TOXICS

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HOWARD FINE

Staff Reporter

A new congressional report that found L.A.’s air to contain high levels of certain toxic pollutants had its share of national headlines.

“Air in L.A. Still Highly Toxic,” proclaimed USA Today; “Los Angeles Pollutants Found at High Levels,” stated The New York Times.

Yet closer scrutiny of the report requested by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles reveals little that is new or startling. Some of the cancer-causing chemicals mentioned have been closely tracked for years by either state or local pollution control agencies. Others have long been known by scientists to pose cancer risks and have been tracked on a limited basis.

“This is certainly not new for specialists in the field,” said Arthur Winer, professor of environmental health sciences at UCLA and one of 11 scientists who resigned from the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s Scientific Advisory Panel in 1996 to protest the district’s pollution control strategy.

So why did Waxman’s federal report grab all the headlines?

While the data generally has been known to scientists and in air quality regulation circles, it has not been widely disseminated to the public, especially in California. The focus here has been on smog-forming compounds like ozone, nitrogen oxide, and small dust particles.

“It is not clear to me that this has been widely understood by the public and the decision-makers outside of the very narrow world of air pollution control experts,” Winer said.

That’s one of the reasons why Waxman asked for the report in the first place, according to his chief of staff, Phil Schiliro.

“There is no requirement for this data on toxic pollutants to be released to the public, like there is for ozone and other pollutants that make up smog,” Schiliro said. “That’s why word has not really gotten out to the public at large.”

The report released by Waxman details atmospheric concentrations of 10 chemicals known to cause cancer, singling out three 1,3-butadiene, benzene and formaldehyde as posing the most risk. The primary source for those 10 chemicals is motor vehicle exhaust and fuel, although factory emissions are also a source.

The report is based on measurements taken at three monitoring stations in the Los Angeles area: Burbank, Long Beach and downtown Los Angeles. The average concentrations of the 10 chemicals was 426 times higher than the goals for those chemicals, as set forth in the federal 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.

“We’ve known for at least a decade that the three compounds singled out in this report pose toxic risks and all three have been regulated,” Winer said.

In fact, the California Air Resources Board has tracked benzene concentrations in the atmosphere since 1986 and has regulated benzene emissions from gasoline pumps and car exhaust since the 1980s, according to CARB spokesman Jerry Martin. One of the reasons that gasoline nozzles have the rubber seals on them is to reduce exposure to benzene, he said.

One result of the extensive tracking, Martin said, is that since 1990 the concentrations of these three chemicals have decreased by about 40 percent. “In some cases, the decreases have exceeded 50 percent,” he said.

The AQMD is in the midst of a major study of its own, collecting air samples from 10 monitoring sites throughout the Los Angeles basin and measuring concentrations of 30 compounds believed to cause cancer. Results of that study are due to be released this summer.

Mel Zeldin, the AQMD’s assistant deputy executive officer for science and technology advancement, said a progress report expected to be released late last week shows “consistent downward trends in recent years in levels of all these chemicals.”

UCLA’s Winer and CARB’s Martin said the state was identifying new cancer-causing chemicals at a pretty fast clip in the 1980s, following the December 1984 Bhopal incident in India, in which more than 2,000 people perished after a toxic chemical release. However, they said, the pace of identifying such chemicals slowed in the 1990s as data became more scarce and public interest waned.

Winer suggested that one purpose of the Waxman report may have been to spur the state to pick up the pace of its monitoring and identification program so that the chemicals posing the most risk could be regulated.

Schiliro said that was not one of the intended purposes of the study. “There was no ulterior motive here,” he said. “The congressman believes sometimes that information is important in and of itself. People need to have the information and then evaluate it.”

Schiliro said Los Angeles was targeted for the first congressional monitoring study because it is the home district of Waxman. He added that this is not the first release of data on toxic pollutants to come from Waxman’s office. “In the past, we’ve put out data on emissions of toxic chemicals, but we were criticized for not having data on exposure levels in the air. So that’s what we’re doing now.”

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