2 October 2012

A group of neighbors who live on the bluff above Swan Island were invited last month to the Daimler Trucks North America-Western Star Star Truck Plant headquarters for a meeting.

Many of these neighbors have been meeting regularly, in each other’s living rooms and basements for just over a year. It was about that time they started to reach out to each other, as they came and went from their houses, about paint fumes in the air. It is a neighborhood with a lot of young couples and young families scattered among residents that have been there for decades. Access to Willamette Blvd make it a favorite neighborhood among cyclists and runners. It was the old timers that probably first linked the paint fumes to the former Freightliner facility just below them on Swan Island. It is a truck painting plant that only recently has come back to life when Daimler took over and added a second shift. About the time moms said they were pulling their children in from playing in the back yard because the paint fumes are so bad, they know that can’t be good.

As the invitation from plant manager, Paul Erdy, informed them: “Daimler Trucks North America is extending an invitation to [neighbors] at the Portland Truck Plant regarding airborne odors in the area. As many of you have noticed, Daimler has been conducting air sampling in the Wellesley Avenue area in an attempt to identify odors in the neighborhood. While Daimler continues to collect air samples, we want to share the information that we have collected so far and gather your input.”

Attendees of the meeting, of whom I was one, learned a few things:
1) The company’s testing protocol included taking 182 VOC samples in summa canisters and 17 samples with tedlar bags.
2) Daimler found evidence at least once of 1-methoxy 2- propyl acetate 229% above detectable odor thresh holds. This is a component of the clear coat the company uses.
3) Daimler has worked to reduce the amount of this compound in the clear coat, and has used the reformulated coating since September 2012. The company has also eliminated n-butanol, a highly odorous compound used in cleaners.
4) Daimler will continue testing air samples into the winter months, which are traditionally the season when nearby residents report more odors in the neighborhood.

Sounds pretty good. And I believe Daimler is making a good faith effort to address community concerns. But this is also a great example of how residents issues are marginalized and left on their own by a regulatory agency that favors the polluters it regulates and does not provide adequate recourse for addressing concerns from the public.

Daimler enjoys plant site emissions limits it inherited from Freightliner. Like all of Oregon’s oldest and dirtiest facilities, the emissions limits were set at levels that matched the maximum capacity of the facility during the 1970’s. For the most part, like at Daimler, these limits are artificially high, which makes them pretty insufficient as, well, limits. That is, emissions limits at nearly any Oregon regulated facility are essentially unenforceable.

That is why you can have residents move into a lovely, if modest, North Portland neighborhood like that which sits on the bluff above Swan Island, and find themselves smelling paint fumes from industrial activity that they didn’t notice two years prior when they purchased their home. That is because Daimler added a second shift due to increased business, and, due to the inflated out of date emissions limits in the state issued air permit, the facility was not required to request any special condition on their permit to double their emissions.

So what did we learn from Daimler testing, really?

1) odor complaints about fumes attributed to Daimler truck painting have been logged enough times since the company added a second shift of production to instigate the defensive action to monitor odors in the neighborhood.
2) the company is taking an action to reduce toxic emissions due to the neighborhood pressure that it otherwise has no pressure from the regulators to make.
3) the company voluntarily works to meet lean manufacturing goals that are economically beneficial to them, because reduced VOC emissions rates can be attributed to lower failure rates.
4) The 182 samples, each consisted of 2-3 minutes, or a total of 396 minutes, of captured ambient air over the course of four months.

The problem with the last thing we learned about the testing protocol is that the samples collected are the equivalent of a picture of the air quality for less than 1% of the time. And we know that many neighbors felt that the timing, in terms of time of year, was way off. We also know that Daimler staff relied on odor complaint reports to determine time of day to test. We had a lot of questions about that as well. In fact, we generally questioned why the company invested its time and resources into neighborhood air monitoring without getting input from the community first. Instead waiting until four months into the experiments to share any information, which they clearly felt gave them sufficient cover. While risking the idea that “the community will never be satisfied,” everything about how this monitoring was set up is consistent with how the company would do it to protect themselves.

Which is understandable. They paid for it.

Daimler staff, while acknowledging that the testing would go on, made a few statements that led me to believe that the company had already made up its mind about its culpability with regards to the community’s concerns:

“We are already doing more than our permit says we have to do relative to compliance.”
“It is a complex air shed. We are participating in it and will take responsibility for our contribution. But as big as the problem is, we are a very small part of it.”

So there you have it, “yes, folks, you have bad air in your neighborhood; but sorry, it is not our fault.” In Oregon, whether a facility is like ESCO, a 100 year old steel refinery that still employs practices from the first day of operation, or a facility like Daimler Trucks, which is fully invested in lean manufacturing to improve their bottom line, communities on the fence line are only protected from emissions limits that equal the most polluting levels of the 1970’s by the voluntary actions of the company in question. And, it has been demonstrated that the voluntary action is still dependent on the community bearing the burden of proof of harm.

Daimler is currently working to renew the Title V air emissions permit for the Western Star – Daimler Truck Plant on Swan Island. A draft permit has yet to be released by Oregon DEQ.

There will be a community information meeting on Wednesday, November 7th @6:30pm to be held at the University of Portland campus. Details of location on campus will be released shortly.