HudCo Fails Soot Test
By Shane Smith • Jan 2nd, 2009 • Category: Blog
Hudson County is one of about twenty counties in the New York metropolitan area that has been designated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as failing to meet air-quality standards. The EPA will require the state to draft a plan to reduce fine-particle, or soot, pollution as measured over a 24-hour period.
The designation of HudCo as “nonattainment,” or incompliant with the standard, will take effect in early April of this year. It is based on the recommendation of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), in turn based on air-quality measurements taken over the three-year period from 2004 to 2006. The public was provided with a 30-day period to review and comment on correspondence between the EPA and DEP before the designations were made.
An undated EPA report puts Jersey City’s average daily concentration of soot during the period 2003 to 2005 at just over 40 micrograms per cubic meter of air, about 14% higher than the maximum allowed. The high incidence of soot in our densely populated, urban, industrial air is hardly surprising, but it is alarming: long-term exposure to sooty air can contribute to a number of health problems, including respiratory ailments such as asthma, as well as cardiovascular disease. The EPA’s designation is likely to draw attention to air quality issues in the state, although in the current fiscal environment it is less clear whether increased funding for improvement programs will follow.
The EPA’s designation is the first one based on standards that were made more stringent in 2006; the 24-hour standard was reduced from 65 to 35 micrograms of fine particles per cubic meter of air. But environmental safety organizations such as the Sierra Club say even the new standards are too weak and “give polluting industries excessive freedom at the cost of public health.”
The DEP will have three years to submit its plan for cleaning up the air in New Jersey’s thirteen nonattainment counties. The plan must detail enforceable measures to reduce the incidence of soot, including ways to reduce emissions from transportation infrastructure projects and industrial facilities.
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Shane Smith is the managing editor of Jersey City Independent.
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