Special Report: U.S. air monitors routinely miss pollution - even refinery explosions

“My throat was closing shut,” recalled Menna, who lives about a mile away. “My nostrils felt like they were on fire.”

“To say there was no impact to air quality was crazy,” said Peter DeCarlo, an environmental engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University who lived in Philadelphia at the time and studied the city’s monitoring system. About 120 million Americans live in counties that have no EPA pollution monitors at all for small particle pollution, according to agency data. That was the case when an oil refinery in Superior, Wisconsin exploded in 2018, causing a leak of 17,000 barrels of asphalt and blanketing Superior and neighboring Duluth, Minnesota in clouds of black smoke.

President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat, has said he would step up prosecutions for illegal polluting; push for a worldwide ban on government subsidies for fossil fuels; tighten fuel economy standards for vehicles; and put limits on methane pollution from oil and gas facilities. Individual monitors have also proven inaccurate, often recording pollution levels that can vary wildly from audit monitors placed beside them, according to government quality-assurance audits. Nearly half of the country’s monitors meant to capture fine particulate matter did not meet federal accuracy standards, an EPA audit released in 2015 found.

Monitors are also sometimes programmed to limit the level of pollution recorded. A government monitor in Imperial County, California, operated by local and state regulators, recorded much lower readings of day-to-day air pollution in 2017 than were actually occurring because it had been programmed to max out at a lower level. The EPA acknowledged the issue to community organizations after the groups discovered higher readings with their own monitors.

In south Philadelphia, Menna said her initial symptoms from the blast’s fallout wore off in about a week, but she continued to cough for six months.A study conducted in 2013 during the administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, detailed a number of problems with the U.S. air monitoring network.

In Imperial County, California, the predominantly Latino community had long suspected government monitors were not giving a true reading of local pollution from agricultural burning and factories across the border in Mexico. An organization called Comite Civico del Valle installed 40 of its own monitors in 2015 to compare against the handful of government monitors.

If they failed to record it then how do you know how much there was

maybe because the great ''deregulator'' trump allowed changes so to make more money but protect humans less...kinda like his schtick on what he calls the global warming hoax. he sure loves his hoaxes

There's still an EPA?

HF is just nasty.

BUT windmills and solar panels are the killers... Oil is good right

Irrelevant U

Because Trumps EPA isn’t concerned with the environment, they’re only concern is how much can’t they get for it.

It would appear the EPA's monitors were restrained for this disaster due to its distinctly high 'cool-explosion'-factor.

Cuz philly is wack

😳EPA?

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