When inventive U.S. Forest Service researchers discovered frightening concentrations of arsenic and cadmium in moss samples from two Portland neighborhoods last May, they wasted no time alerting the state Department of Environmental Quality
You can understand the alarm. Arsenic may cause neurological problems in children, as well as skin and lung cancer. Prolonged exposure to cadmium is brutal on the kidneys and lungs.
As it turns out, DEQ had known these heavy metal carcinogens were fouling our air for years. As the agency's Sarah Armitage told Daniel Forbes at the Portland Mercury, the Department of Environmental Quality had been "hunting" for the cadmium source for three years.
What many families in southeast Portland can't understand is that lack of urgency, a tentativeness that sums up the agency's culture.
They are stunned the Department of Environmental Quality failed for years to isolate these airborne carcinogens in a neighborhood flush with schools, parks and private early childhood learning centers.
They are appalled the agency needed five months to simply deploy an air monitor near the hot spots identified by the Forest Service, and another three months to inform Bullseye Glass that its factory at 3722 Southeast 21st was the main source of the problem.
"I know I'm mad at Bullseye Glass," says Danyelle Prouty, who lives four blocks from the factory, "but who's responsible for monitoring their air quality? I'm mad at whoever is responsible."
Prouty says her neighbors have lamented for years the number of cancer diagnoses in Hosford-Abernethy. She has been diagnosed with Hashimoto's, an autoimmune disease that affects her thyroid.
"You're wondering if there's a correlation," Prouty says. "When you have this disease, everyone says, 'Detoxify your world.' I stopped dyeing my hair. I was always good about organic food.
"But when you're breathing toxic air? What can you do about that?"
On Thursday, Bullseye – an art and architectural glass manufacturer – suspended its use of cadmium and arsenic.
"While the DEQ has not required any action on our part, we decided to take action on our own," Bullseye announced on its Facebook page.
The Department of Environmental Quality has not required action for two reasons:
If the levels of cadmium and arsenic emitted at Bullseye exceeded the agency's safe-air goals by a factor of 200 on several days, DEQ's Marcia Danab reminds us, the company is still "in compliance with its permit."
And that's the case because Oregon has a half-hearted approach to air quality: "Our program is not as strong as Washington or California when it comes to regulating hazardous air pollutants at facilities," Danab acknowledges.
Worse, DEQ tends to safeguard the polluters, not the children at the KinderCare learning center at Fred Meyer's southeast Portland headquarters.
"The DEQ culture is not first about human health. It's polluter first," says Mary Peveto, president of Neighbors for Clean Air. "Their biggest priority is to ensure that the regulated facilities are in compliance."
Even when compliance, with minimal federal standards, threatens Chapman School in 2009 or Winterhaven School in 2015.
This is hardly breaking news, folks. In 2007, I described the agency as "an emasculated, isolated, compromised disaster," and far too little has changed.
The Department of Environmental Quality is still dependent on the industries it regulates, which – when I checked in 2009 – provide 70 percent of its funding.
Watchdog? "It always appeared to me that the DEQ was industry's lap dog," former state Sen. Charlie Ringo, D-Beaverton once told me. "During the '90s, the DEQ was so constantly browbeat by the Republican leadership that it got to acting in a subservient way toward polluting industries."
Recent Democratic governors and Democratic majorities at the Capitol have been content with that. At the end of DEQ's sophomoric 10-year search for "Portland Air Toxics Solutions," the agency couldn't even deliver a battle plan.
"Our intention was to have an action plan to reduce toxics," Danab says. "What we ended up with was a set of priorities. There was no funding to implement any kind of plan."
A plan to clear the air of arsenic or diesel fumes might cost industry a job or two. Our Legislature has decided we can't live with that.
We live, instead, with alarming amounts of toxic metal in the air we breathe. We live with the delusion that DEQ is protecting us, not business as usual.
So it is that at the Children's Creative Learning Center just downwind from Bullseye Glass, the staff is pulling grass from the toxic soil, removing planters, power-washing the center and, for the moment, keeping more than 100 children indoors.
Fifty miles to the south? Your Legislature is telling everyone to suck it up and carry on.
-- Steve Duin
stephen.b.duin@gmail.com