Pasadena plays defense on pollution
In city that abuts plants, residents will monitor air quality themselves
PASADENA — Corey Williams heaved a square, metal cafe umbrella base over his left shoulder and used his right hand to pull himself up the blue, 16-foot ladder that he had toted to a Pasadena church on his Jeep. Then he climbed down to get the air pollution monitors that were ribbon-tied to a steel fence pole.
This was Williams’ third set of monitors to install in Pasadena, a city east of Houston and bordered to the north by a dense row of petrochemical facilities. The others he put in place sit on the pitched rooftops of private homes. All are part of an effort by local residents and Air Alliance Houston, the nonprofit where Williams works, to track for themselves what pollutants they breathe.
The initiative is meant to fill gaps in information between that provided by a state monitoring system, intended to capture regional data, and a new county monitoring program still being built out. The group joins a growing list of communities, such as in Pleasantville and eastern Fort Bend County, taking advantage of improved technology to gather their own neighborhood-specific data.
The installation Jan. 25 in Pasadena marked a significant step for those in Harris County’s second-largest city, where an interest in policing petrochemical companies has come up against the goal of supporting industry and the jobs they bring. Pasadena Mayor Jeff Wagner refused to support Air Alliance’s initial effort to put monitors on schools, organizers said. His two spokespersons did not return multiple requests for comment.
“We’ve got to defend ourselves,” said Juan Flores, another Air Alliance staff member, who passed zip ties and a screwdriver up to Williams.
Flores, who lives across the Houston Ship Channel from Pasadena in Galena Park, coordinated with residents on the project. That afternoon, he could see one school they’d hoped to use. The red-brick St. Peter’s Episcopal Church where they put the monitor instead was across the street. Flores is among those hoping it will be a way for flagging officials to penalize polluters exceeding limits and responsible for environmental disasters.
One state monitor
In earlier years, Pasadena residents had little to go on when it came to understanding their air quality.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality operates 30 monitoring stations across the Houston area and pulls data from dozens more. They are fancy machines, picking up detailed levels of various compounds with a goal of tracking air quality region-wide over time.
The monitoring stations can also be used to evaluate air quality for the surrounding community, said Cory Chism, who oversees the state’s monitoring. Only one sits in Pasadena. It’s in the industrial corridor to the north, soon to be replaced by one at Richey Elementary School that will take continuous measurements. (Air quality standards are based on hourly, 8-hour or daily average exposures.) The state data is hard to interpret, but improvement is in the works.
A new county monitor was also installed in Pasadena in recent months, part of an effort to establish a countywide monitoring system following the 2019 Intercontinental Terminals Co. fire near Deer Park that sent a smoke plume over the region. The days-long disaster highlighted how ill-prepared Harris County was for an emergency like it, with essentially no monitoring ability.
The county’s Pasadena device monitors air quality from the John Phelps Annex, home to the county’s overhauled pollution control services department. Eight other devices in the new county system were installed elsewhere, including one placed Wednesday behind a chain-link fence in Manchester’s Hartman Park. Homes line one side of the park; a Valero refinery borders another.
“Is this the monitor?” County Commissioner Adrian Garcia asked when he arrived that afternoon for a TV news interview and to see the device. “Wow.”
Garcia, a Democrat who represents Precinct 2, had worked to get an industrybacked grant to pay for it and three others. The monitor is basically a tripod with small solar-powered boxes attached, a bit taller than the average person. A newly hired county technician explained to Garcia what it did.
Garcia, County Judge Linda Hidalgo and others held a press conference the next day touting how better prepared they were for the next environmental disaster. That afternoon in the park, a boy gave female county staffers tiny white flowers plucked from the grass. He breathed in the air.
‘Off and running’
In 2018, Paula Torrado held the Air Alliance community outreach job that Flores now does. In Pasadena, she focused on educating residents about the health dangers of vehicle and bus exhaust. She wanted to measure air pollution as part of that.
When she turned to the city for support, she said, she found no cooperation
from the mayor or staff. In a July 2018 meeting, Councilman Sammy Casados publicly raised the issue. Wagner, the mayor, questioned whether Casados was breaking meeting procedure.
Councilman Cody Ray Wheeler, an unabashed critic of the mayor, found the response disheartening. He questioned who the mayor was serving: the people or the chemical plants?
Two and a half years later, the monitors were up — and Patricia Gonzales, founder of Caring for Pasadena Communities, was among those eager to review the data. She wanted evidence to entice officials to help them fight polluters.
That same desire had spurred other communities, too, said Grace Tee Lewis, who works with some of them through the Environmental Defense Fund. (EDF put a monitor at Pasadena Memorial High School, part of a slew installed after the ITC fire; the monitor doubles as a teaching tool.)
The monitors aren’t the most accurate — but they can provide cause for city or county investigators to deploy more precise devices, Tee Lewis said. Judge Hidalgo, at the recent press conference, promoted a legal department stepping up enforcement. What they measure depends on the device, but the Pasadena monitors will track five-hour averages of volatile organic compounds, ozone, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, plus wind direction and speed.
Tee Lewis expects such citizen-science to expand. In a Zoom meeting Thursday night, the Fort Bend/ Houston Super Neighborhood group celebrated their monitors’ website launch. “We’re off and running,” environmental committee treasurer Michael Ballare told the group.
Air Alliance Executive Director Bakeyah Nelson logged in, remembering when they first captured air samples in buckets. ITC may have provided a wake-up call to the whole region to the dangers of air pollution, but these residents had lived it for years.
Now they could check their neighborhood pollutant levels online anytime they wanted.