Port of Long Beach Told to Stop Polluting
The Port of Long Beach, which has been touting itself as one of the nation’s greenest ports, is being threatened with a federal lawsuit if it doesn’t clean up its act in the next 90 days.
Two environmental groups, the National Resources Defense Council and the Coalitionfor a Safe Environment , sent a 13-page letter to port executives and the Long Beach mayor on Jan. 6 urging the port to cut diesel emissions and pollution or go to court.
“We are tired of listening to the port authorities saying all the right things but doing very little,” said David Pettit, a senior attorney with the NRDC.
The two environmental groups said they had tried to work with the port but to no avail. Port-related diesel emissions, the groups pointed out, cause thousands of hospital visits a year for asthma, heart attacks and strokes.
The Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles have mapped out a Clean-Air Action Plan, which promises to reduce diesel emissions at the port by 45 percent by 2012. But much of it has not been put into effect. Part of the plan is to require that the nearly 17,000 trucks picking up cargo at the ports use newer and cleaner vehicles starting Oct. 1. Originally, the cleantruck plan was to have gone into effect last October.
The NRDC said the port has a good written plan in place, but not much has been implemented, which is why it is turning to the courts.
However, Long Beach port officials have said the legal threat doesn’t make sense because the facility has being actively working on its clean-air program for some time now.
The letter is a precursor to a lawsuit that would be brought under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, a federal law that lets a federal court order a polluter to stop causing harm to the public. The NRDC said it had not sent a similar letter to the Port of Los Angeles, located right next door to the Port of Long Beach, because it was still in negotiations with the city-owned entity.
The environmental groups are requesting that within six months the Long Beach port start requiring ships docking at the facility to use cleaner lowsulfur fuel as soon as they are within 40 nautical miles. They also want 50 percent of vessels calling at the port to be coldironed, or using electricity, when docked by 2009 and 80 percent by 2010.—Deborah Belgum
