Smog Sick

Photos by Larry Hirshowitz

Jesse Marquez: “All of Them Are Guilty.”

In 2001, the Port of Los Angeles broadcast to the Wilmington community that it planned to build a 1.6-mile wall to separate the port city from the largest port in the nation, a strategy to help address the impact of the 41,000 diesel trucks a day that drive into the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports. It was heralded as a good thing. “It came out that they wanted to build a six-lane diesel highway,” says Wilmington resident Jesse Marquez, who lives six blocks away from the L.A. port. “They were just trying to soften the blow.” Out of this plan, the 53-year-old former electrician founded the Wilmington Coalition for Clean Air to fight the project. After six months, the fledgling nonprofit boasted a membership of 60. Since then, the coalition, which changed its name to the Coalition for a Safer Environment, has stopped or helped delay 14 port projects in the last five years, including the construction of container-handling facilities at a 174-acre terminal the port leased to the China Shipping Holding Co. Because of community pressure, the port agreed to embark on a major initiative to reduce diesel emissions and spend $50 million in community projects, including an open green-space park. As part of its plan, the coalition has also demanded that the port and the city look into the health impact on the community. Marquez, who suffers from sinus and respiratory problems, blames the high incidence of asthma and respiratory illnesses on the port, but says that the city and port refuse to fund a study. “We always bring up health problems, but they don’t want to deal with it,” says Marquez. “All of them are guilty. They don’t want to do it, because they will have to pay. They are afraid of what they will find. How can you account for respiratory problems with families that have no history of it?”

—Christine Pelisek

Maria Malahi: “It’s Money Versus the Little People.” Maria Malahi used to be a championship skier who sped down trails at high altitudes in thin mountain air and sunshine. Today, she is the mother of two children with asthma and struggles with her own ­respiratory-health problems. She and her family live in a wood-frame house off gritty Gaffey Street in San Pedro, not far from the Port of Los Angeles, “about four or five blocks as the crow flies,” reckons the busy, blond-haired mother. She strongly believes that air pollution has affected the health of her family. Inside, her home is neat and seemingly free of visible dust. Air purifiers quietly hum. Yet Malahi worries because a layer of black particles already is forming on the stark white window ledges she vacuumed just a few days earlier. “You can see the pollution,” she says, as her children play with toys and watch television in the living room on a late summer afternoon. A cupboard in the kitchen is lined with medications and nebulizers — pumps that form an easily inhalable mist of medication that can open the air passages in the event of an asthma attack in her household. Asthma has forced her son Matan, 9, to give up soccer. He used to play on a team at the nearby Field of Dreams, a City of Los Angeles park located next to a truck entrance for a port terminal. Rows of diesel trucks sit in a parking lot next to the field. Just across the entrance to this park for San Pedro’s children loom the steel towers and apparatus of a gas-processing plant and the Conoco Phillips refinery. Early on a summer evening, a petroleumlike odor hangs across the area, even at the community’s Little League baseball park, just across Gaffey. Matan has learned how to use an inhaler and carries one with him at school. However, he misses a lot of classes due to his illness. “He can’t live a normal life,” says his mother. Neither can her baby daughter, Adrielle, who must use the nebulizer two or three times a day. “At times she starts choking,” her mother says. “Her face starts turning red.” Malahi herself has had to give up her beloved skiing because of a loss of lung function that may stem from an autoimmune disease she suffers from known as scleroderma. “My own health is suffering,” she says. “We’re suffering financially.” Malahi estimates that she takes her children to the doctor an average of two to six times a month to deal with respiratory-health issues. Yet she considers herself fortunate to have health insurance, though she still faces the cost of a $10 copayment for each visit, plus monthly medication bills of $78 for her son and $100 for her daughter. In addition, she has had to take her children to the hospital five times over the last six months, at a cost of a $100 copayment per visit. Her husband, a Web designer and graphic artist, moonlights to help pay the bills for his family’s medical problems. “I’m not against the port,” she confides as her brother, a longshoreman, drops in to say hello on his way home from work. “It plays a very big economic role in the country and Los Angeles. But there are ways to make it cleaner.” Yet she has little faith that regulators will force the freight industries to clean up their operations anytime soon, at least soon enough to provide her own family any relief. “It’s money versus the little people,” she laments. “They can squeeze money out of the little people.”