Bay Area Toxic

The Story Behind the Story- Toxic Tour of the Bay

Today was the first BlogTalkRadio show we’ve produced in which we interview our own reporters working on Spot.us pitches. I had the opportunity to interview Josh Wilson from Newsdesk.org, Pulitzer-Prize-winning photographer Kim Komenich and all around rock star (as David put it and I happen to agree) Kwan Booth, who are all collectively working on the “Bay Area Toxic Tour” series, documenting toxic hot spots around the San Francisco Bay and their impact on the lives that take place on the fringes of these industrialized zones.

The Spotus Radio show was an example of live digital journalism in the making. Both Kim and Kwan were out in the field when they called in.

“I’m at the stage right now where I’m kind of establishing sort of a sense of place for the idea of where a lot of the problems are arising,” Komenich said when he called into the show.

It was also an opportunity to tell the journalists’ story behind the story — they relayed the inside scoop on what has been uncovered, the hunches of conflict they sense, the process of putting the story and photos in context, and the challenges in gaining the trust of West Oakland residents… and so much more.

I learned a lot more about this developing story from the 45-minute conversation I had with the journalists covering it, than from all the reading I have done on the subject thus far. Below is an edited transcript of the first half of the interview. But be sure to listen in (scroll down to the bottom) to hear the full story.

Spot: First of all, Josh, could you just give us a little background about this pitch and why it’s such an important issue facing our communities?

Josh Wilson: About five or six years ago, a colleague of mine at the time who was working at SF Gate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s newspaper was a photo editor and honestly feeling a little board. All he was doing was prepping images of pop stars and sports stars and felt that there was a lot more that could be done with photojournalism to serve the San Francisco Bay Area community. An idea I had for quite a while was to do some photo essays of industrial facilities around the Bay and he added to that the idea of not just looking at the facilities but also looking at the people who live near and around those facilities, the refineries, the port facilities, the chemical plants and all that stuff. So this idea has been floating around for a while to try to identify the people who live with the pollution that results from our industrial economy. We were never really able to do it. Getting the resources together was really challenging. Definitely the funding to do so was hard to come by so the idea kind of became fallow and my colleague eventually moved to Alaska. So the idea has been sitting there so when Spot.us came along, it really revealed to me the opportunity of connecting with communities around a particular story.

Kim Komenich: I’m at the stage right now where I’m kind of establishing sort of a sense of place for the idea of where a lot of the problems are arising. The initial stage for me as a photographer is to set the scene, show the trucks, show some of the loading and the unloading and the things that are happening in the port. And then later today, I’ll probably go to the neighborhoods a bit more and show the neighborhoods in the context of some of this.

Josh Wilson: Live Journalism

[laughs]

Kim Komenich: Well it’s a real good contrast for me because I worked 26 years in print and the last couple years we were making the transition to a print/multimedia hybrid so for me, this is kind of a continuation of the way it was heading even in print at this point. We’re going into more web based stuff, more video, more audio recordings and podcasts and slideshows, which is what I’m going to be doing here with Fotovision, Spot.us and Newsdesk.org.

Spot: So far, it seems like most of your reporting has been about the Port of Oakland. Is that the primary focus or are there other areas you’re going to examine as well.

Josh Wilson: The port of Oakland is the first stop on the toxic tour. We have a number of other places we’d like to be checking out including Richmond, but that has to happen after this particular project is done. We’re fundraising for each one individually. But I have to emphasize that we need to finish this piece first which we’re actively fundraising for as we write it, as we produce it.

Kwan Booth: I’m doing a lot of research and the more I find that the Port of Oakland is the main crux of this story but I’m seeing that West Oakland in general has a huge amount of health problems and honestly some of these problems have been dating back all the way since World War II. I’m at this point now where I’m trying to figure out how to put what’s going on at the port in context to what’s been going on historically throughout the years. Right now we’re going to focus on the port because this is the first major issue but hopefully we can come back and revisit some of these issues happening on the larger scale. We have these toxins coming from the port but we also have illegal dumping going on, there are all types of large machine businesses coming in doing things from the illegal dumping to toxin dispersals and I think there was a study done in 2008 that says that the toxins in West Oakland are more than three times the level of the rest of the city. In 1997 there was as study done that says that 82 percent of the people in West Oakland live within and eighth of a mile of a toxic industrial area. So the port is the main issue now but there’s a lot of smaller things I think need to be addressed as well. This is going to be a multi-phased process.

Spot: What have you discovered so far about Oakland. What’s happening there? What kind of pollution is being created in the ocean or by diesel exhaust from the trucks. What are some of the main problems there?

Kwan Booth: The truck pollution is a problem. It’s a relatively small number of the overall pollutants but the fact that the trucks travel throughout the west Oakland streets. That was the initial contention between West Oakland residents, environmentalists, the actual truck drivers and the ports about how to actually clean up those trucks that are going into the communities. Because of the way the port system operates, a lot of times the guys have to sit and idle in their trucks for three to four hours and that’s just pollutants constantly being spewed out into the air. Some environmental groups, The West Oakland Health Council and the West Oakland Environmental Indicator’s Project, realized that the first way to target the immediate things going on is to retrofit the trucks with filters that reduce the toxins that they are spewing out. But along with that, illegal dumping has been going on. In 2008 they ran a study where the City of Oakland removed almost three hundred tons of illegal garbage that was dumped in West Oakland. Some out of residences and others from the manufacturing companies coming out of there but all these things combined would really go to increasing the cancer and asthma rates in the community.

Spot: What types of violations have been broken in terms of air and sea pollution?

Kwan Booth: Well that’s the thing. I haven’t found too many actual “violations” because there’s not a lot of rules. There was one study done in 2000 and another done in 2008. But because the rules are relatively lax, they’re not breaking too many laws. It’s just a recommendation that these things really need to be changed. 

Let’s make sure this important story gets funded! There’s only $500 to go to for the first portion of the series about the Port of Oakland to be fully funded. Donate now!