A Trade Boom's Unintended Costs

On a sunny spring day at Hudson Elementary School in Long Beach, the gleeful shrieks of children on the playground almost drowned out the dull roar of truck traffic.

A third-grader raced into school nurse Suzanne Arnold's office.

"Ambrosia's chest is hurting, she's lying down," she announced. The nurse sighed as she tugged out an old green wheelchair. "Ambrosia is one of my regulars. Last week, she had an asthma attack on the school bus and had to be taken to the emergency room."

Hudson Elementary is tucked in the crook of California's busiest industrial arm. A few miles from the booming ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, its playground backs up to the truck-clogged Terminal Island Freeway, flaring refineries and double-stacked freight trains powered by belching locomotives.

More than 40% of retail goods imported to the U.S. funnel past this poor but tidy neighborhood.

Soon, a global truck and train off-loading center may be built less than 1,000 feet from the schoolyard. It is designed to speed up freight transport and improve regional air quality by pulling diesel trucks off the freeways, and would add 1 million more truck trips a year to local streets.

"What's being proposed is sacrificing this neighborhood for the greater good," said Patrick Kennedy, director of the Greater Long Beach Interfaith Community Organization.

Community activists worry that scenario may be repeated along shipping corridors across the state, from West Oakland and Roseville north of Sacramento to Commerce and the Inland Empire.

They say a new statewide emissions-reduction plan approved by the California Air Resources Board on Thursday, meant to minimize pollution caused by the skyrocketing goods movement, is unfunded, contains no new mandatory controls of polluters and would still result in an estimated 800 premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of lost school and work days each year from exposure to diesel soot, ozone and other pollutants.

The freight transportation corridors "are not located in isolated industrial areas, but in fact pass through hundreds of cities, millions of residential homes," Jesse Marquez, executive director of the Coalition for a Safe Environment, said in a recent speech in Wilmington.

"It is the local communities that deal with daily bumper-to-bumper traffic congestion ... that have to breathe the diesel fuel exhaust from ships, trucks, trains and yard equipment every day. It is our children that are suffering from an asthma crisis.... It is our friends and family members who are dying."