DANGER IN THE AIR
Cities on U.S.-Mexican border suffer in a toxic haze
Michelle Dugan was diagnosed with asthma when she was 6 months old. By the time she started elementary school, she was fighting for her breath, wheezing and gasping. “I was the one that was always sick – hospitals, doctors, you know, the needles, the inhalers, the nebulizer machines,” she said. On weekends, Michelle and her sister Marie, younger by a year and a half, piled into the car with their parents, who ran a shoe-selling business at a swap meet across the border in Calexico, California. As they passed through Mexicali, the air was thick with smoke from the ever-expanding manufacturing plants known as maquiladoras.
“You’d just see these big factories or these big trucks just pumping black smoke,” Dugan said. “That’s when my mom would be like, ‘You know what, put your windows up.’ ”
In the years since, the brown haze has grown worse.
Clouds of smoke billow out of factories and float through neighborhoods where children run and play in the dusty streets. Soot rising from smokestacks mixes with exhaust from traffic-clogged avenues and columns of smoke swirling from blazing heaps of trash.
The poisoned air drifts across the border into the smaller city of Calexico in California’s Imperial Valley. The pollution there regularly violates U.S. air quality standards, and children in Imperial County are taken to emergency rooms for asthma at one of the highest rates in the state.
The pollution that plagues the Mexicali area is consistently some of the worst particulate pollution measured anywhere in the Americas.
The toll in lives lost is ghastly. Mexican health records show at least 78 people died of asthma and 903 people died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the Mexicali area from 2010 to 2016. Pollution causes about 300 premature deaths annually in Mexicali.
The city is one of the main centers of manufacturing on the border. About 180 maquiladoras produce export goods for sale in the USA, including water heaters, roofing materials, glass bottles, big-rig trucks, plastic items and airplane parts.
The proliferation of maquiladoras fueled Mexicali’s growth over the past half-century. The city, which has a population of about 750,000, has become the industrial heart of its sunbaked desert valley.
Government officials on both sides of the border acknowledge the pollution crisis, yet little is done to clean up the air.
Mexican government regulatory agencies have taken only minimal steps to combat the pollution in Mexicali and have allowed emissions to continue largely unchecked.
Documents and information provided by Mexican regulators show that polluters face weak oversight and lax enforcement. The country’s environmental agencies have long been underfunded and understaffed; the state Environmental Protection Department has just four full-time inspectors in Mexicali.
The city’s air-monitoring stations don’t track pollution levels near many of the factories, and officials lack the portable equipment they would need to check emissions on site. The deficient monitoring allows polluters to foul the air without facing consequences.
The toll of toxic air
Air pollution cuts lives short in cities around the world.
The World Health Organization estimates 7 million people die each year from air pollution, and more than
90 percent of the world’s children breathe polluted air that puts their health at risk. The filthiest air fills cities in India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other countries in Asia and Africa. When compared with cities across the USA and Latin America, Mexicali stands out as one of the places with the worst particle pollution.
Particulate matter known as PM10 includes particles smaller than 10 microns across — about one-seventh the thickness of a human hair — and ultra-fine
PM2.5 particles are a fourth of that size and smaller.
These particles lodge deep in the lungs, and some are small enough to enter the bloodstream. Breathing them in can cause asthma, lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses and can contribute to heart attacks and arrhythmia.
Measurements from air monitoring devices in Mexicali show the city far exceeds both Mexican and U.S. standards for particle pollution. The city’s average
PM10 level in 2016 was more than double the national standard under Mexican regulations and nearly five times the more stringent standard in California.
Some of the pollution is simply dust blowing from the desert or farmlands and unpaved roads.
Nobody can say exactly how much of Mexicali’s pollution comes from factories and how much comes from other sources, such as the burning of wheat fields after harvest or exhaust from cars and trucks.
What’s clear from the available data is that factories contribute significantly to the pollution, and the pollution leads to illnesses and deaths.
Missing pollution data
Experts said that for a city of its size, Mexicali needs more air quality monitors to track pollution. The state government has four monitoring stations operating in all of Mexicali, an urban area covering more than 50 square miles.
In the early 2000s, Mexicali used to have a larger network with more air monitors. The equipment was paid for by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and administered with support from the California Air Resources Board.
In 2004, state and federal Mexican and U.S. agencies agreed to cooperate in monitoring air quality along California’s border. U.S. and California agencies handed over the air monitoring equipment to Baja California’s Environmental Protection Department.
After that, the air monitors weren’t properly maintained. Some broke down.
Margarito Quintero Nuñez, director of planning and environmental policy for Baja California’s environmental agency, said his predecessors failed to properly maintain the system. He said the agency plans to install two more monitors in Mexicali.
There are other measures that could help clean the air, such as improving the system of vehicle smog checks, which leaves the streets filled with old cars that would fail smog tests north of the border.
In one of California’s poorest places, the Imperial Valley’s largely Latino communities cope with dust and pesticides from farm fields, frequent agricultural burns and clouds of dust from the shores of the shrinking Salton Sea.
According to state health statistics, about 23,000 people have been diagnosed with asthma in Imperial County. That’s about 12 percent of the county’s population, and some people fear the toll will worsen unless action is taken to curb the pollution.
‘They’re condemned to be sick’
Marie Dugan was diagnosed with asthma when she was 12. The Dugans had moved to the Coachella Valley, where the girls were born, and in 2006, they moved again, to El Centro, about 6 miles north of the international border.
In high school, Marie talked of wanting to become an anesthesiologist. She celebrated her quinceañera in a Mexicali ballroom, looking like a princess in a white dress and shimmering tiara.
Marie took puffs on an inhaler whenever she felt short of breath. In the mornings, while the sisters were getting ready for school, they could smell smoke from burning fields and saw crop-dusters spraying pesticides over the fields.
Sometimes, when Marie’s asthma flared up, her mother took her to the emergency room.
In May 2009, Michelle and her mother drove to Coachella, leaving Marie at home in El Centro. When they said goodbye, Michelle recalled, Marie looked normal and healthy.
Hours later, they got the call. Marie had suffered an asthma attack.
She had died. She was 16.
It’s not possible to attribute individual deaths solely to pollution coming across the border from Mexicali or to pollution in the air north of the border. But the pattern of illnesses and deaths, both in Mexicali and in California communities near the border, points to air pollution being a significant contributor.
Dr. Juan Valente Merida Palacio has worked in Mexicali for 32 years treating children with asthma and allergies. In the early 2000s, he began seeing more asthma cases, and more serious cases. Treatments didn’t work as well as they should.
Merida teamed up with other researchers to study how air pollution affected kids. They focused on 258 healthy, nonasthmatic children ages
9 to 12 and found the children lost about
20 percent of their lung capacity during a period when the particle pollution was worse.
“Our children are now sick children,” Merida said. “They’re condemned to be sick.”
Lawsuit alleges lax enforcement
In 2014, law professor Fidel Alfaro Melendrez and more than 50 law students at the Autonomous University of Baja California sued Mexican environmental authorities, accusing them of failing to enforce the law to prevent pollution.
They singled out three Mexicali businesses as third parties: the Grupo Simec steel mill and two gas-fired power plants. In their complaint, they wrote that the companies “are polluting the air we breathe, causing harm to the environment and society in general, translating into respiratory illnesses and losses of human lives.”
The group said government regulators, by failing to carry out their duties, violate human rights recognized in Mexico’s constitution as well as international law.
A judge ruled against them last year. Alfaro Melendrez said it’s outrageous that the government doesn’t have an effective program to combat pollution, even after officials acknowledged the problem.
In interviews with The Desert Sun, Mexican government officials defended their oversight and enforcement efforts.
Baja California Environmental Protection Secretary Thelma Castañeda Custodia said her agency is taking steps to reduce pollution. She said the government’s efforts include paving dirt roads to control dust, discouraging trash burning and sales of fireworks, shutting down illegal dumps and inspecting industrial plants.
She said inspectors carry out reviews to see that companies follow regulations as spelled out in their permits and turn in documents, including logs reporting the waste they generate and where it goes. Her staff checks information submitted by companies, she said, and if something doesn’t seem right, they may visit to check further.
Finding purpose
Michelle Dugan lives in Coachella and avoids going to Mexicali. She’s trying to avoid getting sicker. Treating her asthma requires vigilance. Twice a day, she straps on a vest that helps clear her airways. To fight congestion, she breathes through a nebulizer three or four times a day. She uses her inhaler up to seven times a day.
Even so, she’s repeatedly come down with lung infections and pneumonia.
“It’s gotten to a point where I have 50 percent lung function right now, which keeps declining,” Dugan said. “It’s a constant battle.”
Although she’s 26, a doctor told her she has the “lungs of an 80-year-old.”
When she was hospitalized twice in November 2017, doctors advised her to think about having a lung transplant – an idea she finds scary but perhaps inevitable in the long run.
Dugan works the overnight shift as a dispatcher at a casino. She said taking care of her two kids, Marie, 5, and Leezandro, 2, helped lift her from depression.
She found a sense of purpose in speaking at community forums about the dangers of asthma and pollution. She said the high asthma rates illustrate why authorities on both sides of the border need to impose stricter controls on sources of pollution, including factories and agricultural burns.
“We’re the ones who need to say enough is enough,” she said. “We can’t have this anymore.”
“You’d just see these big factories or these big trucks just pumping black smoke. That’s when my mom would be like, ‘You know what, put your windows up.’ ” Michelle Dugan