Air pollution budget dwarfed by West Nile
June 17, 2006

Ward one councillor Brian McHattie is calling on the city to get a lot more serious about funding air pollution programs. He was responding to the latest annual report from Clean Air Hamilton that suggested nearly 300 people a year are dying prematurely in the city because of air pollution.

"I look at the number of premature deaths and cardiovascular and respiratory hospital admissions and it really seems to me that this is an epidemic - of epidemic proportions," declared McHattie. West Nile . is a very important issue, but it's had one death in the last five or six years and the amount of resources that the city is putting into that is extraordinary."

This year's West Nile budget is $1.6 million. Last year there was one human illness in Hamilton from the virus and 15 confirmed bird deaths. Clean Air Hamilton, on the other hand, receives $80,000 a year from the city. The 21 member advisory group has 12 government representatives including nine city staff members. It is headed by McMaster chemistry professor Brian McCarry who recently presented the group's annual report to the city's planning committee.

The report includes Ontario Medical Association data that calculates 290 people died prematurely in Hamilton last year because of air pollution, and there were over 800 hospital admissions and more than 2800 emergency room visits.

Number of Smog Advisories in Hamilton — 1999 - 2005 Figure 13, ClearAir Hamilton 2004-2005 Progress Report, May 2006

McCarry told the committee that Hamilton's air pollution trends "are kind of depressing". While dramatic reductions were achieved between 1970 and 1995, the levels of the most worrisome pollutants have either remained flat or increased over the last ten years.

The group reports that "air levels of PM10 and NO2 have remained essentially constant for over a decade; air levels of ground level ozone, which vary substantially from year to year due to weather conditions, have been increasing over the past decade."

These three account for over 75% of premature deaths in Hamilton, with nitrogen dioxide and ozone having the largest health impacts. McCarry pointed to vehicle use as the key cause of the worsening air pollution.

"People tend to focus on industries a lot," he noted, "but we really need to focus on transportation - the car and truck activity in the area."

This analysis is supported by a mobile monitoring study conducted by Clean Air Hamilton last year that found pollutant levels adjacent to major roads were many times higher than in other residential areas.

"So if you're in the area of major roads, or if you live near a major road, your exposure is much higher than the nominal average of a residential area," explained McCarry. The group's annual report explains this in more detail.

"Pollutant concentrations were found to decrease quite quickly with increasing distance from roadways; however, concentrations of pollutants on or near roads and the resultant exposures while driving can be very high, due to the close proximity to direct emissions from diesel and gasoline vehicles. Routinely on busy roads, levels of 300 µg/m3 of PM10 and 150 ppb (parts per billion) of NO were measured, while ambient levels in residential areas were found to be between 20-40 µg/m3 of PM10 and 4-20 ppb NO. Thus, peak roadway concentrations of these pollutants exceed levels in residential areas by factors of 20-50 times."

Councillor Bob Bratina called McCarry's presentation "maybe the most important report of all for a city in which people hope to live and breathe and exist" while Dave Braden said it was the kind of clear information Hamilton needs. He noted the statistics "were actually talking about deaths, and this thing is just thousands of times more important but somehow we're getting complacent about it."

Braden called for immediate action. "I don't think we have much time to sit around, he declared. "We can't wait ten years and pat ourselves on the back by thinking oh we're talking about it."

Sam Merulla took issue with a statement by McCarry that "there's no evidence that expressways reduce pollution." Merulla argued that "if you have an expressway and it takes that traffic and takes it away from that core" that reduces air pollution. McCarry responded: "Formally, yes, but people do travel on the internal roadways of the city, and traffic levels don't tend to decrease very much."

McCarry had noted earlier that Ontario vehicle's have become more efficient, but far more driving is taking place. "So in the last 30 years [driving has] gone up by a factor of four, whereas population's only increased 35-40%."

Committee chair Maria Pearson thanked McCarry for his presentation. "I think that the information is always valuable and we can't get enough of the information to the public," she declared, noting that "technology is changing in vehicles, which is a great thing".

McCarry's list of needed changes was topped by higher density urban development to reduce car use and encourage walking and cycling. "There's no question that automobiles have the number one biggest impact in a major city," he declared. He also called on the city to "invest in public transit as well as keeping the fares low, and keeping the people who need to use the transit, and making the system as extensive as possible."

And he was sympathetic to McHattie's concern about the imbalance of health funding in Hamilton.

"One of my personal frustrations is that you get a lot of money and time and effort being put into traditional classical things that health departments are concerned with - microbiological pathogens, that sort of thing. No problem. We do have an issue that we know about - Walkerton - but there's a lot of people having a lot of difficulties with air and people passing away. There's no easy way out. I agree with the frustration. It's a real public health issue and it would be very nice to see 120 less deaths in Hamilton per year, and we can achieve that."

The Clean Air Hamilton 2004-2005 Annual Report is on their website at http://www.cleanair.hamilton.ca/downloads/CAHProgressReport20042005.pdf.

A partial transcript of McCarry's presentation and the planning committee's response is posted on the CATCH website as part of the report on the June 6 meeting. http://www.hamiltoncatch.org/planning/plan_060606.htm