To Live and Die in LA’s Diesel Death Zones

Seen from outer space, the San Pedro Port Complex stands out as the most identifiable manmade feature along the West Coast of the United States. The complex combines the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach, together creating the third-largest maritime cargo port on the planet after Shanghai and Singapore. It handles one-third of all global maritime shipping that arrives in the United States, or, some 20 million containers per year.

Viewed from above, the complex is rimmed by crab-like configurations of piers, docking areas, container yards and marinas that angle perpendicularly into the ocean. The larger of the two conjoined ports, the Port of LA, opened in 1907 and gradually ballooned in size to comprise 4,300 acres of land, 45 miles of waterfront real estate, 15 cargo terminals and marinas and 83 ship-to-container cranes. The adjacent, slightly smaller Port of Long Beach adds another 3,520 acres, 10 piers, 80 berths and 72 cranes to the mammoth operation.

The ports are surrounded on three sides by a maze of industrial operations dedicated to shipping and logistics including the vast, aptly named Terminal Island, a roughly 4.5 square-mile parking lot for shipping containers that houses various chemical and petroleum product storage areas and a federal prison. Adding to the man-made geometry visible from high above are power plants, oil refineries, factories, and the dizzying array of freeways that connect the complex to the rest of the region and country.

Then, there are the 122 total miles of railroad tracks that funnel cargo from the docks and onto diesel-powered trains that head north alongside the Long Beach Freeway to Downtown LA. Known as the Alameda Corridor, it is the largest freight-oriented public works project in the nation’s history and handles an average of between 12,000 and 16,000 trips per year.

What is not so easy to see from outer space are the residential neighborhoods surrounding the entire San Pedro port complex — full of houses, apartment buildings, parks and schools that are home to hundreds of thousands of low-income, working-class families who suffer from some of the country’s highest rates of illnesses from airborne pollution. For the past few decades, these residents have successfully pressured agencies like the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) to force nearby industrial polluters (including themselves as well as the ports) to clean up their act, resulting in cleaner air compared to the region’s notoriously smoggy past.

On May 4, 2018, the South Coast AQMD Governing Board directed its staff to pursue regulatory and voluntary approaches to reduce emissions for some of the region’s largest indirect sources of nitrous oxide — a key ingredient of diesel fumes. As a first step, AQMD’s staff initially developed a so-called memorandum of understanding, or MOU agreement, in which the ports stated that they would commit to a plan of action to reduce emissions gradually. But when no noticeable improvements resulted, discussions turned to something more enforceable to require the ports to clean up their act, a so-called “Indirect Source Rule” that the agency says is more stringent.

Among the victories is AB617, a 2017 state law that established protections for about four million people in 15 mostly poorer communities from the Central Valley to the Mexican border that are particularly vulnerable to high pollution. So far, the law has allocated more than $1 billion in funding for various grants and incentives to the neighborhoods.

According to SmartAirLA, an organization that monitors air pollution in the port area, the air was unhealthy to breathe on roughly every other day during the year the bill passed. More recently, a 2022 investigative report by CalMatters found that pollution on 23 days in the previous year was more than twice as high as what is considered safe and that the risk of cancer in Wilmington, which neighbors the Port of LA, is 98 percent higher than in the rest of the LA basin.

The stubborn rates of illness and death associated with air pollution in these areas have raised questions about whether the regulatory agency is offering too many carrots and not enough sticks when it comes to cleaning up the air. Meanwhile, the pollution crisis in these neighborhoods is so stark that health experts and community activists alike dub them “diesel death zones.”

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On an early spring afternoon, Theral Golden stands in the street next to a soccer field and baseball diamond adjacent to the Elizabeth Hudson Academy, a K-8 school with 608 students. Just over half the student population is Latino, and the rest are Asian, Black and Pacific Islander. Although the student-teacher ratio is 17 to 1 —  better than average in the Long Beach Unified School District — only 33 percent of the Academy’s students score at or above proficiency level math. Only 43 percent test at or above proficiency for reading. A full third of the student body lives in households that qualify for federal poverty assistance.

Golden points to a green concrete wall that blocks the road about 30 meters away. Both the Alameda Rail Corridor and the Terminal Island Freeway lie immediately behind the wall, which, along with the Long Beach/710 Freeway to the east, makes the Westside Long Beach neighborhood not only the most polluted area in the city, but also among the most polluted in the nation.

According to a 2023 estimate by the American Lung Association, the Long Beach area experiences the worst ozone pollution, the ninth-worst 24-hour particulate pollution and the fourth-worst on an annual basis of more than 200 metropolitan areas nationwide. Although the Alameda Corridor was built to enable the trains to eventually run on electrical power, that has yet to happen. These trains burn diesel fuel, which contains more particulate matter, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide than regular gasoline. The same goes for the on-average 11,000 trucks leaving the ports via the 710 Freeway each day.

“You can see the wall, but not the tracks or the freeway,” Golden remarks. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

Theral Golden, president of the West Long Beach Neighborhood Association, stands next to the railroad tracks that divide a neighborhood near his home. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez

A Vietnam War-era U.S. Navy veteran and retired diesel mechanic, Golden is a tall, fit man who looks like he’d be comfortable on a golf course in his baseball cap and tucked-in shirt. His relaxed but precise and business-like tone testifies to an abundance of public speaking experience, mostly at local city hall or government regulatory agency meetings he attends as the president of the West Long Beach Neighborhood Association and as a member of the AB617 steering committee.

“This school didn’t have air conditioning until about six, seven years ago,” Golden says, pointing back at the Elizabeth Hudson Academy campus. “The school policy at that time was just to open the windows. How can you figure a wall is going to stop pollution from coming into the school?” he asks. “How can you figure that?”

Golden was born and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, before joining the Navy, which stationed him in Long Beach from 1964 to 1968. After his service, he decided to stay in the city and raise a family. Golden worked as a diesel mechanic for the county transportation agency. As Long Beach underwent significant industrial development, with companies like Texaco Refinery and Star-Kist Tuna setting up operations, Golden says the port doubled in size to its current footprint of 7,500 acres.

When a petrochemical pipeline on Wise Street burst in the late 1970s, the dangers lurking beneath the surface were dramatically illuminated. “The whole street lit up,” Golden remembers vividly. “That was the first inkling of what was underground.”

Over the years, Golden saw the economic landscape of his community shift, especially in the early 1990s, when the Naval station and shipyards closed, and manufacturing plants relocated to Mexico or overseas. His journey into activism began with a pivotal moment when plans to expand the 710 Freeway threatened to displace hundreds of homes in his neighborhood.

Particulate pollution from the ports contribute to 1,200 premature deaths per year in the neighborhoods surrounding the Port Complex, and 4,100 throughout Southern California.

“It was about 2000 when they announced they were going to take 450 homes away along the 710 Freeway,” Golden recalls. “The community came out in large numbers and made it clear: we don’t want that.”

The protests failed and the freeway expansion went ahead, which, he says, is just another example of Westside Long Beach getting the short end of the stick when it came to industrial development over community health and quality of life. “That,” says Golden, “is when I started paying more attention to the port.”

Along with the ports, oil refineries and manufacturing plants, the vicinity of busy roads and railroad tracks create a hazardous combination that can impede lung development, provoke asthma episodes, contribute to heart ailments and elevate the risk of cancer. A recent study by the USC Environmental Health Sciences Center found that emissions from vehicle exhausts also adversely affect children’s cognitive abilities and potentially play a role in age-related brain disorders.

According to the California Air Resources Board, particulate pollution from the ports contribute to 1,200 premature deaths per year in the neighborhoods surrounding the Port Complex, and 4,100 throughout Southern California. Virtually everyone living near places such as Elizabeth Hudson Academy is exposed to a regular dose of pollutants, including microscopic particles, that undermine the body’s defenses, carcinogens such as benzene and substances known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

People living, working or attending school adjacent to heavily trafficked freeways endure a higher exposure level. Increased exposure correlates with increased health risks, particularly among children. In acknowledgment of these dangers, and of the most vulnerable of the victims — children — California implemented a ban on constructing new schools within 500 feet of freeways in 2003, albeit with exceptions.

Children play soccer in a field adjacent to the Elizabeth Hudson Academy, the LA River, and the Terminal Island Freeway. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez

In addition, since at least 2011, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been cautioning school districts about the impacts of traffic-related pollution and advising them to exercise caution when selecting sites near major roads or truck routes.

For its part, the port complex has adopted a Clean Air Action Plan that seeks to transition all cargo handling equipment and trucks to zero-emission status by 2030 and 2035, respectively. They claim that since they began implementing the plan in 2017, diesel particulate emissions from mobile sources in and around the Ports are down 87 percent.

For years, the San Pedro Port Complex has also argued that it is a global leader when it comes to mitigating pollution harm and moving toward achieving zero emissions. A major element of this goal is the port’s ongoing effort to build hydrogen hubs at the port as part of its cleaner energy effort. In October 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it would award the Port Complex a grant of up to $1.2 billion to help create a public-private partnership to operate the hub, which would be the first of its kind in California.

But activists such as Golden are not so sure. “I vehemently oppose it,” he says. “The port is already too large to be sustainable in an urban environment and you want to add additional things? They say it is green, but just because you use a different adjective to describe it doesn’t mean it won’t hurt anybody. It is a carbon-based fuel, and it is highly flammable and explosive. Remember the Hindenburg? You are going to put that in the community and at some point, there will be a misfire.”

Oil refineries, power plants and container cranes make up the skyline of the San Pedro Port Complex. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez

For now, the future of hydrogen as a “green” energy source remains speculative and experts disagree on how quickly it can or will be a major player in the U.S. or global economy. So, for the time being, per an August 23, 2022, report by California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, the complex remains one of the largest sources of air pollution in the South Coast Air Basin. “The air quality in the region is some of the worst in the country,” says Connie Mejia, a senior public affairs specialist with the Southern California AQMD, “and as a result, we fail to meet federal clean-air standards. Nitrous oxide is the primary smog-forming pollutant in our region and taken as a whole the ports complex is the largest source of nitrous oxide due to the ships, trucks, locomotives and cargo-handling equipment associated with port operations.”

Meanwhile, there’s a growing national consensus about the linkage between airborne pollution and illnesses, particularly among children. A collaborative investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that nearly 8,000 public schools across the U.S. are situated within a 500-foot radius of highways, truck routes and other heavily trafficked roads. This accounts for approximately one out of every 11 public schools in the nation, catering to roughly 4.4 million students spread across all states. Additionally, numerous private schools and Head Start centers face similar proximity issues.

But, arguably, no area of the country is more impacted than the neighborhoods around the San Pedro Ports Complex. According to a widely-cited 2006 California Air Resources Board report, an estimated 2,400 premature deaths, 62,000 hospital admissions due to cardiovascular causes, and 1.1 million school absence days in the area occurred the previous year — all believed to be associated with port-related particulate matter pollution. Wilmington has the sixth-lowest life expectancy among the 35 LA metropolitan area communities evaluated in a 2017 LA County Human Development Report, with residents who live just six miles away in Rancho Palos Verdes and Palos Verdes Estates expected to live seven years longer than those directly along the port.

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Dr. Edward Avol, a professor of clinical preventive medicine at the USC Keck School of Medicine, has dedicated his career to understanding the far-reaching impacts of pollution — particularly from motor vehicles and shipping emissions — on children’s health. His research began in the early 2000s and currently, he is an advisor to the community on health impact and port exposure.

Although he underplays his activism, Avol is not shy about criticizing the power structure that allows the pollution to continue to impact port-adjacent neighborhoods. “It’s the people with not a whole lot of economic or political clout that have the least voice,” he says.

The health harm of airborne pollution is not limited to the lungs, Avol points out. “Those chemicals can go into any blood system, and those impacts last a lifetime,” he adds, “impacting everything from children’s learning abilities to adult health and early onset of diseases. By breathing and inhaling this stuff every day, it affects their lives for the next 60, 70 years… The downstream costs of this are huge.”

On the frontlines of treating the pollution-related health implications in the area are Long Beach Memorial Hospital’s Children’s Clinic of Long Beach (TCC) and the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma (LABACA), which have joined forces to aid families who are impacted by environmental pollution.

“By breathing and inhaling this stuff every day, it affects their lives for the next 60, 70 years… The downstream costs of this are huge.”

When Dr. Elisa Nicholas founded TCC in the basement of Long Beach Memorial in 1988, she arrived with experience working on rural health in Guatemala, mostly treating Indigenous families suffering from chronic and often fatal pulmonary illnesses relating to long-term exposure to smoke from interior cooking stoves. That background prepared her well for what she saw in the Port Complex area, where 14 percent of residents suffer from asthma, compared to 12.5 percent in LA and 8 percent nationwide, according to a 2009 assessment by the city’s health department, and where rates of asthma-related emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and mortality are 2 to 4 times higher among African Americans than among non-Hispanic Whites.

“Childhood asthma was the number one cause of emergency room visits and early deaths among children back then,” Nicholas recalls. “Children were undocumented or working poor and didn’t have insurance and would wait until Monday morning after an asthma attack to come into the clinic. I had to use oral steroids to bring them back.”

With startup funding from the Robert Wood Foundation’s Allies Against Asthma grant, Nicholas worked with the American Lung Association and other groups to help parents with children suffering from air pollution-related asthma. Over the years, TCC has revolutionized asthma treatment and family education, emphasizing a holistic approach that encompasses medical care, community engagement and policy advocacy.

“We looked at policy and so nobody else was talking about the environment at the time,” Nicholas explains. So, under her leadership, TCC made itself an ally of activists working to fight the pollution that caused the problem, a process that took years of organizing. Key to that effort was LABACA, founded in 1999 in response to a tragic asthma-related death of a young girl on a Long Beach school campus, which quickly grew into a collaborative effort between community stakeholders, health professionals and concerned citizens.

“The death of this young girl was a terrible, traumatic experience for the schoolchildren and the family,” recalls Sylvia Betancourt, LABACA’s director. But she says it finally forced local government agencies like the LA County Health Department and the Long Beach Unified School District to agree to work more closely with community activists. 

“Diesel triggers asthma, and we can treat asthma, but if they continue to be exposed, their health will continue to suffer. This needs to be addressed at its source, at the ports, at the rail yards, with the trucks being used, and how they operate when children are at school and at the park. It has been a slow process up to now.”

“There was already alarming evidence of rising asthma rates in Long Beach and other communities, so the Alliance came together to put the child at the center and educate all those around the child so they could better respond, and to force others who had responsibility to the children and their health to respond in ways that were responsible.”

According to Betancourt, LABACA’s main focus was to work directly with children growing up in port-adjacent Long Beach, Wilmington, San Pedro and along the 710 Freeway who suffer from uncontrolled asthma. “We work with the family over a period of six months in their home to develop trust, a bond that they are unable to get in a meeting with a doctor for 10 mins or in the hospital at an emergency room, to make sure they have access to medications, know how to correctly take them, how to reduce asthma triggers at home and outside.”

The immediate goal, Betancourt stresses, is to train caregivers, including parents, grandparents and siblings, on how to save lives. The problem is that once a person suffers an asthma attack and is treated at the hospital, they have to return to a chronically unhealthy home or school environment.

“Diesel triggers asthma, and we can treat asthma, but if they continue to be exposed, their health will continue to suffer. This needs to be addressed at its source, at the ports, at the rail yards, with the trucks being used, and how they operate when children are at school and at the park. It has been a slow process up to now.”

Another key figure in the effort to help port-adjacent neighborhoods is Angelo Logan, a longtime community organizer in Long Beach. Logan found his start with the Communities for a Better Environment in 2000 when the group successfully fought the location of a power plant in Southeast LA. The following year, he co-founded East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, where he served as Executive Director until 2014, organizing communities around the Port Complex.

East Yard’s most significant victory came when it filed a lawsuit against Burlington Northern Railroad, which wanted to build a 185-acre, $500-million railyard project along the Terminal Island freeway. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which in 2016 placed a hold on the project. But according to Logan, the constant pollution coming out of the Port Complex, the surrounding refineries and other pollution sources is impossible to contain without a radical shift in air quality enforcement.

In 2001, Angelo Logan co-founded the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, which has successfully fought port expansion. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez

“With the cancer and other health and climate impacts from a whole system at the ports, including ship emissions, trucking, rail and warehousing, you would assume one would take aggressive measures to reduce the pollution and protect human health,” says Logan. “But what we find is that industry has a lot of sway and the regulatory agencies like the AQMD.” As a result, he concludes, the state of California is not complying with the U.S. Clean Air Act.

First enacted in Passed in 1955 with subsequent revisions in 1970, 1977 and 1990, the federal law targets everything from particle pollution and carbon monoxide to nitrogen dioxide and lead in the air, but enforcement mostly goes to local agencies such as the AQMD, which Logan and other activists and health experts don’t believe will make any progress on emissions unless it takes a radically more aggressive posture with the ports.

The big hurdle to making progress, he argues, has to do with the disparity in power between the port-business influences on the AQMD and the community advocates who want better air quality enforcement. “Who has time to lobby these agencies?” he asks. “The railroads do, the ports do. Is the industry just going to continue to strong-arm the agency?”

Despite the AQMD recently stepping up by switching from a relatively lax MOU to an Indirect Source Rule requiring greater pollution reduction, Logan says it is still not enough to make nearby neighborhoods safe. “Thousands of lives are at risk, not to mention the health of future generations,” he argues. “You would think they would do everything they can do.”

The AQMD does not deny it has not been entirely successful in getting the Port Complex to clean up its collective act. “After several years of discussion with the ports, it became clear that the ports were unwilling to commit to actions to meaningfully reduce emissions,” says Mejia. “In February 2022 the Board directed staff to instead pursue rulemaking.”

Theoretically, a rule-making process will place greater legal penalties on the ports if they fail to reduce emissions. But so far, AQMD spokesperson Mejia says the agency has not reached any agreement on what exactly such rules would require, and the agency readily admits that the health risks due to the pollution continue to be extreme. “We’ve made tremendous gains in cleaning the air over the past several decades, cutting emissions by over 50 percent in the last 20 years,” she says. “However, despite that progress our air quality remains some of the worst in the country.”

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Driving around the Port Complex on a recent afternoon, Theral Golden guided a reporter and photographer along a grand tour of its most environmentally unsightly aspects: lines of parked or idling tractor-trailers, block upon block of stacked containers, railroad tracks that cut through residential neighborhoods and parks and schools that directly border freeways crowded with port traffic.

The longtime Westside Long Beach advocate does not believe the AQMD will be able to accomplish much in its slow-grinding faceoff with the ports, which he views as an existential threat that has to be cut down to size. “The ports are too large to be in an urban environment,” Golden argues. “They should be downsized and at the same time the State of California should be looking for places to put two additional ports that are not in an urban environment.”

An underground oil pipeline runs beneath the curb next to a school in West Long Beach. Photo by Gregory Bojorquez

Although he acknowledges the chances of this solution are currently nil, and that such a plan would only provide a partial solution to the problem, Golden believes at least this remedy would stand a chance of providing quick relief.

“Waiting on technology and the implementation of new equipment will do great things in the future, but you are talking about building or modifying a whole industry,” he says. “Electrification is where we should be headed like a lightning bolt, but then you’d need to have more generating plants and low-emission fuels to operate the generating plants. All these things have to be developed in large quantities and that takes time.”

But time, Golden argues, is exactly what he and the rest of the residents living in the diesel death zones around the Port Complex do not have. “Right now, there are more than three people that are dying in this area each day [from pollution], approximately 1,200 a year,” he says, citing the California Air Resource Board study. “But they want us to wait for some magic wand in the sky. You have to plan on what the facts tell you that you have today.”

One of the most maddening aspects of living in a so-called diesel death zone, says Golden, is that even if the pollution were to magically stop today, the negative residual health effects will nonetheless last for at least the next 50 years. “There has to be some type of redress when someone is pumping poison in your house, which is the end result of what they do,” he says. “It should be illegal, and it should be stopped.”