Category Archives: Bay Area Air Quality Management District

This is where air quality was the worst in the Bay Area in 2018

Repost from SF Gate

This is where air quality was the worst in the Bay Area in 2018

By Drew Costley, March 13, 2019 12:30 pm PDT

FILE – The San Francisco skyline shrouded in smoke on in this file photo from Nov. 16, 2018, a day when the air quality reached purple on the Air Quality Index (AQI).Click or swipe through the slideshow to see where the best and worst air quality was in the Bay Area in 2018.  Photo: Russell Yip / The Chronicle
IMAGE 1 OF 14 – FILE – The San Francisco skyline shrouded in smoke on in this file photo from Nov. 16, 2018, a day when the air quality reached purple on the Air Quality Index (AQI). | Photo: Russell Yip / The Chronicle  … more

Residents of San Francisco experienced the worst air quality in the city’s recorded history in 2018 because the historic Camp Fire in Butte County. The rest of the region was choking on smoke from the wildfire, too. At one point in November 2018, Northern California had the worst air quality in the world.

During the Camp Fire, Vallejo residents experienced the worst air quality of the year on November 16, the eighth day of the fire, according to the measurements taken by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). On that same day, several other Bay Area spots also recorded their worst air quality of the year.

READ MORE: San Francisco AQI jumps to 271, worst air quality ever recorded in the city

“A few really big events can really affect the air quality in the Bay Area,” Charley Knoderer, meteorology manager for the BAAQMD, said. He added that the frequency and intensity of wildfires in Northern California in recent years is “highly unusual and causes a lot of problems.”

Kristine Roselius, communications manager for the BAAQMD, said that climate change is “supercharging and exacerbating” wildfires in the region. “We’ve got more extreme weather and more extreme weather is causing more catastrophic wildfires that are larger in scale, that are harder to put out, and they put out a lot of smoke.”

This chart shows the number of times the Bay Area has exceeded the federal standard for PM2.5 (particulate matter) since 2000. Although overall air quality is getting better due regulations, wildfire smoke is contributing to the number of days that a federal exceedance occurs in a given year. Photo: Courtesy Of The Bay Area Air Quality Management District
This chart shows the number of times the Bay Area has exceeded the federal standard for PM2.5 (particulate matter) since 2000. Although overall air quality is getting better due regulations, wildfire smoke is contributing to the number of days that a federal exceedance occurs in a given year. Photo: Courtesy Of The Bay Area Air Quality Management District

Outside of the historically bad air quality of November 2018, where in the Bay Area do we find the worst air quality? SFGATE averaged the highest recorded Air Quality Index (AQI) ratings to start to get an idea of where it was the worst.

Click through the slideshow at the top of this story to see where air quality was best and worst in 2018.

The AQI is a combination of air quality measures – carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter and sulfur dioxide – taken by the BAAQMD.

Knoderer said traffic congestion is the largest contributor to poor ambient air quality. The amount of traffic in West Oakland and near Laney College, along with action along the Port of Oakland, make the air quality in the area so poor.

Ambient is a key distinction from the moments, like during a wildfire, when there’s unusually poor air quality. Knoderer pointed out that if it hadn’t been for the smoke from the Camp Fire, the Bay Area would not have had any days that exceeded federal standards for the level of particulate matter in the air last year.

ALSO: N95, P100: What do all these mask numbers mean and how do I know it’s keeping me safe?

“We generally have two seasons that affect air pollution differently,” Koderer said. “You have summer, when ozone is the primary pollutant, primarily from cars. And then you have the winter, which is primarily particulate matter or PM2.5, and that’s more local forces like fireplaces.”

Roselius added, “Wood fires are the number one source of winter time air pollution.”

This chart shows the number of days the the Bay Area has exceeded the state and national standards for ozone since 1974. Photo: Courtesy Of The Bay Area Air Quality Management District
This chart shows the number of days the the Bay Area has exceeded the state and national standards for ozone since 1974.  Photo: Courtesy Of The Bay Area Air Quality Management District

The good news is that most of the monitoring stations in the Bay Area had monthly averages of particulate matter – different from the average of all of the monthly AQI highs – that were all under the federal health standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter per day.

Two of the three monitoring sites with the highest monthly averages in 2018 were in Oakland, at Laney College and West Oakland. The other was on Owens Court in Pleasanton. All three sites averaged 14.4 micrograms per cubic meter per day last year.

Bay Area Air District proposing to give refineries a pass on air monitoring

[Editor: For more, including HOW TO SEND THE AIR DISTRICT YOUR COMMENT, see the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s Notice of Public Hearing.  Plan to attend on December 19, 2018.  – RS]

BAAQMD: Costs for daily air monitoring too expensive… poor refineries…

By Benicia Vice Mayor Steve Young, October 23, 2018 
Steve Young, Benicia Vice Mayor

The Bay Area Air District (BAAQMD) recently released their proposal on how to deal with the problem of excess ROG (Reactive Organic Gas) emissions from refinery cooling towers. Here are my favorite two sections from their proposed way of dealing (or more accurately, not dealing), with the problem …

Amendments to Rule 11-10 reduce monitoring of cooling towers for hydrocarbon leaks from daily to weekly, with provisions to extend monitoring periods after proving no leaks for an extended time. Costs for daily monitoring were found to be excessive relative to the potential hydrocarbon emission reductions. Requirements for cooling tower best management practices and reporting were eliminated when found to be focused primarily on Process Safety Management and cooling water chemistry rather than leak detection.

The only feasible method to reduce ROG emissions from cooling towers is more frequent monitoring and repair, but this method was concluded to not be feasible due to economic factors as per CEQA Guidelines §15364. Thus, no feasible mitigation measures have been identified that could avoid the significant impact or reduce the impact to less than significant.

Generally, CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act) does not allow  an environmental impact to be ignored based on the fact that reducing those impacts will cost money. And refineries certainly SHOULD be expected to spend money on such things as more frequent monitoring and repairs.

Going to testify at these hearings – where testimony is limited to no more than three minutes, and often shorter – is both necessary and, seemingly, pointless.

Questionable community outreach by Air District for Industrial Safety Ordinance audits

From local emails…

FIRST ROUND OF EMAILS…

From: Roger Straw
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2018 9:45 AM
Subject: FW: [BAAQMD Coalition] Questionable community outreach for Industrial Safety Ordinance audits

This is amazing – read below, from bottom, up.  (Click on the image for larger display.)  And then come back and ask a couple of questions:

  1. Does Solano County have to report to the public like this now – even under current regulations?  Do they publish a notice like the one Nancy sent from Crockett?  Is this something that our newbie “CUPA” needs to be doing on our behalf?
  2. If/when we have an ISO, what assurances do we have the Hazardous Materials staff (Contra Costa OR Solano) would be any more attentive to Benicia citizens’ needs.  (Randy Sawyer should be embarrassed by this.)

I think the Working Group could be making a big deal out of this!  I think I’ll post about it on the BenIndy.

Roger


Begin forwarded message:

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018, 3:28 PM Nancy Rieser via BAAQMD Network wrote:

The Contra Costa Health Department considers a booth behind an elementary school two blocks away from a street fair in Crockett as a “public meeting..”   They reckon that the booth where they will be twiddling their fingers while the locals drink and dance a few blocks away will meet its obligation to hold a face-to-face public meeting.

Guess we are lucky.  Martinez gets its face-to-face at a Christmas tree farm in August on National Night Out.

I called the Health Department:  The gentleman who answered the phone said that apparently nobody cares enough to hear this kind of information and they won’t hold a meeting unless they can get a guaranteed audience of 25 people.  Neither will they mail notices to individual homes about their meeting to hustle the crowds.  “It is too expensive.”

LATER, VERY INTERESTING!

From: Ralph Dennis
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2018 12:26 PM
Subject: ISO related

I noticed in the Benicia Herald this morning two public notices for Risk Management Plans prepared by Solano County Department of Resource Management, one for Praxair and the other for Benicia’s Water Treatment Plant. These are part of the 5-year audit review process, I believe, the same reports referenced in the Contra Costa County notice you sent around the other day.

I figured there ought to be one for Valero, so I called the Solano County Department of Resource Management. Turns out the Valero plan was filed in Dec. 2017 and is still under review. The staffer I spoke with who is doing the review is suppose to call me about status. Interesting, I guess: no public meetings planned, copies of plans not available in our library (as in Contra Costa County). He seemed surprised at my question about public meetings, said he could check with management.

CCHMP public notice meetings July-Aug 2018

ISO Working Group personal reflection: City Council says no to industrial safety…for now

By Roger Straw

Council turns down draft local ISO, puts trust in Valero, County, State and Air District

Roger Straw, The Benicia Independent

It’s a sad story.  An ambitious and dedicated group of us formed a Benicia ISO Working Group over 7 months ago.  We met, researched, wrote, met with officials and embraced the pro-bono attorney labors of Terry Mollica, who drafted a head-start on Benicia’s own Industrial Safety Ordinance.

The City Council didn’t buy it.  Mostly, they bought the joint opinion of Valero, Solano County and the Bay Area Air District – that a LOCAL ordinance is redundant given new regional and state regulations.  Which of course, it isn’t – redundant, that is.

Mayor Patterson and Vice-mayor Steve Young voted to direct staff to further review the concept and the draft ordinance and return to Council with recommendations.  Mark Hughes (predictably), along with Alan Schwartzman and Tom Campbell, voted to wait awhile.

Significantly, for the first time on the public record, all five agreed that the City of Benicia and its residents are long overdue for air monitors.

Campbell and Schwartzman threatened Valero that they would revisit the issue and vote in favor of an ISO in November 2018 if Valero has not complied with a new Air District requirement for a few “fenceline” air monitors on Valero’s southeast border.

Of course, we would get fenceline AND COMMUNITY-BASED, neighborhood air monitors with the draft ISO.  But three Councilmembers chose to take a slower route with much less leverage over our local Goliath.

It could go either way in November or December.  Valero could conceivably install the required but totally inadequate fenceline monitors.  Or they could seek a delay, or just never perform.  It really doesn’t matter.  Many are saying we should sit tight, and hold Councilmembers Schwartzman and Campbell to their promise if Valero doesn’t comply – that they would then vote for an ISO.  Fine, but a better plan is to simply remember that Councilmember Hughes is up for re-election in November.  Whether or not Valero complies, a third vote on Council would be assured with Hughes’ defeat in November.

This isn’t over.  Benicia continues as the only refinery town in the Bay Area without a local industrial safety ordinance.  Our City staff and our citizens need a measure of oversight and control when it comes to our public health and safety.