M3.4 Air Pollution

I know Martinez was a major hitter with the refinery but shocked that it was this bad.
My top 3 polluters are:

RankFacilityCityPounds
1SHELL OIL PRODS. U.S. MARTINEZ REFY.MARTINEZ1,142,142
2TESORO REFINING & MARKETING CO.MARTINEZ1,064,658
3CHEVRON PRODS. CO. RICHMOND REFY.RICHMOND999,328


Only 1% of houses in my county, Contra Costa (94526), have lead based paint.

Contra costa county's worst toxic waste site (aka Superfund Sites) are:

Who Is Polluting Your Community?
Superfund Sites in Your Community
1CONCORD NAVAL WEAPONS STATION
2GBF, INC., DUMP
3UNITED HECKATHORN CO.

With only 3 Superfund sites in our county, we are among the best in the nation for being the cleanest. We sit at 20% while the national average is about 50% clean.

For Air quality, it is not great. They are ok on some pollutants but others we are terrible. Carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, PM2.5, PM10, Sulfer dioxide, and volatile organic compounds we are over 90%/worst in the nation.

For water, I am a bit disappointed. I thought we would be good. We are the worst on both accounts, over 90% dirty. number of impaired water bodies is high and percentage of surface waters with impaired or threatened uses.

For Environmental Justice - I think this is OK, it is not totally equal but compared to other counties and states is much better. People of color have a slightly higher rate of being near toxins than whites. This biggest difference in ratio was those of color were closer to the superfund sites. 



Comments

  1. Sandy TanSeptember 16, 2018 at 2:51 PM

    Hi Dan,
    I am interested in knowing some of the statistics for the distribution of burdens. What are the specific difference in ratios you are looking at? Sharing numbers can tell a bigger story than saying it is "ok".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hugo FGSeptember 16, 2018 at 5:22 PM

    Hi Dan,
    We live in the same county, so the information we got was the same. I was also disappointed in a lot of the categories where we were in the bottom 20% or 10% in the country. The good news I found here is that the homes exposed to lead are less than 1% across the county!

    ReplyDelete

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