Ports of Cough

Photo by Larry Hirshowitz

Trucks inch along Etiwanda Boulevard in Mira Loma, puffing diesel smoke as they jerk forward in heavy traffic. Low-slung warehouses bearing names like Wal-Mart, Black & Decker, Costco and Honda cover the farms and dairies that once thrived here along the banks of the Santa Ana River as recently as the mid-1990s.

Above Etiwanda, trains rumble across a bridge to a Union Pacific rail yard to deliver shiny new cars that will be transferred to trucks and whisked on their way to auto dealerships. Locomotives idling permeate the adjacent Field of Dreams youth sports complex with cancer-causing exhaust as students walk home from nearby Jurupa Valley High School.

Mira Loma in western Riverside County is but one small pocket of Southern California’s so-called logistics industry, which has exploded in the wake of international trade agreements in the 1990s, including GATT and NAFTA. The agreements have brought a rising tide of cheap imports and are to blame for blanketing wide areas of the region under a cloud of toxic diesel exhaust from the armada of ships, trucks and trains that move goods through the ports to inland warehousing centers and on to big-box retailers in California and across the nation.

Since 1998, shipments through the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — the biggest in the nation — have doubled and are projected to quadruple in the next 20 years. Diesel emissions will increase dramatically unless major steps are taken to control them. Yet nobody has figured out how to reduce this health menace. The best proposal on the table is the Port of Los Angeles’ “no net increase” plan, which simply aims to keep the problem from worsening as shipments through its terminals grow.

Simply maintaining the status quo, and hoping the skies clear, is a planning and health disaster. “No net increase is not good enough,” says Ed Avol, a researcher at USC's Keck School of Medicine, who points out that the ill health created by emissions associated with international shipping is already unacceptably high.

“If we don’t address the pollution from goods movement, it’s game over for cleaning up the air in Southern California,” says Barry Wallerstein, executive director of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD). “We need a revolution, not an evolution.”

Logistics has become a bigger source of air pollution in Southern California than any other industry, Wallerstein says, and while emissions from other sources are declining or static, pollution from trucks, ships, trains and other equipment used by the industry is growing by leaps and bounds.

Medical-care bills alone from those emissions total some $2.5 billion a year, an annual subsidy of about $7,000 for each of the 300,000 jobs directly involved in the logistics industry, according to John Haveman, an economist for the Public Policy Institute of California. “The goods-movement industry is using the air for free,” he says.

However, many fear that any drastic and expensive requirements to clean up diesel soot could cause the logistics sector to move to other ports and trigger an economic debacle reminiscent of the aerospace bust of the early 1990s after the Cold War ended.

“Diversion is a concern,” says Barry Sedlik, California's undersecretary of business, transportation and housing.

Some community leaders would welcome shrinkage of the industry, questioning the wisdom of staking the region’s economic-development strategy on logistics. They say imports are hollowing out what’s left of local goods production in Southern California and, like a house of cards, could be quickly blown away by changes in the Chinese yuan, a dramatic increase in the price of oil, or a burst of the real-estate bubble.

“We could have put the same kind of time and money into promoting another industry in this area,” says Penny Newman, a lifelong environmental activist in Mira Loma who runs the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice. “This would be the last type of industry you would focus on.”

Because of the industry’s growing health toll, Newman maintains that a moratorium on port expansion is needed. Warehousing operations, with their trucks, trains and other equipment, will kill more than one out of every 1,000 people who live their lifetimes in Newman’s hometown of Mira Loma, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Their emissions also contribute to asthma and other respiratory diseases. The risk is even greater in other communities and worsening as the volume of imports grows, exceeding three people per thousand in San Pedro and almost three people per thousand around downtown Long Beach.

There are a number of potential strategies to solve the air-pollution problems created by the industry.

Pollution and transportation officials are gradually retrofitting and replacing diesel equipment with catalysts and cleaner-burning engines — using public funds in many cases to subsidize private companies. They have begun operating the ports and warehouses at night to keep trucks off the road at rush hour. In the long term, they want to build new rail lines, rail yards and truck lanes on freeways to eliminate pollution-causing traffic congestion.

Skeptics fear these strategies will do little to reduce pollution, but everything needed to accommodate the promised quadrupling of imports through the region and to complete the wreckage of manufacturing in the region and the nation.