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Reposting from a discussion on chemical plants, but I think this offers an insight into why residents often complain about the pollution, when it often doesn't

Reposting from a discussion on chemical plants, but I think this offers an insight into why residents often complain about the pollution, when it often doesn't show up in the official data. I'm not convinced that this is primarily caused by removing two days due to "wildfires". -------------------------------- Sadly, the environmental monitoring is woefully inadequate, even next to the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex (Freeport, TX ... though its a bit better of an example to use or include Deer Park / Houston Ship Channel as well because it's part of America's 3rd/4th largest city). Below the dashed line is a copy/paste of a comment I made two months ago on a post of ProPublica's dispersion model and public health impact modeling of self-reported emission events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32549653 I am very much looking forward to more and more satellites like this one and ESA's SENTINEL-5P and SCIAMACHY. But AFAIK they'll never be able to tell the difference between, say, ethyl acrylate vs. butyl acrylate (both incredibly toxic) or ethyl mercaptan vs. methyl mercaptan (both noxious/cause headaches at unbelievably low concentrations; ethyl mercaptan has an odor threshold of 0.35 parts per trillion). So if one plant makes one chemical, and another plant next door makes a similar chemical, these satellites might let the public know that one of the plants is leaking, but both still would have deniability - "it's the other guy across the street". And you'd still not actually know which chemical you've been exposed to. For that, you'd need monitoring stations with comprehensive sensor combinations at the property boundaries of each chemical plant. ------------------------ I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it. The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they often show no increased pollution at all. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all. Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it. The data used by ProPublica is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem. We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us. They need to spend about $1 million per air monitoring station and build them along the perimeters of each plant so that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and they need to be built near housing so that we know how families are being affected. ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2] 0: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=ab6f85198bda483a997a6956a8486539 https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id... 1: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=ab6f85198bda483a997a6956a8486539 https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id... 2: https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-quality-harris-county/10097289/ https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-qualit...

sitkack 3y ago
When I was kid, I lived next to a pulp mill, there was an air quality station for dioxins on a bluff over the mill. It looked to me even in elementary school that they placed it such that it placed inside of the turbulent vortex as the ocean air would mix with the mill, not measuring the true pollution output of the mill. And there was only one for the whole mill. A drone collection system could sample air at any point vertically, it would be pretty easy to build a system to sample and model pollution that could capture a 4d volume and create a predictive model of emissions. If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.
- reaperman 3y ago
  EPA and TCEQ do have airplanes with analytic equipment equipped to fly through emergency disaster areas and take measurements. But I still don't think they do a good job of measuring the air that residents are breathing 5-20 feet above ground level. > If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now. Environmental fines are usually extremely low (if caught by government) and often non-existent (when caught and reported by the polluting company). The regulatory systems genuinely work hard to try to allow industrial polluters to identify, report, and fix their own problems. Otherwise it would create a culture of hiding problems. The regulatory agencies use the safe, open communication with industrial polluters to disseminate "best practices" on how to reduce emissions. I'm not arguing the current system is best, but just that there are a few potential problems with making things more adversarial which should be at least thoroughly considered and discussed. Fines are only "large" when there's clearly willful, known violation of environmental regulations. Such as if there has been obvious, active, long-term covering-up and managerial actions taken to hide the problems. Or if there are repeated orders to fix a problem and the company continues without remedying the issue. And even then, they aren't very large. > If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now. I'd support that. For me, the model I came up with is to get $150 million donated by some philanthropist and put together a best practice, full scale pilot demo in the Houston, Lake Jackson, or Baton Rouge area. Each monitoring station would cost about $1 million upfront and probably $100,000-200,000 per year to run. You'd need 50-100 of these to monitor the boundaries of each plant and the boundaries of each nearby neighborhood. I think if this was shown to identify which individual business units were leaking, it would result in much lower emissions. A 5-year trial should be enough to help gather federal tax dollars from a sympathetic administration to build a public version of this, or build the support to require and facilities with a "Reportable Quantity" of environmentally hazardous materials onsite to have effective emissions monitoring of both air and water at the boundaries of the facility.

sitkack 3y ago

When I was kid, I lived next to a pulp mill, there was an air quality station for dioxins on a bluff over the mill. It looked to me even in elementary school that they placed it such that it placed inside of the turbulent vortex as the ocean air would mix with the mill, not measuring the true pollution output of the mill. And there was only one for the whole mill. A drone collection system could sample air at any point vertically, it would be pretty easy to build a system to sample and model pollution that could capture a 4d volume and create a predictive model of emissions. If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now.

reaperman 3y ago
EPA and TCEQ do have airplanes with analytic equipment equipped to fly through emergency disaster areas and take measurements. But I still don't think they do a good job of measuring the air that residents are breathing 5-20 feet above ground level. > If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now. Environmental fines are usually extremely low (if caught by government) and often non-existent (when caught and reported by the polluting company). The regulatory systems genuinely work hard to try to allow industrial polluters to identify, report, and fix their own problems. Otherwise it would create a culture of hiding problems. The regulatory agencies use the safe, open communication with industrial polluters to disseminate "best practices" on how to reduce emissions. I'm not arguing the current system is best, but just that there are a few potential problems with making things more adversarial which should be at least thoroughly considered and discussed. Fines are only "large" when there's clearly willful, known violation of environmental regulations. Such as if there has been obvious, active, long-term covering-up and managerial actions taken to hide the problems. Or if there are repeated orders to fix a problem and the company continues without remedying the issue. And even then, they aren't very large. > If we can sue and get a percentage of the fines, we could build this right now. I'd support that. For me, the model I came up with is to get $150 million donated by some philanthropist and put together a best practice, full scale pilot demo in the Houston, Lake Jackson, or Baton Rouge area. Each monitoring station would cost about $1 million upfront and probably $100,000-200,000 per year to run. You'd need 50-100 of these to monitor the boundaries of each plant and the boundaries of each nearby neighborhood. I think if this was shown to identify which individual business units were leaking, it would result in much lower emissions. A 5-year trial should be enough to help gather federal tax dollars from a sympathetic administration to build a public version of this, or build the support to require and facilities with a "Reportable Quantity" of environmentally hazardous materials onsite to have effective emissions monitoring of both air and water at the boundaries of the facility.