Air quality around schools

[pegkerr]

Enter your child's school's name here to see how toxic the surrounding air is.

Ew. Not good. Delia's school is in the 28th percentile (34,948 of 127,809 schools have worse air) and Fiona's school is in the 17th percentile (21,160 of 127,809 schools have worse air.)

Comments

[naomikritzer]

The best it gets in Minneapolis appears to be the 36th percentile.

There's one in the first percentile, did you see that? It wasn't a school I'd heard of. They get the bulk of their pollutants from the same place Delia's (and Molly's) school gets the worst of theirs, but I think the other school must be right by the plant.

[naomikritzer]

For extra giggles, you can enter the school closest to your house to get the rating for the air at your home! (32nd percentile here, and our chief offender is Ford.)

[aome.livejournal.com]

My daughter's school is 14th percentile, which isn't too bad, but the school where I went, in CA? 53rd. Ick.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

No, no, that's pretty bad. The lower the number, the worse the score.

[aome.livejournal.com]

Duh - of course. And yet I find it VERY VERY hard to believe that the air here is that much worse than the Bay Area - where you can SEE the smog, just looking around. So - I confess I'm going to take the answers with a large grain of salt.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

That list is for carcinogens, which are mostly invisible. Smog affects asthma and emphysema quite strongly, but has a relatively small effect on cancer. So it doesn't seem all that implausible to me. Cities tend to concentrate smog, especially cities with a lot of car traffic, in valleys. Carcinogenic toxins are more likely to come from big factories, and from agricultural toxins like pesticides. It's been a long time since companies wanted to build big factories in a crowded city--land and construction cost so much less away from cities. So many cancer risk factors are about being downwind or downstream of pollution sources, more than whether the source is nearby, or whether the pollutant is mixed with something visible like dust or smoke.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

63rd percentile.
Where I grew up is 79th.
Where I went to college is 93rd

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Just rankings don't tell enough of the story, though; if they measured 1000 schools all of which had excellent air, there'd still be 250 in the bottom quartile. (Or, alternatively, and perhaps more likely in the real world, if they measured 1000 schools all with poor to awful air, there'd still be 250 in the top quartile.) So the question is what does the actual curve look like? I guess I could try reading the positions of the two sliders for a little more detail; but I don't know what risk levels their "best" and "worst" mean, or what the slope of the function is.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

Ben and Rachel's school gets 14th, which isn't good, but the list of most likely sources of the pollutants is interesting:

* Sunoco, Inc. (R&M) Philadelphia Refinery - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (This is down near the airport, miles and miles away from the school, which means that all of downtown has poor air quality because of the refinery.)

* Exelon Corp. Eddystone Generating Station - Eddystone, Pennsylvania (I've never even HEARD of Eddystone, PA and have no idea what county it's in, which probably means that this polluter is affecting people for miles and miles around!)

* Sunoco Inc. (R&M) Eagle Point Facility - Westville, New Jersey (I'm also not clear how close Westville is to us, but it's in another state, so affecting legislation to clean this up isn't even in our power as non-NJ residents.)

* Exelon Corp Schuylkill Generating Station - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (This is actually probably the source of a lot of electrical power in the city, which is why, more than ever, I want to try to switch to Green Power, like wind and solar.)

* U.S. Navy Cnrma-Pnbc Site - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (This one is weird, because technically, the Navy isn't supposed to be doing a whole heck of a lot in the decommissioned Philadelphia Navy Yard besides finding other uses for it. So I have to say--WTF?)

Interestingly, their old school, which is three blocks from our house, is 27th percentile, a lot better than downtown. However, we're at a higher elevation and about three miles away from their current school. Amazing what a difference that makes! That school also has the two Sunoco facilities as likely polluters, plus the Eddystone location, but there are two others not seen on the list for the high school:

* Kimberly-Clark Pennsylvania Llc - Chester, Pennsylvania (That's right--the Kleenex people!)

* Conocophillips Co. Trainer Refinery - Trainer, Pennsylvania (Where the heck is Trainer, PA? Never heard of it. Which means that the people who live closer to it must REALLY be lucky. :sigh: Yet another refinery.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Interesting - I looked up my old grade school which is in Northeast Philadelphia, and it ranks 41%. Which is still not reassuring, considering my parents live half a block from it.

[mereilin.livejournal.com]

Ours was 74th, and the worst ranking of the four schools in town. Interestingly they're all within about a mile of one another so I question the accuracy of these numbers. Also, the cowtown in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest where I went to high school ranked 64th, which means that beautiful country air is LESS healthy than the stuff I breathe every day here in town? Weird.

[piccolo-pirate.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit skeptical of the numbers - my old high school and middle school were a full percentage point in difference - but they're literally next door to each other. And they're in the middle of a small town with no industry to speak of for miles, so even 64th and 65th percentile seems high.

[zeldaophelia.livejournal.com]

I noticed the same thing. The high school and the charter school in my home town are In The Same Building, but the charter school is a full 22 percentage points better. :/

[trogon.livejournal.com]

Any large-scale agriculture nearby? Most of the damage from industrial farming is to water rather than air, but it could still play a role.

The difference seems strange, but it could just be that they're right at the cutoff and it's something like 64.49 and 64.51.

[silme.livejournal.com]

Where I last taught in the US (Boulder) is in the 63rd percentile. Hmm. We used to threaten to bring in OSHA because we thought we had sick building syndrome.

Interestingly, where I first taught in rural Colorado is in the 91st percentage. We're talking rural -- a few blocks of paved roads, no traffic lights.

My own former high school, in the working-class Philly 'burbs, is in the 21st. I'm not surprised. :(

[brigidsblest.livejournal.com]

I'm not surprised. My daughter's school is in the 6th percentile (6,001 of 127,809 schools have worse air.) We live in a county in northwest Indiana that has several steel mills, a BP/Amoco oil refining plant, a chemical factory less than five miles away, a Lever Bros. soap factory, a Cargill plant (my husband works there), and is notoriously inefficient at penalizing those who don't adhere to air safety regulations.

Edit: I should add, for purposes of comparison, that the Iowa high school where I attended ranks in the 32nd percentile (40,228 of 127,809 schools have worse air.)

[satakieli.livejournal.com]

This has nothing to do with air quality or schools, but have you seen this?
Apparently Pride and Prejudice and Zombies wasn't a fluke.

[elthionesse.livejournal.com]

Um, they're seriously not factoring in prevailing winds in this study. I don't know if it's a factor where you live, but it's a definite factor around here (Lower Columbia River Valley--the wind blows one way virtually all the time...and my school is not downwind of the industries that are releasing the chemicals that are factored into the rankings).