Currently, the facility burdens local streets packing them with dirty diesel trucks passing by Hudson and Cabrillo schools to the railyard where smoky locomotives operate right next to Stevens Middle School and homes. As a result, children studying inside or playing outside all breathe air laced with diesel exhaust. The Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma (LBACA) and other groups have been monitoring this project and its impacts on the community. Trained by faculty and staff from the University of Southern California (USC), LBACA’s community volunteers, mothers of children with asthma, conducted traffic counts along the Terminal Island Freeway, which feeds trucks from the twin ports to the railyard. In a one hour period, on multiple days and times, we counted more than 500 trucks an hour passing directly by local schools. Other studies verify our results.  With the expansion, the number of trucks heading to the railyard will double.

It was an inappropriate decision to put a polluting railyard next to homes and schools 28 years ago.  But today we know more about the health risks of diesel exhaust. USC’s Community Outreach and Education Program has summarized studies showing the pollutants and risks near the UP railyard. The report can be viewed by clicking here.

USC scientists have found that children living close to busy roads and freeways are more likely to have asthma and reduced lung function. Their lungs don’t work as well as those of children in less polluted areas. UCLA research findings show that pregnant women exposed to air pollution near busy roads are more likely to have premature babies and babies with low birth weight. And more than 40 studies show that exposure to diesel exhaust is linked with lung cancer and heart disease.   

Government studies also show health risks. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently completed a Health Risk Assessment of the Union Pacific railyard and found that of the 18 yards they studied, this yard has the 4th highest diesel cancer risk, with nearly 600,000 residents experiencing a risk above the “acceptable” 10 in 1 million. The risks do not fall below 10 in 1 million until you are more than “5 miles upwind and 8 miles downwind from the railyard boundary.” At the railyard boundaries, the cancer risk is 700 in one million, or 70 times the acceptable risk.
So, with research findings of health risks and this railyard being such a heavy contributor to pollution in a large geographic area, why are the Ports considering its expansion? Why not identify means to immediately clean up the railyard now?  Why not find a better place to put cargo containers onto trains than at a railyard next door to homes and schools?

There are solutions. First, the Port of L.A. and CARB should make the railyard clean up the mess that it has caused by dramatically reducing its emissions with cleaner locomotives, equipment and trucks, so that residents and school children are protected. Second, rather than expanding railyards next door to schools and homes, the ports should be investing in the exclusive development of more on-dock rail capacity on port property.  Then a cargo container would get directly onto a train AT THE PORTS, which is what the Alameda Corridor project always claimed would happen, and what the Port’s Clean Air Action Plan promotes.  Together, these actions would take several million trucks a year off our local freeways and clean up the highly polluting yard.

The formal name for the UP railyard is the Union Pacific Intermodal Container Transfer Facility (ICTF).  Environmental review of its expansion plan starts next week.

Elina Green is the Project Manager for the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma.