Local activists sniff out pollution
By Tom Avril
Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
Posted on Mon, Feb. 24, 2003
Joanne Rossi has a runny nose. And so, try as she might, she can't smell the whiff of petroleum in the air in South Philadelphia.
Not to worry.
She is carrying a contraption that will do the smelling for her: a white, five-gallon bucket fitted with plastic tubing, valves, and a small electric vacuum.
Rossi is a member of the Bucket Brigade.
Whenever she or one of her fellow brigade members smells - or gets wind of - a foul odor, they head outside with their air-sampling buckets, aiming to catch industrial polluters in the act.
"The community... needs to take matters into their own hands," said Rossi, 44, who works as a bank teller when not sampling the air. "If we weren't here to do that, the conditions would only get worse."
Modeled after groups in California and elsewhere, this is a loosely organized brigade of a dozen retirees, homemakers and professionals who live near the vast Sunoco refinery, which can process 330,000 barrels of oil a day.
Five are "samplers," meaning they keep a bucket ready to go in their homes. All are "sniffers," meaning they are constantly on the alert for something noxious in the air.
"Sometimes it smells like rotten ham," Rossi said, braving an icy wind near the corner of 26th Street and Penrose Avenue.
She and Al Caporali, 65, struggled with their bucket, assembled from $130 in parts, mostly from hardware stores.
"This seems loose," Caporali said, fiddling with a valve used to seal off the airtight plastic bag inside the bucket.
Standing near a bunch of Sunoco oil tanks, the samplers seemed almost like insects hovering around a giant beast.
Yet they are taken seriously.
With the help of Clean Water Fund, a local environmental group, the brigade won two $10,000 grants to pursue its work - one from the city, one from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
To date the brigade members have collected five samples and shipped them off to a lab in California, and some of the results seem to be cause for concern.
According to the lab's analysis, the group detected high levels of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), a controversial gasoline additive that is a suspected carcinogen.
The EPA recommends MTBE levels no higher than 1.6 micrograms per cubic meter, over a lifetime of exposure. The brigade got results of 5.6, 8.7 and 15 micrograms per cubic meter on three occasions since June.
The brigade suspects that Sunoco is the source. Company spokesman Gerald Davis said automobile and truck exhaust is likely at fault, but stressed that the company welcomes the brigade's efforts and also holds monthly meetings with a community advisory panel.
Whatever the source, Rossi said the MTBE and other chemicals are a bad sign.
"This is what's in the air that we are breathing, regardless of where it's coming from," said Rossi, who describes her bedroom as a filing cabinet crammed with 12 years of environmental documents.
Elsewhere, brigades have gotten results that sparked official reaction.
An Allegheny County, Pa., brigade last year detected acrylonitrile in the air, a chemical that no company in the area was permitted to emit. The finding prompted the county health department to do its own testing for the chemical; to date it has not found it.
Brigade members say their work is needed because the government does not do a good enough job.
When she or a neighbor smelled an odor, Rossi used to call the city's Air Management Services, which would send an inspector sometimes, and possibly issue a violation if a culprit could be determined.
But the agency's inspectors do not carry testing equipment; the city relies on two stationary sites that measure the air for daily average amounts of a variety of toxins. MTBE is not one of them.
Agency director Morris Fine said stationary measuring sites are an effective safeguard for human health; they track long-term exposure, which is what EPA standards are based on.
Moreover, Fine said, testing in the area of a particular odor isn't necessarily a valid technique.
"You smell things all the time that aren't toxic," Fine said. Likewise, "it may be something that is not detectable by the nose that is toxic."
Fine said he welcomed the group's efforts. The $10,000 grant from the agency will help the group expand testing citywide.
"It gives the citizens a way of participating," he said. "They are filling a gap."
Christine Knapp, a Clean Water Fund employee who coordinates the brigade, said the group's goal is to spur the city to conduct more testing and to consider the cumulative effect of permitting industries to operate in Southwest Philadelphia.
Over the long term, the group hopes to goad the state legislature into enacting air quality standards in Pennsylvania. (It currently has none.)
The key, said Rossi, is vigilance.
She said she is still irritated by a 1997 Johns Hopkins study of Southwest Philadelphia that found no link between pollution and the area's elevated incidence of disease. Researchers did not rule out pollution as a cause, but said the high number of poor, aging and minority residents was a more likely factor.
Rossi and her fellow brigade members, each of whom knows a neighbor with cancer or asthma, are unconvinced.
"Nobody knows what we're breathing and how much," she said. "The government perceives everything to be fine. Only when the people see a problem will the government step up and take a look."
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