Clearer pollution data sought

By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer

Hawai'i consistently ranks on Environmental Protection Agency lists as one of the states with the lowest level of toxic chemical releases.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it's safer to live in the Islands.

One of the frustrating issues for members of the public trying to judge their health risks, as well as for health officials trying to help them, is that it's difficult to make clear connections between environmental statistics and actual risks.

"We've only in the last couple of years begun collecting the information that would give any clue as to whether we're making the world safer," said Marsha Graf, database manager with the state Health Department's Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response branch.

State and federal agencies track the pollutants that billow out of smokestacks, the chemicals that flow into streams and the bacteria counts at swimming beaches. But the smoke may blow out to sea, nobody may be swimming or fishing in the affected stream, and the beach bacteria the agencies tally may not be one that makes anyone sick.

Far more significant risks to human health can be found at home, Graf said. They include the threats of lead in old housepaint that a child may ingest, mercury in fish, and chemicals and fungi that fill the air in indoor spaces, she said.

Both the state Department of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency recognize that they need to develop better, more useful information. And in the meantime, they point to the existing data to show that Hawai'i regularly ranks within the lowest two or three states in the nation for toxic releases — and the amounts of those releases are on the decline.

"There is a significantly decreasing trend, and that's the good news," said Adam Browning, the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory coordinator for the Western region.

The Toxics Release Inventory is one of the EPA's primary monitoring publications. It tracks smokestack fume releases, water pollution, oil spills and other data, and ranks the states. In recent years, only Vermont and Rhode Island have ranked better than Hawai'i. U.S.-aligned island territories like the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and Guam also rank very high. So does Washington, D.C., a city without much industry.

One problem with drawing risk assessments from the data is the amount of information that is tracked and the lack of resources available to make real-world sense of it.

"We collect so much data, much of it technical, much of it not accessible or meaningful to the casual reader," said Gary Gill, deputy state director of health for the environment. "To boil it down and make it usable and accessible is a lot of work, and we don't have anyone to do the work right now."

Browning concedes that the EPA's data is not all that useful to the person on the street, but he said the EPA is working to make it more so.

"This (the Toxics Release Inventory) isn't a risk identification tool, per se. Exposure and toxicity is not always easily collected, but the program is working to make it more helpful and more meaningful," he said.

The 2000 Toxics Release Inventory, to be released in April, includes several chemicals — such as mercury and dioxin — that have the potential to directly threaten human health. The agency will report them at much lower levels than previously tallied.

"We are looking to refine our data to make it more meaningful," Browning said.

Hawai'i's biggest polluters—as identified by the inventory— are its power plants, which release primarily sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and nickel. Before power plant emissions were tracked in the Toxics Release Inventory, Chevron's oil refinery was the top-ranked emitter of toxic materials.

"The air here is already among the cleanest in the country," said Bruce Benson, Hawaiian Electric communications consultant.

The electric plants are the biggest industrial factories in the state. They generally burn low-sulfur oil and any future reductions in emissions data will likely come from improved power plant efficiencies and modifications in the way emissions totals are calculated, he said.

"We're still learning how to do it," Benson said of the process of developing emissions data.

At the state Department of Health, Gill is overseeing an effort to make its statistics more useful to the public, but finds it costs significant time and money.

The department has seven branches overseeing activities that release pollution into the environment, whether it's dust or smoke from a farming operation, oil leaking from an underground fuel tank, sewage spills, toxic discharges into the ocean, hazardous chemicals, radiation and even noise.

"Each of our regulatory agencies over time has developed a different system" for compiling data, and the systems are often not compatible.

"We're struggling to try and bring it together," he said.

Under state budgetary restrictions, decision makers sometimes are forced to make the decision to keep collecting the data, but give up processing it as fully as they might.

"To find something meaningful, we need to systematically collect it, report it over time and connect it to something useful. This is something which, currently, government looks at as being bells and whistles," Gill said.

So, how does a Hawai'i resident determine whether the environment is improving or not? One source, which has received accolades from across the nation, is found in the annual report of the state's Environmental Council. The state Environmental Report Card annually makes an assessment of the state of the environment, and whether it's improving. The Environmental Report Card for 2001 gave the state a C+ for the status of environmental conditions, and a B for progress.

Some might argue with the databases the Environmental Council consults. In addition to number of oil spills and days beaches are closed because of contamination, they look at bikeways and noise complaints. Still, it is perhaps the best measure citizens have for getting a snapshot of the health of their community.

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