By Dianne Anderson

Smoldering soot is sounding air quality alarms for weeks to come, but when the smoke clears, advocates worry more about the microscopic stuff that lingers Inland year-round, and lodges in the lungs.

Even before the fires, the region steadily came up first and second place for the worst air quality for ozone and particulate matter.

“Literally, anywhere in the U.S. is better than here. We have over 100 days of bad air quality, and it’s getting hotter. It’s just crazy,” said Shane Ysais, spokesperson for CCAEJ.

For a long time, he said the logistics industry has been the culprit. Diesel pollution from thousands and thousands of truck trips, with Amazon, FedEx, and warehouses cropping up everywhere.

CCAEJ has been going up to Sacramento with Assemblymember Eloise Gómez Reyes to fight to keep warehouses at a short distance within schools, houses and playgrounds. For now, that fight has eased under much opposition with a compromise, an alternative bill signed by Governor Newsom.

He said it hit hard to know they couldn’t get the siting of 1,000 square feet away from schools and residents that they had hoped for.

“We deserve so much more, we got the bare minimum like breadcrumbs. It was a very serious problem,” he said.

Black and Latino people hold the highest incidence of respiratory illness, cancer and all diseases common to pollution impact. In the future, he said emissions per truck must be lessened to zero emissions.

But because long-haul cargo isn’t feasible with electric trucks, environmentalists are concerned that the alternative hydrogen energy just shifts the problem.

“Hydrogen is still a fossil fuel, it’s just not producing carbon, it’s carbon-free,” he said. “They use some methane reformation techniques is bad. When they do green hydrolysis, that takes so much more power creating that energy from usually gas power plants actually increases pollution.”

Slowly, there has been some chipping away.

“It’s more on the transition side of things. We’ve already been to SCAQMD, they’ve made plans by passing Indirect Source Rules to phase out all diesel engines by 2030-40 with penalties if they go over. We’ve already passed that for rail warehousing and the next up is the ports. That’s the win,” he said.

Even besides climate change impact, he said while there are some victories, looking for longer scale plans to kick in is not a solution, and there is no time to wait.

“People are getting sick faster and the wait time to see doctors is longer in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. You are ultimately shortening your life by living in certain cities because of this issue.”

Coming up, the CCAEJ Civic Engagement 101 program is open for all to learn about how to impact the issues. They are also developing a voter guide for the weeks ahead for environmental concerns on the ballot.

“We want to get ahead of these issues, it’s not a red or blue thing, it’s a green thing,” he said. “We all breathe the same air, we’re all going to be in trouble if we don’t start seeing change.”

Marven Norman, CCAEJ policy coordinator, said a recent Sacramento meeting, that he was concerned by what seemed to be attempts by groups to use the Black community as a wedge in the progress of air quality. He said that it was hard to tell if any were from the IE.

“New groups popped up to talk about how city truck rules will harm black truckers because they disallow most natural gas, they say Black truckers can’t afford new trucks.”

But, he said the state has a lot of funding to help people get upgrades and incentives to buy a truck, however, the ARB rules are intended to capture companies, not individual truckers. In the 2010s, a lot of independent truckers were forced to buy trucks that later had problems.

It ruined a lot of truckers, but this time around he said there is careful work to avoid that problem.

“The onus is on the companies, not individual truckers. On the other side, the legislature keeps putting hundreds of millions of dollars into incentives to help people get trucks and doling out grants for that. Both sides are happening.”

He said AQMD data shows a decrease in certain sources of pollution. He meets people who were alive in the 1970s who say they just can’t see the problem of air pollution today like back then.

“They tell us, why you complaining? You can see the mountains now in the summer,” he said.

But almost weekly, he said someone proposes a warehouse down the street or in someone’s backyard. Others not to worry about air quality impact as Southern California clean truck rules are coming down the pike.

He questions the timeline, and time will tell.

“We’re still waiting for EPA to approve some of the rules, if they’re not approved, they’re not in effect,” he said.

Seen or unseen, even on a good day when air quality seems decent, it doesn’t mean it’s good to breathe.

“If you can’t see it it’s still there. That’s why it’s called particulate matter. It’s still over 2.5 (PM),” he said.

For more information on Community Action,
See CCAEJ, see https://www.ccaej.org/

To see the PM Map for IE, see https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c2fd7f9c6c1d441983f24d7eed531064

For Toll of Freight Pollution in California NRDC
https://www.nrdc.org/bio/guillermo-ortiz/breathing-harm-toll-freight-pollution-california

For the UC Davis study see, https://environmentalhealth.ucdavis.edu/air-pollution/californias-warehouse-boom-raises-health-concerns