Chapman neighbors fight for DEQ pollution monitors

Neighborhood Beat • State says equipment needed most at school in North Portland

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Jun 4, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (7 Reader comments)

A $50,000 pollution monitoring site is now located at Lillis-Albina Park, adjacent to the Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy for Young Women in North Portland.

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

It isn’t too often that parents at Northwest Portland’s Chapman Elementary School look with envy at Jefferson High School’s Harriet Tubman girls academy in North Portland.

But Tubman has something a number of Northwest Portland residents think rightfully belongs in their part of town — a $50,000 air pollution monitoring setup that last week was placed next to the playground at Tubman, which educates sixth-graders through 10th-graders.

About 80 Northwest Portland residents attended a heated meeting with Oregon Department of Environmental Quality officials at Chapman Elementary late last month, and the testing equipment was part of what concerned them.

They asked for major changes in the way nearby neighborhood foundry ESCO Corp. runs its operations. ESCO’s five-year emissions permit is up for renewal in July.

A petition with signatures from more than 1,000 Northwest Portland neighborhood residents was presented to DEQ officials. The petition asks DEQ to require a variety of emissions reducing modifications at ESCO, which makes industrial steel products, and to stipulate in ESCOs next permit that the foundry cannot operate on DEQ-designated air quality alert days.

Northwest Portland residents and their experts at the meeting expressed concerns over possible long-term effects of the carcinogenic industrial chemicals in the air around Chapman. State officials maintained the ESCO emissions aren’t dangerous. Which brought the discussion around to whether further monitoring of the air around the school would help the two sides reach a consensus.

The meeting was inspired by a computer-modeling study of air pollution at schools around the country. That study was commissioned by USA Today, which hired researchers at three universities. It found industrial pollutants in the air at Chapman Elementary are among the worst in the country — putting Chapman in the bottom 2 percent of schools in the country. Abernethy School in Southeast Portland was also rated in the bottom 2 percent among schools nationwide. Tubman was ranked in the bottom 9 percent — not quite as low.

Clarendon Elementary School in North Portland, George Middle School in North Portland and the individual schools that comprise the Roosevelt campus in North Portland, were ranked worse than Chapman — in the bottom 1 percent nationally for air quality.

In fact, parents at the other schools with high levels of air pollution may not know it, but their schools had been in competition with Chapman and Tubman. Partly as a result of the USA Today study, the federal Environmental Protection Agency decided to fund air pollution monitoring equipment at select schools around the country. Because the equipment is so costly, the EPA provided enough funding for only one monitor at a Portland school.

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