Port Marks Progress With Air Quality Monitors—But Not Air Quality Itself

The Port of LA’s four air quality monitoring stations are now operational — that’s the upbeat good news shared by consultant Joel Torcolini, who handles the program, at it’s third update meeting Oct. 24 via Zoom. There were even backup monitors, which could be put in place within a day or two—an announcement that drew immediate appreciation in the chat.

“Thank you for re-visiting our recommendation to have back-ups available,” long-time community activist Kathleen Woodfield said.

But that was the exception. Overall, a whole different tone prevailed in the chat, populated by activists like Woodfield and their long-time expert advisers/allies. It’s taken enormous pressure from them, led by Andrea Hricko, professor emerita with the USC Keck School of Medicine, to get the monitors back online as their history of sporadic breakdowns turned into an almost total collapse as the pandemic set in, and the flood of ship congestion made the lack of monitoring data an even more grave concern.

“During the worst months of air pollution in recent years, half of its monitors were not functioning,”

Ethan Ward summed up at the non-profit Crosstown LA website in early in October.

“As of today all of the instruments and prameters measured in the monitoring program are currently being measured,” Torcolini said confidently. “We currently have backup instrumentation for all the instrumentation except for black carbon which we have one on order. We anticipate getting that within the next month.”

The backup status was both a welcome surprise and a signal of management chaos. Ward’s article cited POLA’s interim Environmental Manager Lisa Wunder—replacing the abruptly dismissed Chris Cannon—saying “that the port needs to spend its money wisely, and that purchasing back-up sensors would be costly,” in response to Hricko’s call for the backups.

“We don’t have an unlimited budget,” Wunder stated. “If we spend all our money buying double of everything, we’re going to waste money on something that we could use to actually have a good impact on the program.”

So, not only was Wunder dismissive of the monitoring’s importance, she was apparently ignorant of what was actually going on.

“Shouldn’t we be asking for a national POLA search for a replacement for Chris Cannon, someone who can seriously try to reduce POLA air pollution?” Hricko said in a followup email. She reiterated her concerns in the meeting chat.

“We need a Director of Env Mgmt who is knowledgeable and concerned about public health and Port impacts…. and who takes these issues seriously,” she wrote. “There should be a broad search to fill this critical role at the Port.”

At the meeting, the activists’ concern turned to the larger picture, as Torcolini turned his attention to long-term data from a report released in September. “The POLA has essentially made little progress in reducing many emissions since 2016,” Hricko summed up in the chat.

“Overall improvement has hit a plateau,” Woodfield chimed in.

“It is not true that concentrations have fallen year over year. Emissions have been generally stable after the low-hanging AQ emissions were eliminated,” activist Peter Warren added. “After about half a dozen years, all of the categories stabilized, and there has been stasis in the past decade with little progress in the various categories. As to the discussion of periodic changes intra-year — that is typical and continues. The real issue around AQ is that CAAP has made little progress in the last 8-10 years.” Finally, he pointed out, “You also need to not allow the COVID drastic changes to be used to misstate progress or lack of progress.”

Eventually, the chat world broke into the presentation world during public comments.

“Everything seems pretty static,” Woodfield said. “Why haven’t you been able to improve air quality over the last six or seven years?” She asked. “You got the low hanging fruit. Probably the clean truck program had a lot to do with that, and now it looks like you need to step up to a higher level of mitigation.”

“We’re doing all we can, Kathleen,” POLA’s Deputy Executive Director Michael DiBernardo replied. “It’s been mentioned many times before is that that last mile is hard to get.”

“I hope it’s not a last mile,” Woodfield shot back.

“We agree,” DiBernardo conceeded, but then went on talk primarily about outside agencies and other actors, first the the California Air Resources Board with respect to trucks, then the shipping industry.
“We’re giving out vouchers from our clean truck program and people are taking advantage of it but not as many as we hope would take advantage of it,” he said regarding trucks. “But there’s going to be new requirements coming in in 2024 with the state of California.”

On the ship side, “There is the green shipping Corridor that we’re heavily involved in and we’re working on those but it’s not something you could just flip the switch and now a ship is going to be is running different,” he said, not mentioning that the shipping corridor is a voluntary agreement.
He also discussed shoreside power plugins, without mentioning POLA’s long history of resisting working with Ruben Garcia, the pioneer of emission -capturing bonnet systems that don’t require shipping companies to do anything to change their ships.

And while he did mention demonstration projects the port has underway, scheduled to be discussed at the next CAAP stakeholder meeting in November, he said nothing about what lies beyond them — a measurable roadmap of mandatory progress.

“The POLA failed again to explain why there are no targets along the way to the so-called ‘goals’ of zero emission yard equipment and trucks by 2030 and 2035. We are almost two decade into the program of CAAP, and still no metric targets for the POLA to meet along the way,” Warren told Random Lengths afterwards. “Senior staff repeat again and again that “the fruition” of the CAAP is coming, but they still have no plan to increase the non-electric truck fee nor to increase subsidies to drive up the purchase of electric trucks. These trucks exist, are on the road and can be bought today.”

“The Port staff clearly avoided answering my questions that were spelled out in the ‘Chat,” Hricko told Random Lengths afterwards. “My comments raised questions about the leadership of the POLA Interim Director of Environmental Management, Lisa Wunder, who recently told the press (XTown) that air quality backup monitors were not necessary and were costly.” And, she reiterated, “My written comments suggested that a broad search be conducted for a new Director of Environmental Management at the Port, someone who has a greater regard for public health and for maintaining critical POLA environmental programs.”

On a more micro — but very telling —level, Hricko called attention to the most dramatic monitoring evidence of continued environmental health harm to the community: the dramatically elevated levels of ultrafine particles registered not by POLA, but by the South Coast Air Quality Management District at its Hudson School Station. While ultrafine particle levels move roughly in tandem at all the POLA monitoring sites over a 24-hour period, they rise steadily in morning hours to around a noon-time peak, then gradually decline throughout the afternoon, still far higher than any other site.

Hricko said she was surprised that air quality monitoring expert Joel Torcolini was unaware of the reason for those high levels of pollution near Hudson School– the huge number of big-rig trucks from the Port heading to the Union Pacific railyard north of the Terminal Island Freeway, which is is adjacent to Hudson School and its play areas. “The community has been counting Port trucks and monitoring pollution for more than 15 years,” Hricko noted.

But it still seems to be a blindspot for the port.