Reality check: Pittsburgh’s air is still highly toxic
We brag about how we’ve cleared our skies, but they continue to poison us. Meanwhile, our leaders fail to act, writes Penn Future activist
The stories we tell ourselves define how we lead our lives and interact with other people. As a boomerang Pittsburgher who left in 2001 and returned last year, I’ve noticed that stories Pittsburghers tell about air pollution contradict many of our lived experiences. Moreover, the stories our government and regulatory agencies promote are increasingly out of touch with reality, and out of touch with our aspirations for a healthier environment and sustainable economy.
Pittsburghers often say that, because our air is no longer visibly smoky, it is clean. Go on any local tour with visitors and you’ll hear about how our city has cleaned up its dirty air. If you complain about how bad the air still smells during inversions, as I often do, many Pittsburghers will tell you that it isn’t as bad as it used to be, as if breathing today had anything to do with the air quality 75 years ago.
We are in denial about the dangers of air pollution in the Pittsburgh region, and our story must change to reflect reality. Many of us must deal with the health effects of our polluted air on a daily basis. My childhood asthma symptoms reappeared shortly after moving back here and keep me less active outdoors than I prefer. Why? My neighborhood is located downwind of U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, in 2016 alone, Clairton Coke Works emitted 712,000 tons of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas; 312 tons of PM 2.5 small particulates, more than half of the entire county’s PM 2.5 emissions from all major emitters; 152
tons of volatile organic compounds, which cause serious health conditions, including damage to liver, kidneys and the central nervous system; and 12 tons of benzene, which increases the risk of fatal cancers.
Our reality is this: Pittsburgh and Allegheny County stand among the top 10 most-polluted places in the nation with regard to year-round particulate pollution, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the American Lung Association, which gives us a failing grade. Allegheny County ranks No. 3 in the country for pollution-related cancer rates. A recent Lancet study attributes 4.2 million deaths to air pollution worldwide. How many of these are in Pittsburgh?
Penn Future launched the Toxic Neighbor citizen engagement campaign in October, stating that Clairton Coke Works committed more than 6,700 air-pollution violations over a recent three-and-a-half year period. The campaign mobilizes citizens to demand clean air because Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and the Allegheny County Health Department have neglected to adequately penalize this repeat offender. County leaders are failing to protect us against local sources of pollution and the many hazards to their constituents’ health that ensue from toxic emissions.
The Post-Gazette quoted county health director Karen Hacker after a recent board of health meeting at which clean-air activists, myself included, demanded action. She said that bringing the coke facility into compliance would take time because the department must make a strong legal case for enforcement decisions, adding, “We don’t want to spend two or three years in court where nothing happens.”
As far back as 1972, the DEP sued U.S. Steel for violating the state’s air pollution laws at Clairton Coke Works, according to information provided to Penn Future in response to a right-to-know request. Over the past seven years, the county health department has entered into 10 consent agreements with U.S. Steel, allowing the company to continue to pollute the air and violate the law. Given this history, spending two or three years in court to force U.S. Steel to obey the law seems long overdue.
Allegheny County citizens deserve to breathe clean air. Why should we continue to suffer thousands more toxic air violations while the department continues to allow big polluters to violate our laws? Neglecting this inconvenient truth doesn’t make it goaway.
We must demand that our health department treat airpollution-related diseases as it does other public health crises, such as lead exposure, gun violence or the opioid crisis. It must produce better education, prevention and interventions to curtail pollution-related diseases.
We also must demand zero air violations from U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works. U.S. Steel holds $1.7 billion in cash, according to its thirdquarter report to the Security and Exchange Commission. Certainly the company could spend some of that money to retire the oldest and most-polluting coke batteries in Clairton.
What the county health department isn’t saying and isn’t doing perpetuates our region’s dangerous denial about air pollution and its effect on public health.
At former Vice President Al Gore’s recent Climate Reality Project training in Pittsburgh, many of us were energized by the global efforts to decouple our economic and social aspirations from the interests of the fossil-fuels industries. Yet in Pennsylvania, we not only are inviting even more toxic neighbors to locate here, such as the Shell petrochemical plant in Beaver, but incentivizing them with billions of our tax dollars: $1.65 billion, to be exact. Our continued public investment in these industries locks us into a future of being known as a Cancer Alley.
Please join Penn Future’s Toxic Neighbor campaign at www.pennfuture.org as we work together to hold county, state and business leaders accountable and urge them to act more aggressively to stop the contamination of our air. Until we do, Pittsburgh and Allegheny County will fall short of its potential to be a great, healthy place to live, and the many new, clean industries we are trying to build and attract eventually will opt to move elsewhere. We deserve a healthier reality that we can truth fully brag about.