I once worked in a building that was located next to a former fuel storage site — a boarded-up property encircled by a chain-link fence. My office was on the first floor, and there was underground parking, where walls of poured concrete had wide pipes running along them. In time, I learned that those pipes were part of a ventilation system designed to remove pollutants seeping upward from a plume of toxic material that had traveled underground from the neighboring site. I contacted the state Air Resources Board to learn more and was sent several reports: thick packets containing a lot of very complex information. There were chemical compound illustrations for several pollutants, including benzene, a known carcinogen. I wondered if the building could make me sick.
But I needed the job, so I kept my head down and hoped that the government regulations were stringent enough, and that the Air Resources Board was enforcing them. I sometimes saw people taking samples from test wells along the fence between the two properties. The truth is, we all rely on public officials to keep us safe. And yet, the degree of protection they provide can, and does, shift with the predilections of our elected officials, including the judiciary. I often wonder why the need for clean air, clean water and healthy ecosystems isn’t apparent to everyone. And why prioritizing their protection — for humans and other species — isn’t a given.
But it isn’t. My experience with that workplace is repeated in countless communities on a variety of scales. Which is why I was not totally surprised to learn about the massive, aging and not-terribly earthquake-proof oil storage site that lies within the city limits of Portland, Oregon. Located along a six-mile stretch of the Willamette River, Portland’s Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub, where 330 million gallons of petrochemicals are stored in 630 tanks, is the textbook definition of a disaster waiting to happen. In “The big spill”, you’ll read about how this site was exempted from meeting the city’s updated seismic standards, and how the city continues to increase both the amount and variety of dangerous fuels allowed to be stored there. A few miles downriver, the Willamette flows into the Columbia and then out to sea. A big spill would cause untold damage. Irresponsibly regulated infrastructure shouldn’t be the stuff of nightmares — in the West or anywhere else.
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