- Full citation and abstract?
- Mikulka, Justin. "Air Quality Concerns Raised By Albany Residents Living Along Oil-By-Rail Tracks." Desmogblog (blog), October 11, 2014. Accessed September 27, 2015. http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/10/11/air-quality-concerns-raised-albany-residents-living-along-oil-rail-tracks.
- This is a blog post I found on a website called “Desmogblog” which has several posts related to climate change and environmental pollution. The article focuses on how the residents of the Ezra Prentice Apartments in Albany’s South End have been repeatedly been neglected by the DEC when it comes to issues with the oil trains. First, when Global Partners applied to the DEC for a permit to allow them to truck in ~2 billion gallons of oil per year, they determined that no project was required to see if there would be an environmental justice issues. A second time was when the Benzene Screening report was released and the DEC decided that the levels were acceptable. The author concludes the article by saying that all across the U.S., communities are facing problems similar to Albany, as the “oil-by-rail” movement takes hold.
- Where do the authors work, and what are their areas of expertise? Note any other publications by the authors with relevance to the 6Cities project.
- The author of this piece is Justin Mikulka, who is a freelance writer who lives in Albany, NY. He has a degree in civil and environmental engineering from Cornell. He has written several other blog posts on Desmogblog, with a significant portion of them relating to rail transport of fuel which may be helpful specifically to the Albany project.
- What are the main findings or arguments presented in the article or report?
- One of the primary arguments in this blog post is that the DEC seems to be not doing its job in protecting the environment and the health of New Yorkers. The people who live in the Ezra Prentice Apartments are a particularly vulnerable community (poor and high # of minorities), who are being neglected the chance to speak for themselves and protect their people.
- Albany is not alone in this regard. All across the US, people’s health is put at risk by living near rails that are frequently used to transport oil.
- Describe at least three ways that the argument is supported
- Of the 28.3 million people in the US who live within one mile of an oil train evacuation area, 61% qualify as an environmental justice area.
- The DEC did an air quality study of the South End in May/June of 2016 and found elevated levels of Benzene near the Ezra Prentice apartments (broke long term exposure limits). The DEC then decided that they were safe levels and did nothing about them.
- What three (or more) quotes capture the message of the article or report?
- “Dr. Carpenter’s report confirms what the people who live next door to the crude oil facilities at the Port of Albany have known all along: that the oil fumes from those facilities make people sick,” she said. “We don’t understand how DEC could have concluded that there are no public health issues without having spoken to a single resident of Ezra Prentice about what its like to live here and breathe this polluted air.”
- “What happened in Albany is part of a pattern that has occurred across North America as new oil-by-rail facilities are approved. The oil companies say there will be no impact to the air quality and the regulators take their word for it.”
- “Similar situations have played out on the West Coast where multiple oil-by-rail facilities have been approved withoutenvironmental impact assessments. And when an environmental impact assessment is done, as in the case of the 360,000-barrel-per-day Tesero facility in Washington, it is being completed by consultants with ties to Tesero.”
- What were the methods, tools and/or data used to produce the claims or arguments made in the article or report?
- Most of the information in the article came from government reports, other newspaper publications, and (apparently) some interview with residents of the Ezra Prentice Apartments.
- How (if at all) are health disparities or other equity issues addressed in the article or report?
- Look Above.
- Where has this article or report been referenced or discussed? (In some journals, you can see this in a sidebar.)
- Nowhere that I can tell.
- Can you learn anything from the article or report’s bibliography that tells us something about how the article or report was produced?
- The lack of bibliography is typical for a blog. I did not include this piece to bring any fascinating information to the table, more just to show that people in the area are not ignoring this issue.
- What three points, details or references from the text did you follow up on to advance your understanding of how air pollution science has been produced and used in governance and education in different settings
- The one point I really wanted to follow up on was the actual summary of the DEC South End Air Quality Report. I have written an annotation of the critical review of this document by Dr. Kevin Carpenter, but have not actually read the report myself. On page 22 of the report (found here), is the table that lists the given concentrations of various VOC’s for different locations included in the report. Right there, you will see that the benzene concentrations (in ppb) around the Ezra Prentice Apartments were consistently above the long term exposure limits.
- At the bottom of the document, the DEC makes sure to point out that “1-hour samples are not representative of life-time exposure limits”. In that case, does it make any sense to do the sampling at all? For four separate sampling dates (mostly in May 2014), the benzene concentration in the air was above the long-term exposure limit. That should at least result in further study of the area.
- The only thing that may shed some light on why they disregarded the information can be shown on a graph on page 23. In this graph, the recorded benzene levels found in the study are compared to other air quality measurements from across the State. The State “average” was placed at around 0.17 ppb, which would make the measurements in Albany’s south end look relatively low. This average is inflated by urban areas like NYC and Buffalo, and makes Albany look much better off comparatively. This still does not change the fact that the south end is above the maximum long-term exposure limit.
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