I live ten miles from Hudson School.  My house is up on a hill on an eastern slope of Rancho Palos Verdes.  When I moved to my house eight years ago, I noticed black oily dust on my windowsills.  I had lived all of my life in Glendale, California, and the only dust I had ever seen was gray and fluffy.  I asked one of my neighbors if she had the same black and oily dust, and she said, “Yes.  It’s because of the refineries and ports.”

From my house I can see San Pedro, Long Beach, the ocean, and both ports.  On some mornings before leaving for work, I have seen a giant cloud cover blanketing the entire area.  Sometimes that cover has been tinted yellow from the pollution, and I almost can’t believe that I have to drive under it to get to my job at Hudson.

Hudson has approximately 1100 students.  According to my records, 185 of them have asthma (17% of the total student body).  I have about 65 inhalers in my office; some of them for the most severe asthmatics at Hudson.  

Asthma inhalers don’t cure asthma.  The inhalers merely help decrease the swelling and inflammation of the children’s irritated airways.  Actually, the inhalers serve to open or widen their airways, resulting in their being able to inhale even greater numbers of particulates in the air.  At Hudson, we can truthfully and sadly say that “we are what we breathe,” for much of these ultra-fine particulates that we continually breathe in will literally become part of our bodies, for they will cross right over from our lungs into our bloodstream, travel throughout our bodies, and ultimately lodge in our organs and blood vessels; never to leave us, and forever be a part of us.   

In February 2007, Andrea Hricko, Associate Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, visited our campus with a group of people participating in the “Smart Growth and Global Trade Tour.”  They had a particulate meter (or p-trak, which looks like a hand-held vacuum cleaner) with them during their visit, which was measuring the number of particulates per cubic centimeter in the air, roughly the volume of a sugar cube.  While we were in a classroom with tour participants, the meter was registering 8,000 particulates per cubic centimeter.  When we went outside towards the playground, the meter was registering 40,000 particulates and climbing.  We did not go to the fence next to the freeway, because the children were on the playground during their recess.  Had we gone to the fence, the numbers would have undoubtedly been much higher.  

At Hudson, we have done everything we could possibly do to help keep the children safe from polluted air.  Our district has helped us by providing 60 portable in-room air filters for all of the classes.  The children are typically in their classrooms for five hours each day, and we are happy that during that time, they are able to breathe clean, filtered air.  It is the remaining 19 hours of each day that we worry about; when children are at play, at home, sleeping, continually breathing the polluted, particulate-filled air. Unfortunately, our filters are starting to clog up with debris and need replacement, and we do not have the hundreds of dollars for each unit to purchase replacement filters.

In January 2007, USC released a study stating that children who live near a major highway are not only more likely to develop asthma or other respiratory diseases, but their lung development may also be stunted, resulting in respiratory problems for the rest of their lives.  This is likely no surprise to anyone.   

Because of devastating impacts on air quality, I am opposed to the development of BNSF’s SCIG (Southern California International Gateway) project, 750 feet from our playground’s chain link fence.  I am also opposed to the expansion of Union Pacific’s ICTF (Intermodal Container Transfer Facility) project, about _ mile down the road from Hudson, behind Stephen’s Middle School.  If both facilities are built, there will be an increase in diesel truck traffic by 3 million trucks per year on the four-lane Terminal Island Freeway.  

They say that societies can be judged by how well they care for their weakest and most vulnerable members.  We at Hudson and Bethune realize this and are doing our part by helping these precious children learn all that they can, in order to become productive and valued members of society.  We know that their health is of paramount importance, and that they are entitled to breathe clean, fresh, pure, unpolluted air.   We know that the addition of expanded rail yards would make our air even worse, and it is incomprehensible and unbelievably inhumane to think that these expansions could ever occur.

This is a precious community, filled with citizens of all ages, who have every right to expect that the air that they breathe will not eventually kill them.  These people are not dispensable and simply unfortunate health casualties or collateral damage, resulting from rail yard growth and expansion.  Each and every set of lungs in this community is precious.  We need to do all that we can to insure that everyone who lives, works, and goes to school here will be able to live long, happy, and healthy lives.