hour permits, heavy diesel trucks line up as early as 2 a.m. to idle noisily on local streets, waiting to pick up as many as 150 loads every day, emitting even more pollutants like black carbon and nitrogen dioxide.
The Toxic Bus Tour stopped in front of LBJ Hospital because there is an effort to construct a seventh concrete batch plant in Kashmere Gardens right across the street from the hospital – a reality that could hamper any healing hospital residents hope to experience.
“The TCEQ is not calculating for the cumulative impact effects that already exist within this community,” said Crystal Ngo, AAH’s environmental justice coordinator. “Again, I have to emphasize that there are already six concrete batch plants in this community, and one is trying to be built right across from a trauma three hospital with about 80,000 patients that can be seen per year. My mom personally goes to this hospital. I was just here a couple of months ago. So, while community members are trying to heal, they’re gonna get more long-term exposures while they’re healing at this hospital.”
Josefa Najera, a 54-year-old Kashmere Gardens resident whose son suffers from chronic asthma and whose grandchildren have been tested for lead poisoning, spoke of the onslaught of illnesses impacting her and her neighbors.
“People are just getting sick every day: our infants, our newborns, our elderly, our children,” she said. “We hear so many stories about people getting this sickness, that sickness, their lungs. If it’s not cancer, it’s pulmonary disease, it’s asthma, it’s other things that are just making people sick.”
The tour also visited Galena Park, a Houston-area community caught in the crosshairs of multiple cereal polluter industries and home to the highly toxic dredge regularly dug out of the Houston Ship Channel and dumped in the community just beyond Houston’s northeast corner.
“Houston has no hills, so if you ever see a hill in Houston, it was manmade. There’s the dredge site,” pointed out longtime Galena Park resident and AAH Community Air Monitoring Program Manager Juan Flores. “All this dirt right here used to be at the bottom of the ship channel. And over the years, they dug it up and they put it here.”
Flores said that as a child, he and his friends played on those hills daily, unaware they were made of toxic sludge.
“We used to actually have a real good view of downtown Houston. It looked so beautiful in here, but now over the years, this hill is getting bigger and bigger. We can’t see downtown Houston anymore.”
Flores, who is in his 40s, was informed by a doctor that he has a medical condition that could develop into myeloma (cancer of the blood), a reality that could very well be linked to his lifetime of proximity to pollutants. Still, he remains on the front lines, pointing out polluters and seeking to educate and engage neighbors in actively monitoring the air to know when to stay in or go but, also to collect data to show legislators and regulators that the horrible smells, headaches and periods when entire neighborhoods remain nauseous for weeks after a refinery accident are not just figments of residents’ imaginations.
Flores and Leticia Gutierrez, AAH’s director of government relations and community outreach, say one of the battles they face is the fact that polluter industries are rarely held accountable for polluting beyond “acceptable” levels.
“These refineries out here, they have their own air monitors. They’re required to report on themselves, but how are we supposed to trust them? All those guys, they’ve been fined multiple times. And for them it’s easier to pay the fine than it is to fix the problem. It’s easier, it’s cheaper for them. And a lot of times these guys will get a fine and TCEQ, last I looked, they only collect the fine 28% of the time. So, these companies get fined all the time. Sometimes they pay, most of the time they don’t,” said Flores.
Gutierrez said many of the state regulators are big-wigs in the very industries they are charged with regulating.
“It’s like foxes guarding the hen house,” she said.
Though the tour ran out of time before being able to visit the Houston Ship Channel, there were more than enough personal testimonies provided by residents and community activists about the damage being done daily to Houston-area air and the people who have to breathe it.
How to help
The tour not only highlighted the problems, but gave voice to solutions and ongoing efforts to create better air realities for Houston-area residents.
“We have had a couple of wins. Whenever the community showed up in droves, whenever we mobilized this community, they were able to come together and the concrete batch plant owner, in the middle of the hearing got nervous and pulled the permit , and so everyone cheered,” said Gutierrez.
She also emphasizes residents attending TCQE meetings to share their stories.
“We’re using stories and these comments at TCQE as ammunition so that whenever we do go up to the state capitol to basically beg our elected representatives to make sure that they’re enacting laws and creating legislation so that we don’t have to continue to have hearing, after hearing, after hearing, we go armed with information and personal testimonies. We need laws to be able to make sure that we’re protecting people.”
This story was originally published by The Houston Defender.
