Ken Salazar's high school alma mater has an oil problem. However, this isn't the fault of our Secretary of the Interior--not even a little bit. One conceivably could blame the problem on his brother Leroy, who was president of the North Conejos School Board for many years, but only if one holds Leroy accountable for problems which came to light after his tenure as president, which wouldn't be quite fair.
As our body politic continues to debate the toxicity of the dispersant Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico disaster, we forget (deny) that petroleum alone is fatally toxic to nearly all life. What Corexit does is simply break up the petroleum molecules into smaller and smaller units. That alone likely increases the damage that the oil released into the Gulf will do. Examining the analogy of fossil fuels released into the air, we know that the nano-sized petroleum molecules daily spewed by the burning of fossil fuels in gasoline and diesel-powered engines wreak great havoc to human health. (And that's not even considering what petroleum pollution is doing to our atmosphere and climate.)
The oil problem at Centauri High School in south-central Colorado is caused by a daily contamination of the school hallways by diesel exhaust. Centauri has long made a practice of queuing up their six diesel-fueled buses in front of the school--about 10 feet or so away from two single doors which open directly into the main classroom hallways. Since the school is 7,000 feet above sea level, temperatures get cold, and the buses often idle from the time they pull up to the school at 3:15 p.m. until they leave at 3:35. As the students stream out of the doors, the diesel exhaust streams into the halls. The fumes are strong enough to cause nausea for several hours afterward. The school is heated by a radiant steam system, so the air inside the school is not circulated by an adequate ventilation system, and the particulates build up and up. To exacerbate matters further, half the classrooms feature a gravel road directly outside their leaky windows, over which semi-trucks, garbage trucks, and diesel maintainance vehicles travel hourly.
Marshall McLuhan said, ""We don't know who discovered water, but we are pretty sure it wasn't a fish." By the same token, the longtime residents of Centauri's community have so taken for granted the daily diesel fumes, they have overlooked the inherent danger of the exhaust permeating the school.
Current school administrators have refused to adequately address the problem--or even acknowledge it exists. Despite being provided with the plentiful information available online about the dangerous health effects of breathing diesel exhaust, no action seems likely to be taken. This perverse obstinance ensures that nearly 400 people daily breathe a plentiful amount of diesel exhaust particulates (DEP)--stirred up by custodians who begin sweeping with large push-brooms during the last period of the day.
Scientists have known for several decades now that diesel exhaust and particulates are dangerous.
Diesel engines are a major source of fine-particle pollution. The elderly and people with emphysema, asthma, and chronic heart and lung disease are especially sensitive to fine-particle pollution. Numerous studies have linked elevated particle levels in the air to increased hospital admissions, emergency room visits, asthma attacks and premature deaths among those suffering from respiratory problems. Because children's lungs and respiratory systems are still developing, they are also more susceptible than healthy adults to fine particles. Exposure to fine particles is associated with increased frequency of childhood illnesses and can also reduce lung function in children. California Office of Health Hazard Assessment
Diesel exhaust is a carcinogen. According to the American Cancer Society,
Epidemiologic studies of lung cancer risk in diesel-exposed workers have been done. Lung cancer is the major cancer thought to be linked to diesel exhaust. American Cancer Society
I'm forced to wonder just what effect the air quality might have on a young student who already had lung cancer. Wait! I could ask. . . but, oops, he's no longer with us, having died a few years ago.
But this is just the beginning of in-depth research about the health effects of DEP. Scientists are notoriously reluctant to infer direct cause and effect relationships, requiring years of research to recognize even a slight association between toxins and their consequences.
The suspected effects of diesel and air pollution are even more frightening than those recognized associations. Researchers now believe that chronic inflamation is a key factor in many autoimmune diseases.
Like an unattended fire, chronic inflammation can slowly spread and lead to serious metabolic breakdown, with vast implications for your long-term health. You may have heard that disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and eczema stem from inflammation. But chronic inflammation has now been connected to a host of modern diseases, from obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, and high blood pressure, to Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s, cancer, and even depression! In the functional medical world, we view all chronic and degenerative illnesses — and even biological aging — as rooted in chronic inflammation. Marcelle Pic, OB/GYN NP Women to Women
Because the majority of diesel particulates are nano-sized (>.1 micron or 1/70 of the diameter of a human hair), DEP causes chronic, systemic inflamation. Researchers say DEP are so tiny they infiltrate the alveoli and cross into our blood, capable of eventually reaching every cell in our bodies.
The study illuminated the late course of events involved in the blood-vessel effects triggered by diesel exhaust in healthy individuals in the test... there were signs of systemic inflammation, measured as an increase in inflammatory markers in the blood. (Science Daily)
DEP may even be able to translocate along the olfactory nerve directly into our brains.
Lead researcher Paul Borm from Zuyd University in The Netherlands said: "We believe our findings are due to an effect nanoparticles or 'soot' particles that are major component of diesel exhaust. These may penetrate to the brain and affect brain function. We can only speculate what these effects may mean for the chronic exposure to air pollution encountered in busy cities where the levels of such soot particles can be very high." (Medical News Today)
Speculation centers on the possibility that DEP may have strong associations with Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's, and damage to the central nervous system.
"It is conceivable that the long-term effects of exposure to traffic nanoparticles may interfere with normal brain function and information processing," noted Borm.
Given that in the above study, every parameter of the EEGs went up (and stayed up for a prolonged time) when subjects breathed diesel exhaust, what, I wonder, would daily exposure to diesel nanoparticles do to a teacher who had, for instance, epilepsy? Oh, wait, I could ask. . . but he's no longer with us either.
Finally, medical scientists are just starting to investigate the possibility that maternal exposure to diesel particulates may be linked to the rapidly increasing epidemic of autism. The incidence of diagnosed autistic children has gone from 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to about 1 in 100 children today (and 1 in 58 boys) (Centers for Disease Control Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, 2/9/2007). After trying for a decade or two to believe that the increase in autism was due only to better diagnoses, researchers have finally concluded that autism's rapid increase is probably rooted in environmental toxins. Diesel particulates are a leading contender for this role, a recent study having proved that the off-spring of mice whose mothers were exposed to DEP were notably "sluggish." (Science Daily) Finally, autism has been linked to DNA damage; diesel damages DNA through oxidative stress. (Science Direct)
Ironically, Centauri's exposing its students to daily doses of diesel runs counter to its educational mission, for the exposure may actually decrease the intelligence of students.
Before children even take their first breath, common air pollutants breathed by their mothers may reduce their IQs. A pair of studies involving more than 400 pregnant women in two cities has found that 5-year-olds exposed in the womb to above-average levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, score lower on IQ tests. The compounds, created by the burning of fossil fuels, are ubiquitous in urban environments. Environmental Health News
The DEP compounds are, no doubt, ubiquitous at Centauri, as well. In all honesty, I have to admit to a highly personal interest in Centauri's contamination by diesel. I teach there and, after a a mass exposure to diesel fumes caused by an overworking classroom heater left unrepaired for two months, I became sensitized to diesel exhaust in 2003, four years after I began working at Centauri. For the better part of a decade, I have been mostly well in the summertime and often ill with sinus, bronchial, and eye infections during the school year. On a daily basis, I usually return home stuffed up, with bloodshot eyes; my lungs feel tightly congested and I get out of breath quickly. These symptoms generally accumulate and grow worse over the school week, often provoking infections within a week or two.
But all evidence indicates that I am not alone in being so adversely affected by the DEP. One former teacher was similarly ill and even lost his sense of smell during the decade he taught at Centauri. Another former teacher--one whose room was next to the exit doors--now suffers from Parkinson's. Still another teacher whose class was next to those same doors died, suddenly and unexpectedly, two days after the end of a school year. He was looking ill for weeks prior to his death. The number of young, female staff members who have miscarried a child is nearly equal to the number of successful births. (I have no way of judging this number among students, but pregnant students at Centauri are abundant; sex education is nonexistant.) Kidney infections seem awfully prevalent among our cheerleaders--the population of students who spend the most time in the high school building. (Most of the high school's athletes practices at the nearby and much newer middle school.) Kidney infections are often symptomatic of toxic overload, since the kidneys are responsible for clearing toxins from our bodies. Many students have noted sinus stuffiness, reddened eyes, cough, headaches, allergic reactions, dizziness, nasal drips, or other symptoms while in the building. (For a recent meta-analysis of the health effects of diesel exhaust, see The American Board of Family medicine's The Toxicity of Diesel Exxhaust: Implications for Primary Care.) These students and staff are Centauri's canaries in the coal mine, but no one is listening.
So why won't Centauri administrators move the buses away from the buildings? "Safety considerations," say the administrators, as if it were not possible to keep students both safe and healthy. Countless other schools manage to do so, but here in the heart of cowboy country, breathing daily diesel is just another part of life.
And, as the Deepwater Horizon blowout and Massey Coal Mine disasters have demonstrated, our country's regulatory systems are hopelessly broken. Neither OSHA nor the EPA nor the Colorado Department of Health and the Environment can or will take any action to stop this senseless endangerment of students and staff at Ken Salazar's alma mater.
Finally Colorado's new teacher evaluation law makes my job security half dependent on my principal's performance evaluation of me and half dependent on my students' test scores. Under such circumstances, how can such an evaluation system be either fair or right? After seven years of my increasingly desparate attempts to get my administration to do something about the school's air quality, my principal is now just trying to get rid of me. This follows his harassment in previous years of a black coach. (See this Denver Post article. The upshot of that situation--Coach Hunt found another job, and the "Confederate Flag" boys never received any negative consequence for their actions.) The year before last, an outspoken and two-time Colorado Counselor of the Year resigned her position after continuous "administrative attention." Just never mind that Celina Espinoza was responsible for two-thirds to three-quarters of our low-income graduates going on--with scholarships--to further post-secondary education. Perhaps understandably, politicians all perfer to forget Lord Acton's maxim about how power corrupts. . .
In what world do Colorado legislators, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and President Obama imagine that a teacher's evaluation by a principal is anything but political? In the absence of due process, the concept of "objective criteria" for any teacher--least of all one who opposes any administrative directive --is truly ludicrous. And how is it at all fair to judge my teaching by my students' test scores, when the diesel pollution at the school not only discourages regular attendance by many students, but may actually be affecting student's intelligence, learning abilities, and "brain functioning and information processing"? This new Colorado evaluation law has great potential to negatively affect those of us who have chosen to teach in low-income areas, "difficult" or special education students, or transient populations. Colorado legislators seem to think all students come from the Cleaver home. Additionally, the new teacher evaluation law completely overlooks the fact that wealthy Colorado schools have about three times as much money per pupil as compared to schools in dirt-poor districts like ours. (Of course, researchers say this doesn't affect students' educations. Perhaps those researchers ought to spend a year teaching a class of 30 students with 12 available textbooks.)
A teacher evaulation system which ignores the context and environment in which teachers must function is destined to cause great, undeserved anguish for many Colorado educators. It's rather like a doctor berating a rape victim for her subsequent pregnancy. Or like a jury convicting one of our soldiers of a murder during combat in the reality of war.
The idea that employers such as Centauri's administrators must provide a "safe and healthy" work environment for employees is plain laughable. Minus any real regulatory enforcement or punitive penalty, those are just meaningless words on a piece of paper. And profit isn't even much of a consideration at public schools--how much worse must the situation in private businesses be?--Let's ask Massey and BP employees, shall we?
We should all be worried about the toxicity of oil--not just in the Gulf of Mexico, but in our air as well. Petroleum products are poisonous to life. I just hope that a few centuries from now, enough of our descendents are left alive with enough intelligence left to look back and ask of us, "What were you thinking?"