Air quality ranks 1.8 out of 100 for Argyle and Bartonville, according to Sperling’s BestPlaces.
Long ago, the American Lung Association gave Denton County air quality an “F.”
People are joking they will soon need a negative scale for shale air. Really, what more needs to be said?
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Demoralizing numbers.
“No more trees. No more Thneeds. No more work to be done.
So, in no time, my uncles and aunts, every one,
all waved me good-bye. They jumped into my cars
and drove away under the smoke-smuggered stars.
Now all that was left ‘neath the bad smelling-sky
was my big empty factory…the Lorax…and I.”
According to Ed Ireland, drilling here is just getting started.
Watch for colling inversions. Last February my son played outside when we were snowed in and school was cancelled. By noon the next morning, he was bedridden lethargic for ten days with dilated eyes, dizziness, headaches, nauisated, and said he felt “out of his head”. The doc ordered VOC bloodwork, but that is not a test that Aetna labs perform. The CBC, nasal and chest xrays were normal and so the mysterious illness went undiagnosed. We live downwind from 22 gaswells at UTA and he goes to school near a drillsite too. Recently I pulled him from school because they were fracking and the winds were blowing that way. Once I was stupid and let him talk me into visiting a friend who lives extremely close to that drill site by his school and within a hour of riding bikes, he called me crying that his ears were about to burst and I had to rush him to a doctor who treated him for an acute sinus pressure attack.
Cooling Inversion pushes down pollution.
Yes, those kinds of pollution inversions have killed people in the past, although I’m sure plenty never got the kind of scrupulous documentation that allowed health officials to chronicle those famous incidents in London and Pennsylvania.
Sometimes I wonder if Texas counts on its winds too much. And if we have numbers this bad with wind …
Don’t eat the benzene snow. I wonder what/if there is a freezing point for the VOCs and other emissions?
Benzene freezes at 40 something degrees but I’m not as worried about the benzene as I am the carbon disulfide. There is a reason Honeycutt wants us to focus only on the benzene.
That’s right, benzene freezes at 5.5 C, which is between 41 and 42 F. Formaldehyde holds out until -133 F or so.
Toxicologists don’t really know what happens to the human body when it is burdened with a multitude of toxic compounds. No one has ever studied it.
It’s important to know that there are different kinds of toxicologists. Some are MDs, some are PhDs. Some studied the effects of contaminated soils on worms and then became the head of the toxicology division for the largest environmental regulatory agency in the country.