- [Advertiser] Funding for this program was made possible by the Members of WQED and the Allegheny Regional Asset District.

Thank you.

(heavy breathing) (dramatic music) - I've been running for 48 years.

And as a runner, the first thing you do is check the weather.

Is it raining outside?

Is there snow and ice?

Today, I'm not checking for rain and snow and ice.

I'm checking for air quality.

- Although the air has improved much over the last couple of years, we still have a pretty heavy burden of air pollution, compared to other places in the country.

- When the air gets pretty bad, my heart, it goes into AFib, and sometimes if the air is bad for days, it goes to AFib for days.

- Air quality is probably the most controversial thing that we have going on in our neighborhood.

- For me, it's killing me.

- The stench wakes me up sometimes, as early as three o'clock in the morning.

- To know that there are carcinogens that are going through the air while my son is out in the yard playing, that he could be breathing, you know, is very alarming to me.

- It's a false choice to say, we can have this type of industry and the jobs associated with it, or we can have a healthy environment and healthy people.

We believe we can have both.

- It's worth being here and fighting for clean air.

It's a beautiful city.

It's a place that I love.

(train whistling) - Historically, the air quality issues in Pittsburgh, you could qualify them as severe.

- [Film Narrator] It was a grim city.

A city you could taste in your mouth.

A city that smarted in your eyes.

- If you go back to the 1940's and 1950's, life expectancy, particularly for people who worked in industrial facilities, wasn't much above 50, 55 years old.

And, you know, there's a lot of cases of heart disease and respiratory disease and cancer.

At that time, people were still burning coal in their fireplaces.

Steam and locomotives, let alone the industrial facilities' use of coal without having pollution controls.

It was a big problem for air in our region.

(dramatic music) In the 1940's, after the Donora smog inversion event that killed many people, I think that that event was really embarrassing for leadership in the region.

So there was a coming together on the part of industrialists and our regional political leadership to tackle the pollution issue.

The Pittsburgh region, Allegheny County, and the State of Pennsylvania were some of the first places that started passing laws and regulations to improve air quality.

- I think most people, when they do go outside on a day like today, find it hard to believe that there's a problem.

(train horn honking) Air pollution is a particular problem in Southwest Pennsylvania for a variety of factors.

One is that, although you don't see some of the industrialization that you once did, a little further down the river, you still continue to have major industrial facilities, steel mills, Coke plants, that continue to produce a lot of pollution.

Like any urban center, we have many motor vehicles.

Those motor vehicles tend to be concentrated in low lying river valleys, as other modes of transportation, such as, railroads, as well as the barges that go up and down the river.

- Problem is, is that pollution doesn't go anywhere, because we have these valleys.

And then we have a complex terrain.

You know, we have the river valleys and deep valleys and we have what's called air inversions.

Air inversion is when the air is warmer above than it is on the ground.

The sun doesn't hit this valley, so it stays cold there.

That traps pollution, it creates a lid.

And so that pollution just keeps building up and building up and building up, and that causes health problems.

- Things have improved dramatically over the last five decades, but the air here in Allegheny County, and really in Southwestern Pennsylvania, still is some of the worst in the nation - especially with regards to fine particulates that come from a variety of sources.

From everything from the tailpipe of a diesel truck, to a coal fire power plant, to a Coke making facility, to someone burning something in their backyard.

- If you're exposed to air pollution, you can breathe in very small particles called PM2.5.

They're very tiny.

- [Matt Mehalik] Those particles are small enough to go past your respiratory defense systems and go right into your lungs and directly into your bloodstream, where they can pass around through your body.

- The biggest pollution source in this area is gonna be the Clairton Coke Works.

What comes from Clairton Coke Works is primary.

I mean, that piece of soot comes right out of that stack, and is picked up by that monitor and goes into your lungs.

And that piece of soot coming from a Coke operation has a lot of toxics in it.

- People who live in closer proximity to industrial facilities, particularly in the direction of the prevailing wind, are the people who have the most health issues related to air pollution.

When the Clairton Coke Works had an explosion and then a fire, they took offline all of their pollution control equipment.

People were complaining about the smell and having trouble breathing there.

There were multiple public hearings that were taking place on that topic, with people essentially wanting US Steel to shut down the Clairton Coke Works.

- I have been poisoned by the Coke Works.

This helped me to breathe.

It stops my heart from palpitating.

I went back for my brother's funeral, went back to Seattle in 2016, and I was there for 11 days, (coughing) and all of the pills that I was - the prescriptions that I was taking while I was here, I didn't need it anymore while I was there.

My head was clear.

- In December, it was so bad out here, it looked like Armageddon outside.

He was very young when he contracted asthma, and he's had asthma really bad.

- I've done a lot of work with the children in the communities around here, looking at air pollution impacts on asthma.

There are many triggers of that.

Allergies, respiratory infections, tobacco smoke, air pollution.

We know, in general, more boys have asthma than girls.

African-Americans are more at risk.

And we know that patients who are poor are more at risk.

- I use my inhaler mostly on very bad days.

Like, not, but not all the time.

(bell ringing) - How has it impact us?

You know, environmental racism, environmental justice, it's something that is an everyday reality for us.

The folks who are the least privileged, the folks who were not able to get, you know, the best jobs, the pensions, the benefits, the health care, those types of things.

Those are the folks who are still here.

(traffic whooshing) (car horn honking) - We moved in 2004 to take a job in New York City.

Lived in the middle of Manhattan.

I ran every day in Central Park.

I never had a day when I couldn't run because of bad air.

When we came back to Pittsburgh, we decided to live in the city rather than the suburbs.

And that was the first day that I noticed, whoa, something's wrong here.

This smells bad.

I'm a convener of a group called Eastend Neighbors concerned about air pollution.

I believe grassroots groups can be effective.

Just recently, we had a rally down at the City county building, right in advance of a meeting of the Allegheny County Health Department Board.

I believe that we've caught their attention.

- I'm not just angry today and I am not just angry alone.

Weather today's a little bit cloudy.

Air is pretty good.

Well, actually, it's kind of in the yellow range.

I'm working on a documentary about our region's air quality called, Inversion: The Unfinished Business of Pittsburgh's Air.

I've been focused on environmental issues as a filmmaker and activist, since about 2006.

Back with the scroll of Smell Pittsburgh, here.

The over 11,000 complaints submitted since the beginning of the Smell Pittsburgh app.

Now we have tools, monitors, apps, where we can see each other's complaints that show us that, A, we're not alone in our concern for air quality, and B, our lived experience is reflected in monitors that change in real time.

That we can see, when the air stinks outside, the monitors are spiking.

- We have regulations that are much more stringent than the federal government or the state, for Clairton.

And we have inspectors out there every day some evenings and even weekends.

Industry doesn't like me because the efforts of the Health Department cost them money.

And certain parts of the public don't like our efforts, 'cause it's not enough.

(crowd singing) We can't just order someone to reduce emissions, or order someone to shut down, because then that gets appealed and appealed and appealed.

Everybody in Allegheny County deserves clean air.

Some people, we have to fight a little bit harder for, especially over in the Mon Valley.

- We live here.

You need to be out here fighting for your air.

(heavy breathing) (slow, sad music) - The first death in Allegheny County occurred in March, shortly after the shutdown.

It was at 90 year old person.

This is someone who had lived in Clairton their life.

They were exposed to higher levels of pollution, and sadly, you know, that weakens immune system, resiliency, lung functioning.

It's not a surprise that someone with that health history would be vulnerable to a disease like COVID-19.

- The disease seems to be associated with communities of color, the aged, you know, areas that have a greater depth of their population represented by those groups will also be skewed towards having worse outcomes.

- That's two to three times what we see across the state of Pennsylvania, as well as nationally.

We know that there are some long-term complications of COVID.

- Back in March, I had a consistent sore throat.

Wasn't painful, but it was just a sore throat.

It was consistent, went on for weeks and weeks and weeks.

I thought it was COVID, you know, it kinda scared me.

And I finally went to the doctor, and I was diagnosed with allergies.

And I said, there has to be a connection.

- There's been research done nationally, internationally, that has demonstrated that air pollution exposure increases your chance of dying of COVID by almost 20% in the United States.

Businesses have been wiped out by COVID, haven't been able to operate, and restaurants that have been closed.

The steel industry continues to operate and continues to pollute.

Why is that?

- Not an awful lot has changed, in terms of air quality within the region.

There's been no sort of major systemic improvements.

- In November of 2020, we had seven days of tremendous air pollution in our area.

On November 9th, the Allegheny County Health Department issued a warning.

At the end, after the seven days had already transpired.

And what was their warning?

(lawn mower engine revving) That citizens should use fewer gas-powered lawn equipment.

Why isn't industry told to cut back on production during that point in time?

- Our brief cameras have captured incidents of the Edgar Thomson Steelworks blast furnaces belching red plumes that are very opaque, that go high into the sky and then dissipate.

And then you can see spikes in monitors.

Over the summer, we see these events that might last four, five, seven, nine hours.

A lot of industrial facilities started curtailing production and some of the blast furnaces went offline about a year ago.

And so, that's resulted in a little bit less because of reduced production.

You don't see the rush hour pollution spikes on monitors like you saw in prior years.

Scientists that we work with did determine earlier this year that there really was a reduction in air pollution.

- May of 2019, US Steel announced that it was gonna spend $1.2 billion upgrading its Mon Valley Works, the greatest source of pollution in this area.

Since that time, they've spent almost $2 billion in Arkansas and Alabama, creating mini mills, advanced technology.

And the bottom line is they haven't done a thing in the Mon Valley.

- There's days where, you know, I can't even do my exercise.

I was chased back inside because my heart started to palpitate, and I knew it was directly related to the air.

- We have two pandemics.

We have a pollution and a virus pandemic, and both of those target the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems, and cause damaging inflammation and dysfunction.

- Diesel exhaust is a major contributor to air pollution within the County.

- We don't appreciate it quite so much because we can't point to that big single smoke stack that's making the sky gray all around it and we can smell it.

Diesel buses are all over.

(train whooshing by) We have rail corridors that go through this city, which are certainly being considered for an expansion.

- Train pollution, in particular.

Black carbon diesel is a Group One known carcinogen.

- Freight railroad is the most environmentally-friendly way to transport goods.

One single train can take thousands of trucks off the highway.

We can move freight hundreds of miles on less than 10 gallons of diesel.

- Barbara and I co-founded Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh, because now, more than ever, it's necessary to address rail proliferation where it conflicts with urban health and safety.

- Norfolk Southern Railroad is looking to expand their current operations, by including double stack trains that go through the city of Pittsburgh.

(bell ringing) As well as, they are trying to increase the frequency of how often those trains come through different communities.

And so, it's very concerning because of all of the potential hazards and harms that could be caused to our communities.

I bought my house in 2015.

The same day that I bought it, moved in, put my bed in, and I slept there.

You literally can feel the house vibrate and shake every time a train goes by.

- [Jeff DeGraff] This is an existing route that is already used by a number of trains.

What we're doing is essentially shifting some traffic.

Trains that are already using the south, we'll now be able to ship them over to the northern route.

We'll move the double stack container trains to the northern route.

- 70 or 80 trains per day is the actual equivalent of 5,440 diesel buses passing your doorstep every single day.

For every hour of idling of a train, it's one pollution-related death a year.

Now, one of the highest level environmental justice areas in the city is the Manchester community, right next to ours.

- There's almost 80% African-Americans who live in Manchester.

There's a higher risk of, you know, health issues for Black and Brown communities.

And it's very problematic because these trains run all times of the day, through our community, and they are putting different particles, black carcinogens into the air.

- We don't have a problem with trains.

We want them to be safer and cleaner and just do oversight.

We're proposing, at Norfolk Southern's Altoona Pennsylvania plan, to manufacture scrubbers for existing older locomotives, tier four, which are much cleaner locomotive engines, and cleaner switching engines.

And that's a win-win because the state gets more jobs and we all get cleaner air.

- We are technically in mediation with the different parties that are involved, which is something that we welcome.

We wanna show our, show that we're responsible corporate citizens in these areas.

- About 180,000 people live within a quarter mile of this rail line that goes from McKees Rocks to Braddock, on the eastern side of Braddock.

And all of those people are at risk.

- We feel like our community is being leveraged and being taken advantage of, and we wanna prevent that from happening.

- I started working for Women For a Healthy Environment a year ago, and what we do is we educate communities around environmental issues.

So, anywhere from plastics that are bad for your home, to the environment that's bad for your home.

I come from a Mon Valley town, grew up in Duquesne.

I knew the air was not healthy.

My dad worked in the mill, my uncles worked in the mail.

So, it put food on our table, kept a roof over our head.

But, there's the saying that, when you know better, you do better.

And in this day and time, there's technology, there are things that I believe US Steel can do to improve the air quality.

And so here I am.

I feel like I've been given, I've been given a task as a gatekeeper of the community to educate individuals, and just to let them know they have rights.

(dramatic music) - The communities that are closest to the polluters tend to be the communities that have the fewest resources.

They may not have the resources to be able to move somewhere else.

And what can they do about it?

- Clairton also has a very high poverty rate.

So, just to get up and move is not, it's really not an option.

It's not an option.

But even my children say that to me, we should move.

I can't.

(chuckling) - In Allegheny County, there is a high rate of asthma amongst young Black and Brown folks.

And as, you know, a new parent, I have a one-year-old son, it's very concerning.

And to know that there are carcinogens that are going through the air while my son is out in the yard playing that he could be breathing, you know, is very alarming to me.

But also as an advocate, I understand that, you know, sometimes I can be a voice for other folks who are in the community because it's protecting their children and their families as well.

- People who live in the Mon Valley, that still experience these episodes, be they short term eruptions, really awful smells that keep happening, or even exceedances of air quality standards is fundamentally unfair, especially to people in the Mon Valley.

But it affects all of us in our Allegheny County.

(bright, upbeat music) - For the first time in our history, Allegheny County is in attainment with respect to the EPA pollutant mitigation, at all eight of the monitors throughout the County.

It's a big deal because we've never done it.

We're improving year after year after year, getting better.

And we finally, this year got to the point where we have made it.

And it was a lot of work that was done, most of it by the Health Department.

They entered in, back in 2017, an NOV.

A Notice of Violation, in which they used legal action with the EPA to enforce some monitoring.

Couple years later, as part of continued monitoring and enforcement action, they entered into an agreement in which US Steel would spend over $200 million in improving in air pollutant, in mitigating factor.

We've hired more people to be monitors and enforcement.

- This community is very hard hit by air pollution exposure.

This is a federally qualified health clinic that's bringing care right to the residents of Clairton.

These patients are very underserved, a lot of disparities and health equity issues.

And it's very hard for them to access care at the medical centers, due to transportation and even just work issues.

I teamed up with them recently to try to bring specialty care to these centers.

- I think it's wonderful for the community to have an accessible health plan.

- I think that the pandemic has focused perhaps a little bit away from air pollution.

Do I feel like I'm being listened to?

No, not by the folks that really have the power to make the decisions.

- Are we just going to rest on our laurels?

Are we just going to stop?

No.

- [Aerion Abney] And so it's incumbent upon the people who actually are impacted to take action.

- I do think we're seeing progress made.

We're actually seeing the Clairton residents.

They formed together into a group called Valley Clean Air Now.

- I'm trying to engage community team members, to let them know they have rights, they can speak up, they can speak out.

There's power in numbers.

(chuckling) There's power in numbers.

(bright, upbeat music)