By Don Miles, Lehigh Valley Group
On Monday, February 10, 2020, the Lehigh Valley Group presented a community forum on "Trucks, Warehouses and Air Pollution" at the restored Illick’s Mill in Bethlehem. The event was attended by over 40 people and covered a subject much discussed in the region. The Lehigh Valley has been recently identified as one of the fastest-growing regions for warehouse and distribution center growth in the world. The Lehigh Valley's location includes easy access to several major Interstate highways, which puts the region within one tractor-trailer shift of over 100 million people. This growth has brought with it air pollution and loss of area farmland.
Dr. Benjamin Felzer, associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lehigh University, explained how diesel engines produce particulate air pollution particles known as "PM2.5 '' that get trapped in human lungs and are passed into the bloodstream. When these particles join nitrogen oxides also produced by diesel engines, they can cause ozone air pollution. He described how this mix of pollutants becomes massive when an area has as much diesel truck traffic as the Lehigh Valley, particularly concentrated near the major highways and warehouse depots.
A major remedy for such pollution is actually installed in all diesel trucks produced since 2009: diesel engine catalytic filters, which can reduce particulate and nitrogen oxides pollution by over 90%. The problem is that millions of trucks built before 2009 are still on the road without such filters, and even the filters in post-2009 trucks need periodic replacement, which is expensive and not always done.
Beth Somishka of the City of Bethlehem Health Bureau explained the health impacts of the pollution produced by diesel trucks in the Lehigh Valley. The thousands of diesel trucks that enter and leave the Lehigh Valley each week produce air pollution that is dangerous for hundreds of thousands of area residents including infants, children, the elderly, and those suffering from respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as those with heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Long-term exposure to diesel truck air pollution is dangerous to these populations, but recent studies have shown that even short-term exposure at air pollution lower than current EPA standards can create substantial risk of premature death.
Land use attorney Donald Miles presented another health impact of the proliferation of warehouses served by diesel trucks in the Lehigh Valley. Since most of these facilities have been built on land that was formerly farmed, their creation reduces the availability of fresh produce for residents -- the loss of which detrimentally affects their overall health. He described a series of governmental actions that Lehigh and Northampton counties, in the absence of substantial federal and state actions, could take to curtail the loss of area farmland to warehouse construction.