Health impacts beyond port communities: Exposure to diesel emissions from distribution centers and intermodal facilities

The health impacts of global trade and the movement of goods and products extend beyond the entry ports. The distribution system for these products creates severe health impacts far beyond the coastal areas to the inland areas of the country hundreds of miles from these ports.

Beginning in 1998, the agricultural land of the Inland Valleys of Riverside and San Bernardino counties began to be transformed into industrial parks with massive million square foot buildings that attracted thousands of diesel spewing trucks. The area is also home to one of California's most polluting intermodal rail yards. The results are some of the highest levels of particulate pollution in the nation; children with reduced lung growth and weakened lung capacity; and a cancer risk at one railyard of more than 3,330 in a million for nearby residents.

This presentation details how the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice has worked on environmental health and justice issues around the truck and warehouse issue. Their unique community-based approach brings together the diverse populations of warehouse workers, truck drivers, immigrants and Latino residents together with longtime small farmers to demand protective policies to stop the development of more than 700 acres of agricultural land into warehouses and created policies for buffer zones between diesel sources and sensitive receptors; truck routes away from residential areas; a moratorium on development of future industrial facilities. The policies have become the model for land use guidelines adopted on a local, regional and state level.