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Warehouse town locals fight to breathe
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TEXT OF STORY
Steve Chiotakis: Mira Loma, Calif. is about 50 miles east of LA. It has some of the worst air pollution in the nation. Freeways and railroads are a big source of the problem, but researchers say warehouses also play a role. From the Sustainability Desk, Marketplace's Caitlan Carroll reports.
Caitlan Carroll: I'm standing in Mira Loma Village. It's a neighborhood of about a hundred small stucco houses. A rail line runs down one side. Two major trucking routes, Highway 60 and Interstate 15, intersect on the other. Residents say living here isn't easy.
Charles Lanathoua: Hard to breathe sometimes and I call it respiratory problems, you know.
Alexandra Jimenez: We got headaches. Our nose would burn. We had soot all over our face, our body.
Estella Portillo: I'm out in the afternoon gardening and I have to go in the house because I can smell those fumes -- you can smell them now.
That's Charles Lanathoua, Alexandra Jimenez and Estella Portillo. This area used to be mostly farmland, but as Los Angeles expanded, companies built their distribution centers further east. Now sprawling warehouses cover Mira Loma. They serve companies like Walmart, Nestle and Coca-Cola.
More than 800 diesel trucks often pass through Mira Loma in an hour. Some drop off cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Others pick it up. Ed Avol teaches Environmental Health at the University of Southern California:
Ed Avol: So increasingly we're beginning to understand that in a way warehouses are like magnets for pollution.
Problem is, the county doesn't have money to move residents or to pay the truckers to retro-fit their rigs. John Field works for the local County Supervisor:
John Field: Obviously from a land use planning standpoint if we had it to do over again, Mira Loma Village would not be there, but that's the way it goes.
Penny Newnam heads the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice. She says warehouses have cropped up here since the late 90s. Now the community wants to stop any new ones. Newnam encourages Mira Loma residents to speak up at county meetings. They're helping log pollution stats, too.
Penny Newnam: It's where the lessons are being learned really the hard way, and it's where the crisis is.
Newnam is advising states with expanding distribution hubs like South Carolina, Kansas and New Jersey to put some space between the people and the products.
In Mira Loma, Calif., I'm Caitlan Carroll for Marketplace.
Caitlan produced this story while participating in a California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship, a program of USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.
I recently read your article about air pollution issues affecting Mira Loma Village, CA and am concerned about the take of some of the interviewed and of the author.
One of the article’s conclusions appears to be that the problem is with people deciding to live in a warehouse-ridden area.
First of all, the problem, defined in simple terms, is that the Mira Loma area has extremely high air pollution and people are exposed to this resulting in short and possibly long-term health issues. The problem is not, as the article suggests, that “the county doesn't have money to move residents or to pay the truckers to retro-fit their rigs.†Don’t get me wrong, moving residents and retro-fitting trucks sound like short-term steps in the right direction. It just doesn’t address the issue.
The solution is not simply to designate pollution-free residential zones away from pollution-ridden manufacturing zones. I think that there is a fundamental flaw in assuming that the problem only affects the residents. Air pollution affects people and, as corny as it may sound, employees are people too. As simple as that. Employees of these warehouses and factories are affected by the same air pollution and are therefore exposed to the same health risks. Separating residences and warehouses still leaves working people exposed to this mess. They are not less valuable for being employed by these polluting companies. Sometimes when people identify the companies as the polluters they see the employees, by association, as faceless polluting components of these companies. Environmental justice applies to employees as well.
Furthermore, why is the viability of the retro-fitting and relocation solutions dependent on the county’s budget? Three words: Extended PRODUCER responsibility. The companies should be responsible for the emissions caused by their supply chain. I am an entrepreneur and don’t believe that companies are evil. I do believe, however, that companies should be responsible for mitigating the social and environmental impact caused by their activities—upstream and downstream.
All I am saying is: there is NO right place for such a high concentration of pollutants. Air pollution is a severe problem by itself. The impact on the residents only makes it direr and more evident. Companies need to consider their impact to the people they employ and to the present and future communities around their manufacturing and warehousing locations. Resolution of these issues ultimately hinges on the elusive comparative value of health (and therefore the value of clean air) vs. the cost of running a business--values which are implicitly assigned by the companies and regulators.
With a planned population of one billion people sometime around the turn of the next century we are not going to be able to save many farms and forested areas. The fact is we will need all the productive farm land for warehousing, new cities, interstate highways, commercial retail, schools, and ever increasing population centers. This is America we will not tolerate
crowed cities we need room for massive expansion. The unwise thing to do would be to diminish our national parks and preserved areas and allow development there but I do not think it can be stopped with this coming huge population boom. It is sad that the environment will degrade and we will become a net importer for food but we as Americans prize growth and wealth as our primary focus , sustainability is a noble concept but it will remain a concept. Economic and political forces will never allow a sustainable human footprint wall street and corporate America are forces that will swallow any energy for a healthy sustainable balanced population and environment. It is the better part of wisdom to except this political reality. We can hope by fighting on perhaps we can slow the progression.
