| June 23, 2005
Responding to residents’ concerns about potential health effects from toxic
air pollution, the South Coast Air Quality Management District will conduct
a special air monitoring project in Santa Ana starting this summer.
“AQMD is committed to investigating toxic air pollution levels in Santa
Ana,” said Miguel Pulido, Mayor of Santa Ana and an AQMD Governing Board
member. “If we find anything unusual, we will do everything in our power to
reduce the risk to school children and residents.”
AQMD pledged to locate a temporary monitoring station in Santa Ana
following a community meeting last week at Franklin Elementary School in
Santa Ana. At the meeting, attended by nearly 100 parents, teachers and
government officials, parents expressed concerns about children at Franklin
and other schools in Santa Ana who have been diagnosed with leukemia, as
well as those that suffer from asthma and other respiratory ailments.
AQMD will re-prioritize the placement of a special mobile monitoring
station, currently slated for use in an ongoing toxics monitoring program,
to a location to be determined in Santa Ana.
The monitoring station, housed in a large metal shipping container, would
measure several dozen toxic air contaminants including benzene, a
cancer-causing chemical. Increased incidences of leukemia, a cancer of the
tissues that form white blood cells, have been observed in people exposed to
benzene in the workplace, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency.
Once a location is secured in consultation with school district and other
officials, the monitoring station can be equipped, instruments calibrated
and the container shipped to a Santa Ana site within a month.
Air toxics measurements would then take place. Final analysis and
results of such monitoring generally are available about a month after the
completion of field measurements.
In addition to the full-scale mobile monitoring station, AQMD will place
a sampling device in Santa Ana to monitor ambient levels of the
cancer-causing compound hexavalent chromium. Instruments will be set up
within a week following the determination of a location.
Hexavalent chromium is emitted in small amounts from Markland
Manufacturing, a motorcycle parts manufacturer at 1111 E. McFadden Ave. in
Santa Ana -- across the street from Kennedy Elementary School.
AQMD is the air pollution control agency for Orange County and major
portions of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
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