When explosions ripped through a Philadelphia oil refinery last year, the shock waves knocked Felicia Menna’s front door frame out of place. Then came the black smoke.
“My throat was closing shut,” recalled Menna, who lives about a mile away. “My nostrils felt like they were on fire.”
She went to an emergency room, where doctors put her on a vaporizer device to ease her breathing and treated her with intravenous Benadryl for allergic reactions, according to medical records she provided to Reuters. She was among several dozen people who sought treatment after the blast, according to a neighborhood group that tracked affected residents.
One of the explosions was so large that a National Weather Service satellite captured images of the fireball from space. Refinery owner Philadelphia Energy Solutions later told regulators that the blasts released nearly 700,000 pounds of hazardous chemicals, including butane, and about 3,200 pounds of hydrofluoric acid, which can cause fatal lung injury in high concentrations. The incident remains under investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
Yet the federal air quality index (AQI) score for south Philadelphia showed that day as one of the year’s cleanest, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The score was based on readings from part of the federal network of air quality monitoring devices, which are operated by the city of Philadelphia with oversight from state regulators and the EPA. None recorded any significant pollution.
“To say there was no impact to air quality was crazy,” said Peter DeCarlo, an environmental engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University who lived in Philadelphia at the time and studied the city’s monitoring system.
The episode illustrates a much broader failure of the U.S. air-pollution monitoring system, according to a Reuters examination of data from the EPA and independent monitoring organizations, along with interviews with scientists and environmental researchers. The government network of 3,900 monitoring devices nationwide has routinely missed major toxic releases and day-to-day pollution dangers, the data show.
The network, for example, identified no risks from 10 of the biggest refinery explosions over the past decade, the Reuters review of EPA data shows, even as thousands of people were hospitalized and the refineries reported toxic emissions to regulators.
Reuters also reviewed data from 10 community-based air monitoring projects by residents worried that government air-quality assessments are inaccurate. Those efforts often revealed pollution spikes and hot spots the EPA network never captured.
About 120 million Americans live in counties that have no EPA pollution monitors at all for small particle pollution, according to agency data. That was the case when an oil refinery in Superior, Wisconsin exploded in 2018, causing a leak of 17,000 barrels of asphalt and blanketing Superior and neighboring Duluth, Minnesota in clouds of black smoke. Though Superior has Wisconsin’s only refinery, the city of 27,000 people isn’t big enough to require permanent government air-pollution monitors nearby, said a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, citing EPA guidelines.
Fine particles – measuring less than 2.5 microns – are far smaller than a grain of sand and are considered the most dangerous form of pollution because they penetrate the bloodstream and cause lung and heart disease. Major sources include power plant and industrial smoke stack emissions, as well as vehicle exhaust.
The system’s failures pose a public health risk, independent scientists say. The monitors underpin the Air Quality Index that many Americans, including those with respiratory disease, rely on to determine whether the outdoor air is safe. Pollution detected – or missed – by the monitors also guides regulatory decisions on whether new or expanded industrial projects can be permitted under the National Ambient Air Quality Standard. If pollution in the area is below regulatory thresholds, the projects generally go forward.
The data also inform and justify environmental policy decisions – and have often been used by President Donald Trump to tout his environmental record. Trump has cut back on policies aimed at addressing climate change by limiting carbon emissions. In his losing re-election campaign, he referred to the AQI this year when he asserted that America has the world’s cleanest air. A leading Yale University study, produced annually, ranks the nation 16th for air quality globally.
President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat, has said he would step up prosecutions for illegal polluting; push for a worldwide ban on government subsidies for fossil fuels; tighten fuel economy standards for vehicles; and put limits on methane pollution from oil and gas facilities.
The EPA declined to comment on the monitors’ performance during specific pollution events, including the refinery explosions examined by Reuters, but said the network was generally accurate and reliable. “We are confident that the monitoring network provides data that allows decision-makers – states, public health officials, etc. – to make informed decisions on public health” and the permitting of plants in polluting industries, the EPA said in a statement.
The EPA oversees the network of pollution-monitoring devices, which are maintained and operated by state and local environmental agencies, who also share the financial burden. With probes that suck in air, the devices use filters, light pulses and beta rays to detect gas and particle pollution so tiny that concentrations are measured in parts per billion.
Academics, along with current and former regulators, say the network’s problems are many and varied: Monitors are sparsely and poorly placed; the program is underfunded; and the network is not equipped to meet current pollution threats. The monitoring program emerged piecemeal after the 1970 Clean Air Act, mainly to track acid rain, smog and ozone pollution. Those hazards have largely subsided, replaced by more localized threats including toxic compounds and particulate matter from a wide range of industry and natural hazards, such as wildfires.
Individual monitors have also proven inaccurate, often recording pollution levels that can vary wildly from audit monitors placed beside them, according to government quality-assurance audits. Nearly half of the country’s monitors meant to capture fine particulate matter did not meet federal accuracy standards, an EPA audit released in 2015 found.
When explosions rocked the Philadelphia refinery, the closest monitor for hazardous chemicals was programmed to operate only one of every six days – and therefore missed the incident entirely, according to EPA data reviewed by Reuters. Other Philadelphia monitors were either upwind or too far away to detect the explosion’s pollution, according to the EPA data, which shows wind direction and speed. The refinery owner, Philadelphia Energy Solutions, filed for bankruptcy after the explosion and sold the property this year to a Chicago developer that plans to convert it to a mixed-use industrial park.
It wasn’t the first time monitors programmed to operate sporadically missed pollution from a major explosion. When Chevron Corp’s refinery in Richmond, California, caught fire in 2012, clouds of particulate matter forced 15,000 people to seek treatment, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
But the closest government monitor of hazardous chemicals recorded no problems because it was turned off. It had been programmed to work one of every 12 days, according to EPA data. The EPA and local regulators told Reuters that certain types of monitors are designed to operate only occasionally to reduce costs and labor. In 2013, Chevron agreed to pay $2 million in fines and restitution after pleading no contest to six misdemeanor criminal charges in connection to the fire.
Monitors are also sometimes programmed to limit the level of pollution recorded. A government monitor in Imperial County, California, operated by local and state regulators, recorded much lower readings of day-to-day air pollution in 2017 than were actually occurring because it had been programmed to max out at a lower level. The EPA acknowledged the issue to community organizations after the groups discovered higher readings with their own monitors.
“It’s almost unbelievable this can happen in the United States,” said Michael Jerrett, chair of the environmental health science department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an adviser on the community monitoring project.
Researchers from the University of California San Francisco did a post-mortem on the Chevron refinery fire as part of a community health study. They concluded many of the people who suffered initial health problems continued to have worsening health in the years after, including chronic respiratory issues such as asthma.
Chevron said in a statement that it has worked since the 2012 fire to improve safety, reduce pollution and provide the community real-time data on air quality around its refinery. “Chevron recognizes the value of complete and accurate air quality data,” the company said.
In south Philadelphia, Menna said her initial symptoms from the blast’s fallout wore off in about a week, but she continued to cough for six months.
“I still don’t know if I have long-term effects,” she said.
UNDERFUNDED SYSTEM
A study conducted in 2013 during the administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, detailed a number of problems with the U.S. air monitoring network. The report proposed improvements including boosting monitoring near major polluting infrastructure, sampling for more pollutants, and doing more urban field studies to better understand block-to-block variability in air quality. But the weaknesses largely remain today because neither the Obama nor the Trump administration invested more in the monitoring network.
Over the past five years, the number of government monitors nationally has declined by 4% as state and local environmental agencies cut spending, according to EPA figures. Federal grants to state and local air-quality agencies have not increased in 15 years, according to testimony earlier this year by the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a nonpartisan group based in Arlington, Virginia.
