Pollution, trash hide around us

Breathe.

And ... again.

Cancer-causing particles, tiny pieces of petroleum coke dust that omnipresent sea breezes pervasively carry throughout Long Beach, have entered your lungs.

Maybe, one day, they will kill you.

Probably not. You live with the risk.

Swim at the wrong place on the wrong day, and bacteria enters your bloodstream through a tiny cut on your foot. You get typhoid fever. Or maybe it's a virus; you contract meningitis. Swim in Long Beach, and you may be swimming in the the oily wastes, the pesticides, even the pet feces of a million households whose storm drains feed rivers that dump into Long Beach.

That soot covering your car after itâs sat in the parking lot all day, that's waste from the airplanes descending over campus as they approach Long Beach Airport. Places you thought safe from development, they are becoming housing tracts because there is simply too much money to be made. All one needs to do to circumvent the state's landmark 1972 Coastal Act to destroy a wetland, such as the Los Cerritos Wetlands not too far from campus, is to pay for the restoration of a wetland somewhere else. Developers have been doing this for years.
 

Cristian Vera Aleman/Daily Forty-Niner

To understand pollution and its impact on our daily lives, and what we as citizens might or should do about it, you must first understand the nature of today's pollution. For the most part, sludge does not openly pour into a harbor and  smokestacks do not spew black filth into the air without constraint. Rather, today's pollution is more subtle.

An oil tanker does not dump a thousand gallons of fuel into the ocean; a thousand weekend boats instead accidentally spill a gallon of gas when they go the pumps. A thousand gallons of paint thinner aren't dumped into the sewage system; instead, thousands of art students over thousands of days rinse a thousand brushes that were dipped in paint thinner in the sinks of the Fine Arts Building because it is convenient.

We, in this eight-page special section, examine pollution not from a macroscopic point of view. We look instead at the multitude of smaller ways in which we all impact the environment.

Together they present a troubling image.

Especially considering that despite the tremendous advances in pollution control over the past 30 years, so much is left undone. For example, producers of petroleum coke, which is a byproduct of the refining industry and is used as a fuel source in Asia, were supposed to have the open piles of coke in Long Beach and Los Angeles covered by 1985. They have been able to win exemptions from government for 15 years.

While some cities, meanwhile, divert water collected via storm drains to the sewage system during rain (so that it will be treated), for the most part contaminated storm water runs to the sea, and the only weapon against it is education.

"Until we control people in their stupidity," said Gordon Labedz, chair of the L.A. and Orange county chapters of the Sierra Club, "urban runoff is going to make our beaches unfit for human enjoyment."

Hundreds of trucks idle as the wait their turn at the Port of Long Beach; there is no law against idling, and tons of toxic diesel exhaust swirl in the air for no apparent reason. Winds carry this pollution as far as the Grand Canyon, where visitors on some days can no longer see the opposing canyon rim because of the smog.

On this campus, paint thinner is routinely disposed improperly, and no one seems overly concerned. Fans for ventilation are left off. "I'm getting woozy just standing here," said one art student, Marla Michika, recently as she admired a fresh work. "It's not that bad when there are just a couple of people here, but when there's about 30, which often times there is, it gets really bad.ä

There is a proposal to make Long Beach the home of a Carnival cruise ship, which proponents believe will be a boon to local tourism. Environmentalists believe it will be a boon to local pollution.

"We don't need to add more trash to an already polluted water," said Robert Palmer, chair of the Long Beach chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. "It's time for us to tell city hall we want our beach back."

In this special section, we hope to raise the level of education and consciousness on some of the pressing issues we face locally. We know this package is far from complete. But, like many of the environmentalists whom we interviewed, we seek only to make a difference.

GET INVOLVED
To report an illegal hazardous material spill in Los Angeles County, or to get information of how to properly dispose of common hazardous substances such as motor oil, call (888) CLEAN-LA.