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That Sickening Smell?
"Getting rid of the smell doesn’t necessarily take care of the toxins in the air."
By Sophie Simon-Ortiz
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Where you live can have a significant impact on your health. Youth Radio’s Sophie Simon-Ortiz grew up in West Berkeley near a steel manufacturing plant, and still has vivid memories of the smell that poured regularly from its smoke stacks and permeated the neighborhood. The smell is still there. So Sophie decided to find out why, after so many years and complaints by nearby residents, not much seems to have changed at all.
Check out this article from the SF Gate for a news update on the Pacific Steel Casting Company!
Pacific Steel to Reduce Toxic Emissions, Carolyn Jones (02/01/07)
During WW2, West Berkeley became a center of industry in the Bay Area, and if you walk along the train tracks that still run through the western edge of my childhood neighborhood, you’ll still pass dozens of warehouses and rusted smokestacks. The sound of the train whistle is so much a part of my childhood memories, that when I hear it now, it’s still comforting to me. There’s something else that reminds me of that time. The best way to describe it is the smell of burning pot handle that’s been left on the stovetop too long.
KATRI (on tape)
I don’t remember what it smelled like as much as I remember my dad and me being outside...
SOPHIE
That’s one of my oldest friend Katri Foster who also grew up in West Berkeley.
KATRI (on tape)
We would go for walks every now and then around the neighborhood and every now and then he would start complaining about the smell in the air and be really grossed out by it and I didn’t really know what that meant…I think I thought that was just what the neighborhood smelled like, like what are we gonna do?
SOPHIE
Katri’s house is only a few blocks from one of the few remaining factories in West Berkeley - Pacific Steel Casting. Now that we’re in our twenties, Katri and I talk about the pollution in the neighborhood. Her little brother Joe is ten. He developed asthma as a baby, and had to go to the hospital often. The asthma got better for a while, until last October, when he started having headaches.
KATRI (on tape)
…and he wasn’t eating a lot and he had been throwing up and they found out he had a brain tumor and for a ten-year-old that’s just not obviously very common and it was really I mean there’s no history of this in the family.
SOPHIE
Katri says the first thing that popped into her head to explain her brother’s condition was the pollution.
KATRI (on tape)
I mean of course there’s always a possibility that it was a coincidence and there’s so many things that could cause this happen but it just seemed really weird and given that he developed asthma so young I don’t think it’s that far off to think it’s a possibility.
SOPHIE
Katri’s family is convinced of the connection, although they don’t have any direct proof that pollution is what caused Joe’s health problems. But there are some frightening statistics about our zip code. The most recent city of Berkeley health reports show that the West Berkeley zip code has the highest asthma hospitalization rates in the city.
BEATRIZ (on tape)
What I have seen an increase in children with asthma.
SOPHIE
That’s Beatriz Leyva-Cutler. She’s the director at the childcare center I attended before kindergarten.
BEATRIZ (on tape)
Whereas before 1 child out of 62, now 2-3 children in any one classroom showing asthmatic symptoms. Coughing, wheezing…
SOPHIE
That’s Beatriz Leyva-Cutler. She’s the director at the childcare center I attended before kindergarten. The center is right up the street from the steel plant, and not far from the freeway and the city’s bus yard. While her observations make it seem like Katri’s family has legitimate concerns, to be fair, there are two sides to every story. So I went to the plant – the source of the distinct smell in my neighborhood – to get their perspective.
Even though I lived just a few blocks from Pacific Steel Casting, I had never been inside until now. The PR people at the plant don’t deny the smell. Elizabeth Jewel is a consultant for the company and says the odor is a product of the manufacturing process. She also says production has increased in recent years making the situation worse.
ELIZABETH JEWEL (on tape)
And so the neighbors have been upset about the smell, understandably so, and the company has responded to them by coming up together with a proposal to install a 2 million dollar filter that the company is confident will address all of if not the majority of the odor problems.
SOPHIE
As the neighbors see it, getting rid of the smell doesn’t necessarily take care of the toxins in the air. They want the plant to stop using toxic products in the first place. But the company isn’t planning on stopping their business. And Elizabeth Jewel points out that the neighborhood was industrial before it was residential.
ELIZABETH JEWEL (on tape)
It’s an age old problem where you have industry, freeways..and housing. You know housing has grown up around Pacific Steel and so we have understandable conflicts where you have people living next to an industrial site.
SOPHIE
What complicates the situation is that many of the employees for Pacific Steel live in the neighborhood and it’s one of the biggest employers in Berkeley, with union wages. And for many people who depend on those paychecks, it’s more of a health risk to be unemployed than exposed to bad air. But David Schroeder at the West Berkeley Alliance for Clean Air and Safe Jobs says everyone is entitled to clean air.
DAVID (on tape)
We’ve done a bit of research on the toxics on what’s in the air and there’s all sorts of stuff you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near if you had the choice about it.
SOPHIE
David points to a test his organization conducted of levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.
DAVID (on tape)
…and there the levels of formaldehyde were about twenty-four times the threshold for EPA region 6…and so that’s kind of scary to us.
SOPHIE
And those fears are real for neighborhood people like my friend Katri. For now, it looks like her brother is going to be okay when he finishes chemotherapy and her family plans to stay in West Berkeley. Meanwhile, the conversations between community groups and Pacific Steel continue, and people keep moving into the area.
Now there’s a new generation of children falling asleep to the sound of the trains passing. And I’m sure they’ll grow up to love this neighborhood like I do, because it’s rich in a strong working class history, shared among many different kinds of people.
My hope is that they don’t have to hold their breath when they go outside like I had to
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