Air Monitoring web data courtesy BerkeleyCitizen

Pacific Steel Casting (Pacific Steel) is a large steel foundry in West Berkeley.  According to publicly available data from the California Air Resources Board, its toxic air emissions have increased up to 160% over the period 2002-5.  According to the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, these toxic air contaminants consist of substances that have been targeted in the U.S. and California for tracking and emission reductions because they are know to be toxic to humans at even low levels of exposure.  Pacific Steel’s toxic air emissions include benzene, formaldehyde, phenols and a number of highly toxic heavy metals (including lead) that persist in the environment, accumulate in human tissues, and are especially hazardous to children.

Prior community testing found alarmingly high levels of lead at two locations.  An earlier test also found high levels of formaldehyde at one location.  In both cases, EPA health standards were exceeded.  The community requested funds from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) to conduct additional air monitoring focusing on toxic metal particulates.  BAAQMD agreed to provide a grant to Global Community Monitor for the community to do this follow-up monitoring. 

BAAQMD recommended that a Mini Vol Portable Air Sampler be used because it provides accurate and precise results, is easy to use, and can be moved from location to location allowing for a broader assessment of how toxic air contaminants might be distributed in West Berkeley.  This monitoring represents the first time there has been any systematic monitoring of the air in West Berkeley despite decades of complaints and health concerns about Pacific Steel’s emissions. (Read more under BAAQMD Grant.

(Below excerpt from West Berkeley's Air Quality: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
L A Wood, Berkeley Daily Planet August 28, 2007

Most who live in that district (Nothwest Berkeley) are all too familiar with the odor plumes that waft out more than a mile from the steel mill. The monitoring team now wants to know if the particulate metals travel like the odor plumes and at what concentrations.

This unprecedented effort by GCM is now beginning to answer some of these questions and has produced some astonishing data. Although laboratory results are still preliminary, the nearly two-dozen samples processed so far have shown that concentrations of PSC’s metal contaminants were highest at locations closest to and downwind from PSC. Lower, but still excessive, levels of these contaminants have also been measured more than a half a mile from the stacks of PSC. It should be noted that the monitoring project has dispelled the long-held belief that the Highway 80 is the source of Oceanview’s airborne metal emissions.

It is not surprising that manganese and nickel are showing up in high concentrations. According to the California Air Resource Board’s data, Pacific Steel Casting is the only significant industrial source of manganese in the Oceanview area. PSC also accounts for 99 percent of all industrial nickel emissions from the more than thirty West Berkeley industrial sources that come up on CARB’s radar. A health consultant for Berkeley’s community monitoring team, Mark Chernaik, Ph.D., has stated that the levels of manganese found in a sample was 10 to 20 times higher than deemed safe by the World Health Organization. Nickel was found in a sample to be “up to 330 times the U.S. EPA reference concentration for this contaminant.”

Early indications of the GCM monitoring project suggest that BAAQMD’s assumptions about the levels of PSC’s airborne metal particulates and the dispersion of these emissions may be grossly underestimated. Perhaps the GCM project will now shift public awareness from the foundry’s noxious odors to the potential dangers produced by PSC’s metal particulate emissions that cannot be detected by sight or smell.

More Information (Also see Air Monitoring Index)
GCM's air monitoring was structured around Pacific Steel emissions and that of prevailing wind patterns (wind rose). Second Street and Gilman (from the perspective of PSC) are in the center of the wind rose established by several studies conducted in the past ten years by the city at the Harrison Park including the study at Berkeley's Recycling Center.

The GCM air monitoring project sampled for metals which may or may not be directly associated with the known odors coming from PSC. The presence of odor was likely to be associated with airborne chemicals such as formaldehyde and other materials used as mold binders. These odors appear to be generated in more of a “puff” fashion, and not continuously, as one might find at an oil refinery. The associated odor plumes are dispersed more or less by the wind.
 
For the purpose of the GCM monitoring, the odors were more of an indication that the facility is operating, and to some extent, what the wind direction might be.  The GCM project recognizes these parameters, but also looked more closely at the weather data provided by BAAQMD and others to determine when, and where, airborne particulates might be present, and to what extent they are being dispersed (wind speed).
 
GCM assumed that the presence of airborne metal particulates, whether fugitive or stack emissions, to be more constant than odors, and present even when the odors were not apparent. There are few places where the wind blows in a constant direction over a twenty-four hour period. GCM monitoring was structured to sample when the prevailing winds are constant for about twelve hours or more in a twenty-four hour period.

MAP WEST BERKELEY AIR MONITORING SITES click to view

The air filter (far left) is typical of a number of air samples drawn downwind of Pacific Steel Casting. Photo of air monitor (far right) with stacks of PSC in background.