PETCOKE
luke white
“You’re gonna feel burning in your throat and in your nostrils. It’s there—it’s obvious.” From his third-floor classroom, the piles in the KCBX terminal are readily visible. Limbeck had his students conduct a small “study” of the black dust, having them wipe wet paper towels on the windowsills and make observations and drawings of the substance. Two students in his class of twenty-six have asthma, and both students were forced to miss more than a week of class at the beginning of the school year. Limbeck says their parents were sure the absences stemmed from petcoke inhalation. He told me he was disappointed with the way the city has dealt with the petcoke issue. “I feel like I’m in a George Orwell novel, where fixing the problem is increasing it,” he said.
After the meeting at St. Simeon, I talked with Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs at Chicago’s Respiratory Health Association. He thinks the petcoke should go completely. “The only safe limit is zero,” he said, pointing to a positive, linear relationship between general pollution and health issues. Dr. Giles agrees, and added that the issue of pollution is even starker for children. “We know that particulate matter is a kind of airborne pollution,” she said. “The younger you are, the more susceptible you are to damage that can happen from prolonged inhalation.” When I talked to Tom Wolf, of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, he expressed concern that residents were blam-
ing petcoke indiscriminately for the area’s perceived health problems. “That’s an industrial area down there,” he said. “It’s a huge assumption to say one facility is causing all those perceived problems.” In the same year that Washington High School’s air monitor saw record levels of PM-10, it also recorded the highest yearlong averages of cadmium and nickel in the state, though nowhere near the EPA’s limits. Coal dust, which has been stored along the Calumet River for over eighty years, looks very similar to petcoke when it is stored in piles or is airborne, or when it clings to the siding, windows, or front steps of a house. “What I’m worried about happening is you do knee-jerk reaction regulations,
you put a company out of business or make it spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and at the end of all that the community still has dangerous levels of particulate matter because the problem’s from someplace else,” Wolf continued. “I’ve seen people tell me, I’ve seen people throw up filters, but anecdotal evidence isn’t science.” The filters Wolf mentions are those found in your average in-home air-treatment system. At the meeting in January, one of those filters was held up in front of the crowd by Peggy Salazar, of SETA. It had only lasted a few weeks the previous summer before turning the color of a charcoal briquette. “That’s not normal,” she said, as she swept her fingers across the filter and held APRIL 30, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7