Georges Thurston

Dr George Thurston talks Navajo Generating Station pollution & health 11 14 13

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• published: 06 Jan 2014
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During the November 2014 public hearings by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the best plan to reduce pollution from Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant that is located on the Navajo Reservation near Page, Ariz., Dr. George Thurston testified about the harmful and even deadly health impacts to children, babies and pregnant women, who breathe in the pollution from NGS. Thurston is a professor of Environmental Medicine at the New York University of Medicine. "For decades, the Navajo Generating Station has been spewing pollution into the air that the downwind communities breathe, Thurston said. "Health damages linked to NGS cost approximately $13 million in health impacts each year." Thurston added that a new study showed that more than 500 extra asthma exacerbation days, hundreds of lost work, and between two to five extra deaths in Arizona were linked to the health impacts that air pollution from NGS has on surrounding communities each year that the US EPA's Best Available Control Technology is not applied to the plant. But NGS owners, the Navajo Nation and other interested parties, which have dubbed themselves the Technical Working Group, are pushing their best plan, which they claim would reduce even more pollution from NGS than the US EPA's -- in 30 years, not five years. "EPA must honor the five-year compliance schedule for NGS to install pollution controls, just as it has with other coal plants," Elsa Johnson, a Navajo tribal member, said. "This time is critical to protecting public health for the Navajo and Hopi communities because we live closest to the plant and are most exposed to the harmful toxins and particulates from their smokestacks." "Metro-Phoenix and southern Arizona do not have to contend with pollution from most of Arizona's coal-fired power plants, whereas the Navajo and Hopi Reservations are surrounded by five plants," Johnson added. "Every single day that goes by makes a different in our health, especially for our children and elderly whose lungs are most vulnerable."