By F. Ellsworth Lockwood
My interest in asthma is personal, given my health history. I was born in 1944 in Santa Cruz, California, and as an infant I had asthma which my mother attempted to treat by giving me coffee. I still love coffee but it seems to have little affect on my asthma. Some of my earlier memories are of sitting up all night, my mother rocking me in a red plastic rocking chair, because lying down I could not breathe. At the age of ten or eleven I was hospitalized for several days with asthma. During my adolescence and I experienced asthma, fatigue, and frequent headaches, probably due to allergies and asthma.
My parents at first would not allow me to partake in active sports, fearing, I suppose, that I would have an attack and die. When I was in high school, my doctor stood up for me, and Mom let me participate in track, which the doctor said would be good for my lungs. At the age of 18 I joined the U.S. Navy, supposedly a no-no because of my asthma, but through a screw-up on the part of the recruiter I was allowed to join the Navy, perhaps the cleanest environment on earth other than a dust-free room in high tech electronics (We scrubbed all decks two to three times daily.) and I was asthma free for several years, but during my twenties I started having asthma attacks again. My doctor blamed the dusty construction work that I was doing, but two or three days after I moved out of a house on Plateau Avenue in Santa Cruz, I ceased having asthma attacks and was relatively asthma free until about four years ago.
I am trying to figure out what changed in my environment to have triggered my present asthmatic attacks. I moved from Hermiston to Tri-Cities, but it would seem to me that the allergens and air conditions would be similar in the two towns, so I am puzzled as to why the asthma returned when it did. I live in a new home, built in 2002. Again, it is a mystery.
However, when one cannot breathe, he begins to suspect any and every "trigger" that can cause these attacks. For example, one day I was sitting in a restaurant on Clearwater Street in Kennewick, when I saw a yellowish-brown cloud pass overhead. A few days later I read that there had been an accidental release from a chemical plant. I understand the plant has since gone out of business. One cannot help wondering, had the accidental release taken place at night, would it have gone unnoticed by the general public?
And how frequent are such accidental releases, and do they always get reported? During the 1990s, while I was working as a news reporter for The Hermiston Herald, I interviewed a woman whose medical reports showed deterioration of the liver. She also had medical reports, signed by the clinic nurses, of her treatment for exposure to an unknown substance. She had been fishing near the Port of Morrow, when, she said, she saw a yellowish-green mist, like a cloud of mist approaching, and she was enveloped in that mist. Afterward she became ill and was treated but her condition had continued to worsen. A companion who had been fishing with her also became ill, but to a lesser degree. The medical professionals told the woman that each person's tolerance is different. And the state agency that investigates such things? It took them days to get around to investigating, and they told the victim that the type of chemical suspected, a fumigant, dissipates within several hours of release, leaving not a trace, and that no one had reported an accidental release. Small wonder. Who would voluntarily turn themselves in on a deal like that?
Those two incidents alone would have been enough to raise my level of concern about air quality in the basin. But other known air-releases have taken place during the four years or so that I was reporting news in Hermiston as well.
I received a call one day from a man in Boardman, Oregon, saying that cars in the towns of Boardman and Irrigon had suddenly been covered with a layer of ash. When he went into a meeting in the evening, the cars were clean. After the meeting they were covered. I requested information of the DEQ and they ran a check. DEQ actually found the ash on vehicles, confirmed the information and sent samples in to two separate labs for analysis. A particular coal fire plant in Boardman had been named by the caller as a suspected source, which I reported. The spin doctor from the power company called me up and chewed me out for mentioning his company's name in the news story, and within a few days the DEQ called me back saying that the ash definitely did not come from the coal plant. It was not the right kind of ash or some such thing. The explanation given was that the ash had blown in from out of the area, traveling perhaps hundreds of miles, and that it the same phenomenon had been reported on that particular evening in other cites thirty miles, sixty miles distant, as I recall. Supposedly it might have been ash from ancient volcanoes.
The explanation sounded a little funny to me, but the DEQ are the experts and they are there to protect us, and the DEQ's own lab results supposedly had given the same answer as the results from the power company's own labs. So what was I do do? I let it drop. Several months later I happened to be visiting a friend, John, in Beaverton, Oregon. John is in management for a construction company now, building power plants and such. His company sends him all around the world, China and elsewhere, to supervise the building of facilities involving boilers and so-on, but at the time the Boardman plant was built, he had been a pipe fitter. He had helped build the plant in question. When I told John about the ash in Boardman he just laughed at me. "You were hoodwinked, Frank," he told me. "There is no other potential source in that area where the ash could have come from." And he scoffed at the idea that the wind might have suddenly blown the ash in from far away places, and just as suddenly ceased blowing it in.
So in our area, summertime's weeks-on-end-of smoke-filled air from natural and man-made fires, are supplemented with mile-long clouds of brownish-yellow toxic gases, we have mysterious green clouds that wipe out people's livers and do who knows what to people's lungs. We have supposedly ancient volcanic ash that just ups and dumps on an entire region. And that's not the end of it the airborne toxin sources by any means.
