Air pollution in Delaware sparks illness, debate

• State officials have pointed to out-of-state industrial facilities as the cause of pollution problems.
• People vulnerable to the chemical ozone have been dealing with poor air in Delaware for years.
• The Delaware City refinery accounted for 48 percent of the state's industrial output of those emissions.

Meredith Hurst's son Daniel, a 16-year-old student at St. Elizabeth High School in Wilmington, noticed his breathing growing shallow mid-day Friday.

It was a day when the atmosphere was unsafe for lungs sensitive to pollution – something that happens too often in Delaware, say health and government officials.

Daniel’s airway closed as an asthma attack erupted in his lungs. His mother rushed him to Christiana Hospital. The cause of the emergency, she said, was toxic ozone – a byproduct of pollution from greenhouse gases – in combination with a lingering smell of fresh grass clippings at his school.

“We regulate his medicine and push his medicine and everything like that but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to have an asthma attack during these high [ozone] days," she said.

People vulnerable to the chemical ozone, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, have been dealing with poor air in Delaware for at least eight years, according to the American Lung Association. In an April report, the organization gave all three counties in the First State “F” grades for ozone pollution.

The problem is continuing. Two days during the past week – including Friday – the level of ozone pollution in northern Delaware surpassed federal limits, said David Small, secretary of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

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For years, state officials have pointed to out-of-state industrial facilities as the perpetrators of Delaware's pollution problems. States such as Pennsylvania, with its numerous coal-fired power plants, and the Sunoco Marcus Hook refinery that sits along the Delaware state line, bombard the First State with too many pollutants, they say.

And it's a problem that is out of DNREC's control, said Small.

More than "90 percent of those contaminants that lead to our ozone problems come from out of state,” he said.

But greenhouse gas industrial emissions data collected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2014, shows the picture to be more complex, according to an examination by The News Journal, in conjunction with the Center for Public Integrity, the Weather Channel and USA Today.

While the First State lies in the path of prevailing winds that pass over many of the country’s largest producers of ozone-causing greenhouse gases, Delaware – for its size – is also an outsize emitter of greenhouse gases.

Industries released more greenhouse gases per square mile in 2014 than those in any state, except Indiana or West Virginia. The Delaware City refinery, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in Delaware at nearly 4 million metric tons in 2013, accounted for 48 percent of the state's industrial output of those emissions, according to EPA data.

Michael Karlovich, a spokesman for refinery operator PBF Energy, did not respond to requests for comment.

Emission reports to the EPA from DuPont Co., Delaware's flagship chemical businesses, show the company emitted small amounts of greenhouse gases in past years.

The company's now-shuttered facility in Edge Moor in 2014 released 231,131 pounds of toxic air, water and solid chemicals – separate from greenhouse gases – into the environment, second to only to the Delaware City refinery.

Hurst, who like her son is asthmatic, says they both sense higher levels of air pollution in Delaware than they do during trips to the West Coast.

“It’s worse in Delaware than other places,” said Hurst.

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The greenhouse gases nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, as well as volatile organic compounds, that lurk in East Coast air become a toxic brew during sunny days because sunlight causes the chemicals to transform into ozone, said Kevin Stewart, director of Environmental Health at the American Lung Association of the Mid-Atlantic. That is deteriorating the health of people with weakened lungs. Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, also contribute to temperature increases globally, he said.

“What will happen is [air pollution], on its way to you on a hot, sunny day will become ozone,” Stewart said.

“Ozone smog is harmful for public health and especially for children, older adults and those with asthma and other lung diseases,” he said.

David Stevenson, director of the Center for Energy Competitiveness at Wilmington-based, conservative think-tank Caesar Rodney Institute, disputes DNREC’s numbers about out-of-state emitters and said coal power is critical to the country’s energy supply despite recent shifts away from the fuel.

The majority of ozone, he said, comes from naturally occurring sources and regulators should not disturb industry based upon uncertain science.

“If every source of pollution were shut off in the world, we’d still get days of high ozone,” Stevenson said.

Regulators take action

DNREC officials, whose views differ starkly with Stevenson’s, say they are gaining ground on Delaware’s air pollution fight in-state, pointing to an 80 percent reduction in the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide at the Indian River Power Plant in Millsboro since 2010.

But those efforts have not allowed Delaware to consistently meet pollution standards set by the EPA in 2008 because the First State is being “thwarted” by emissions from Maryland, Pennsylvania and states farther west.

“It’s just that we are at the mercy of upwind sources,” Small said.

That argument is the “basis” of two lawsuits DNREC filed this summer with the federal court system in the hope of forcing states to act.

The first, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, challenges a ruling that would give Delaware’s neighbors another year to meet federal ozone standards set in 2008.

One more year for Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey would mean more time that asthmatic people and others would have to breathe polluted air, officials say. It also puts Delaware businesses at a competitive disadvantage, Small said.

“Those who worry about economic development here in Delaware might be saying, ‘What are we doing? We ought to be using some of that available [pollution] headspace for our own economic development purposes,” he said.

DNREC also filed a petition with the EPA asking the federal agency to mandate pollution reductions at the Brunner Island Power plant near York, Pennsylvania.

Small said computer modeling indicates the plant’s three coal-fired electric generating units are contributing to unhealthy ozone in Delaware.

Brunner Island is the 127th largest industrial greenhouse gas emitter in the country.  The issue, Small said, is about more than total emissions but also the way a plant cleans them.

“We’re filing petitions with EPA for power plants that either don’t have pollution control equipment, and these are coal-fired plants, or they have the equipment and they don’t run it during ozone season,” Small said.

EPA spokeswoman Joan Schafer said the agency would not comment on the court cases “as we are currently reviewing the data.”

Stevenson argues the data will show that Delaware has no case and that insignificant amount of pollutants drift into Delaware from other states.

He alleges DNREC officials might be trying to manufacture an ozone “crisis” to justify their existence, saying that ozone levels across the U.S. are down significantly from the 1980s before federal standards were set.

Nevertheless, more states and individual industrial facilities could be targeted for future DNREC suits, Small said, but he declined to name any.

In a July statement, DNREC said Delaware’s air will improve only if upwind states reduce emissions, including “Maryland and Pennsylvania and other states further west and as far away as Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.”

“We’re just trying to use every tool that we have available to us because we feel like we’ve done as far as our own regulatory framework, about as much as we can do,” Small said.

DNREC's lawsuits follow similar action taken in 2011 by the Delaware justice department to limit out-of-state pollution from drifting into the First State. Then-Attorney General Beau Biden intervened in a lawsuit filed by Kansas that challenged the EPA's ability to limit cross-state pollution.

“Delawareans should not be subjected to increased air pollution because other states do not take the necessary steps to control pollution produced within their borders,” Biden said in a 2011 statement.

Early this month, the EPA did move unilaterally to limit second-hand, cross-state pollutants for 2017, announcing that it will reduce the amount of nitrogen oxide allowed to cross state lines during the summer of that year from power plants in 22 states, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

Continues to play soccer 

Dr. Katherine King, a pediatric pulmonologist at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital, is building a database of hospital visits from asthmatic patients that might give researchers a clearer view of the connection between pollutants and lung diseases. While ozone is clearly a threat, she said, microscopic particles, which are vented from engines or power plants and float in the air, might be just as dangerous.

“Ozone is the elephant in the room, but the little things that we may not be measuring, may, in fact, be causing a lot of damage,” she said.

Viruses and pollen also can irritate asthmatic people, she said, but emissions are something that can, and should, be regulated, she said.

According to an August report from New York University' Marron Institute, 41 Delawareans die each year on average as a result of air pollution, making it the sixth highest death rate in the country. At least three state did not have data.

Until the air is cleaned, Daniel must be constantly vigilant when outside, but he will not live condemned to an indoor “bubble," shielded from Delaware's outdoor air pollution. While there are times when he must stay indoors – windows closed, with the hope that a clean air filter sits between him and the toxins outside, he is also an active soccer player. He plays goalie on the soccer team at St. Elizabeth High School.

Just three days after the asthma attack on Friday that kept him in Christiana Hospital overnight, Daniel was back at practice Monday.

He has developed an innate ability to sense when unsafe ozone is wafting outdoors, he said.

“I can tell immediately without looking at the news without any of that,” Daniel said.

Hurst, his mother, says regulators should crack down on industries that vent any pollutant into the air.

“We’re asking for trouble," she said, "if we go out in those high ozone days."

Contact Karl Baker at kbaker@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2329. Follow him on Twitter @kbaker6.

About this story 

This story was produced as part of a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity, the Weather Channel and the USA Today Network.