After almost ten years of planning, a lot of studies and negotiations, the Los Angeles Harbor Department has circulated its Draft Environmental Impact Report of more than 2000 pages for an expanded rail yard, the Southern California International Gateway.
This rail yard will receives trucks from the Port of Los Angeles and transfer them to BNSF railcars with hours of operation paralleling those of the port, which can run day and night seven days a week.
There has been long-term hope in the environmental community, including the Sierra Club, to move more cargo by rail rather than by truck. Rail transport is more environmentally efficient that trunking, emitting less toxic and carbon pollution and making better use of the land.
However, a lot depends on where and how we cite rail facilities. It comes down to who gets the benefits and who gets impacted. Residents on the west side of Long Beach have expressed deep concerns over the additional noise, air pollution and night-time lighting that will come from the proposed rail yard expansion. One of the cornerstones of insuring environmental justice is that no neighborhood picks up a disproportionate burden of new projects, even if the intent of the project offers regional environmental benefits.
The DEIR suggests that the “... the Reduced Project Alternative... is the Environmentally Superior Alternative...[other than] the No Project Alternative.” Then it says that the “Proposed Project takes into consideration increased activity at the proposed site versus reduced activity on the 710 freeway and in the area of downtown rail yards. Greater use of rail is contrasted with continued use of trucks for longer hauls...is a simplified way to look at these issues, but cannot substitute for a review of the analysis in the EIR itself.”
Consequently, the more an alternative moves goods to rail by loading trains on the docks, the more superior the alternative is. Such alternatives should be part of the assessment, not a separate section remote from the assessment.
Jim Newton suggested in an opinion piece published in the L.A. Time (on October 10) that the “quality already is not the greatest” in an area surrounded by freeways and industrial facilities (though erred in suggesting the project is next to the 710 Freeway). The DEIR itself continues a similar bias, suggesting that intersections impacted by the project already which already have the lowest quality of service (“F”), so making it worse is okay since it will not have a significant impact (because there is no rating lower than “F”). Besides snarling traffic, “F” grade intersections can be nosier and more polluting than better flowing intersections.
This sort of thinking — if its bad already we can’t make it much worse — underlies a serious problem in advancing blighted neighborhoods and achieving environmental justice. These are compounded in a DEIR full of inconsistencies, poor outdated foundation information, old census data and pre-recession employment and traffic counts.
This project also claims that SCIG will be the Nation’s, and maybe North America’s, greenest intermodal terminal and will be their “gold standard” of sustainability for all BNSF intermodal facilities, perhaps all terminals worldwide, with digitally automated gates, GPS monitored truck routes, wide-span electric cranes, ultra-lowemitting genset switchers, Hydrogen and CNG/LNG fueled yard tractors and hostler trucks, hooded exterior lighting system, light-pole height lowered from 80ft to 60-40ft, reduce terminal’s size for containers moved (compared to Hobart), buffers and soundwalls between the facility and surrounding communities, and other facilities to reduce impacts of anticipated utility rate increases.
The DEIR doesn’t tell us that these measures have already been used for ports, terminals, and transfer facilities in elsewhere in the world (e.g., Singapore, HongKong, Dubai, Rotterdam, etc.).
The DEIR also fails to provide a “Traffic Management Alternative” (common in highway EIRs) that for decades Sealand/Maersk has used in HongKong and Salalah (Oman) reducing by half truck movements for imports and empties. T
he DEIR does discuss and assess “SocioEconomics” and “Environmental Justice” but not as parts of the environmental assessment section but completely isolated from an integrated environmental approach to these issues. This is common practice when the preparers want to hide some bad parts. Discussions of jobs in 2006-07 data do not really reflect the redistribution within the logistics industry and the reduction of time/container, and therefore trucking jobs. Over the long-term various estimates give up to 14,000 new direct and undefined indirect jobs in Los Angeles or 22,000 new direct and indirect jobs in southern California by 2036 but no definitions or evidence of indirect jobs is given.
We, like the NRDC, must be concerned for those who live nearest to the proposed facility, Wilmington, Carson and Long Beach’s west side. Our comments on the DEIR will look to transfer 50-75% of all containers directly between rail and ships and to improve the San Pedro- Commerce corridor’s environment.