Does it smell like this where you live?

“No, it doesn’t,” was my answer to a Commerce High School student as we stood with a group of 25 other strangers at an intersection surrounded by three rendering plants in Huntington Park, a neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. It only took walking off the bus for everyone to be hit with the smells that accompany animal slaughter, and if you weren’t already a vegetarian, you might consider being one for the day.

The rendering plants were one of the stops along the “toxic tour” the Communities for a Better Environment hosts about once a month to shed light on the environmental injustices that the people of Commerce, Industry, Huntington Park, Vernon, Boyle Heights, Maywood, the port communities of Wilmington and San Pedro and everyone who lives along the Alameda Corridor face daily. It feels like many of these neighborhoods are forgotten communities, and, as we heard on the tour, many residents lack the resources to challenge the intermodal yards, factories, powerplants and highway expansion projects planned in their backyards. One of the first powerful visuals of the tour was a paper factory pumping tons of pollution out of its stacks less than a block away from the Vernon elementary school. No doubt there are children who live and play within blocks of this one facility let alone others equally as toxic.

To get to the ports of LA and Long Beach, we took the I-710, which is notoriously within what is referred to as the “diesel death zone.” The nearby Alameda Corridor is the genesis for this name.  It initially was planned to carry goods via rail from the ports to the intermodal yards 25 miles from the ports, in an effort to reduce truck traffic and diesel pollution. Turns out the rail line along the corridor only handles about 30 percent of its projected capacity of goods and none of it is electric -- as originally planned. In lieu of utilizing this railline to its capacity, CalTrans has proposed expanding the 710 from the ports to Pasadena. CBE has been fighting the expansion efforts at the port end of the 710 for at least nine years and the people of Alambra (near south Pasadena) have been fighting the north end for 40 years. CalTrans’ plan is to expand the highway to 14 lanes, seven going each way. Some might say that we need to encourage growth and facilitate goods movement, but clearly there are smarter ways for the city to grow and eliminate some traffic concerns than to virtually double the size of the existing I-710 freeway.

Once at the ports, it was clear how 40 percent of our nation’s cargo goes through the two facilities on its way to the Wal-Marts and Targets of the country. It’s just a massive facility and if the ship, truck and locomotive traffic weren’t enough to concern you about the lungs of people living there and their significantly higher cancer rate, then perhaps the Conoco-Phillips behemoth would convince you that the port neighborhoods are lethal.

Standing in one of the cul-de-sacs abutting the plant, I see children playing on the cement in their gated yards, a fine coating of soot on parked cars and nine or 10 smoke stacks pumping out a mushroom cloud of toxins one after the other. Sure, these people probably know the pollution coming from those stacks isn’t going to prolong their lives, but I wonder if they assume the facility is cleaner than they think, or that plant management would tell them if they were inhaling something truly hazardous.

Still, this is the one place on the toxics tour where I saw someone who isn’t typically associated with environmental justice concerns, a Caucasian woman. Everywhere else we’ve been today, there are Latino or African American families living near diesel death zones where their children are plagued by asthma and they are working at jobs that are accompanied by diesel pollution and premature death.

Many of the problems in these neighborhoods can be traced back to corporations building facilities in low income, minority neighborhoods. At the time, residents might welcome such a facility because it promises jobs. These jobs generally turn out to be low wage and highly toxic to workers’ health. I know no one wants a refinery in their community, but it struck me today how little clout neighborhoods like Huntington Park and Maywood have in barring these polluting facilities from setting up shop a block from a local school or community park. Projects like the ones I saw would never be built in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, but they have to exist somewhere -- right? Most often it’s in these communities already beset by a number of other lifespan limiting factors and very little is done to mitigate their effect on the community.

It was difficult to see the people living in these communities with their quality of life so diminished by pollution I don’t see on a daily basis. There’s more all of us can do to help disadvantaged communities like Huntington Park, but I’m glad my colleagues David Pettit and Adrian Martinez are fighting for communities like Boyle Heights and Vernon to stop projects like a 940 megawatt power plant from being built and for challenging the I-710 expansion project in addition to their projects to protect Wilmington and San Pedro from port pollution. But at the end of the tour, I got back in my car and drove 20 miles to Santa Monica where I knew I would breathe easier, the headache I’d had since seeing the Conoco-Phillips plant would go away, and my throat would feel better. I had the luxury of driving away from the pollution that kills thousands of people in Los Angeles every year.