L.A. residents ferret out toxic sites for researchers

A few blocks away she noted a child care center, where youngsters played outside in air that reeked of a chemical.

"There are a lot of hazardous waste sites around my house," Herrera said in Spanish through an interpreter. "I wanted to do something to help out."

Frustrated because she must keep her asthma- and bronchitis-suffering daughters indoors to protect their health, Herrera recently joined a cadre of northeastern San Fernando Valley residents to catalog the location of industrial businesses and their proximity to gathering places for young and elderly residents, who could be most affected by contaminated air and water.

The effort, known as "ground truthing," is part of an ambitious project devised by environmental justice researchers and a local nonprofit group to compile an accurate picture of where toxic and hazardous sites are located in Southern California and how they affect the health of nearby communities.

"The idea is to try to find the truth on the ground, and we thought, 'Who better than the residents?' " said Michele Prichard, director of change initiatives at the Liberty Hill Foundation. The organization paid residents this summer, in communities including Pacoima, Van Nuys, South L.A., the Figueroa corridor downtown, Boyle Heights, Maywood, Commerce and Wilmington, to walk select neighborhoods and write down what they saw.

Updated information is necessary because state and federal environmental databases that track industrial uses by location or type of pollution they emit are incomplete, said James Sadd, a professor of environmental science at Occidental College.

Without data that show the full picture, lawmakers have a hard time drafting laws to protect neighborhoods and can't accurately target cleanup efforts, residents and researchers said.

"It is a challenge to look at cumulative risk," said Alvaro Alvarado, an air pollution specialist with the California Air Resources Board, which funded similar research by Sadd and others in Oakland.