Town hall meeting focuses on air quality

South Los Angeles residents and staff members from the South Coast Air Quality Management District met in a town hall meeting Wednesday night to discuss recent complaints over odors from the AllenCo oil well in the University Park neighborhood.

 

Residents have been complaining for the past three years about odors coming from the site and attribute some acute health problems to those odors. Since 2010, the SCAQMD received about 340 odor complaints and 16 Notices of Violation were issued. The SCAQMD began taking air samples in 2011 by using both a mobile trailer and what they described as “instantaneous samples.”

The district is taking long-term samples in addition to the samples collected by portable instruments that basically suck in the air around them. The results showed elevated levels of light hydrocarbons in one air sampling as well as high levels of total hydrocarbons in the AllenCo property’s wastewater, water that would not affect the community. None of the results, however, revealed toxic levels of any compounds. The SCAQMD Assistant Deputy Executive Officer for Science and Technology Advancement Philip Fine said the levels they found could explain the smells around the site, but that nothing was found in toxic levels.

Even with these results, community members still expressed their belief that something is seriously wrong in the area, something they believe can be linked to the odors coming from the AllenCo site.

Sandra Matamores Barrios described an incident in which her daughter stopped breathing from what the doctors later told her was an environmental cause. Two years ago, Barrios’ daughter woke up early in the morning and told her mother that she could not breathe and had pain in her heart and chest. Her daughter was able to breathe again when Barrios performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“At that point I felt a horrible odor, and it felt like a chemical odor, like it had exploded,” Barrios said through an English translator. “It smelled like burnt gasoline and so I was saying to myself, ‘Something must be happening at that company across the way.’”

Barrios said the odor was even stronger outside, and her daughter had to be hooked up to a respirator when the family arrived at the hospital. Her daughter has had asthma since then, and Barrios said the doctor told her the asthma was due to the environment in which they lived.

Barrios has lived in the area for about 10 years and said her daughter was always healthy. Nancy Ibrahim of Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, an organization that helps provide affordable housing, said that residents have complained to her about acute health symptoms such as asthma that did not exist before, nosebleeds and severe headaches. She also expressed worry for students who live in the area because they may not be able to afford more expensive housing elsewhere in the city.

“People are getting sick. Children are getting sick. My colleagues are getting sick. I am getting sick,” Ibraham said. “People are reporting that if they go away for vacation or leave the area, they feel better. They have these beautiful apartments to go home to that they can’t live in.”

Moving forward, SCAQMD will continue monitoring the air for at least another month. A second town hall meeting will be held in early December.