Do you know how bad
Connecticut’s air quality is? According
to the American Lung Association, all of our state’s counties got a grade of “F”
when it comes to ozone.
On hot, summer days the
sun’s rays combine with auto, truck and power plant exhausts to create an
invisible blanket of ozone over our state.
When it combines with fine particulate matter it turns into a grayish
haze, making breathing difficult.
Sure, we can blame states to our west whose pollution blows our way, including those “clean
coal” meccas of West Virginia and Ohio.
But before we point fingers, maybe we should consider what we are doing ourselves
to worsen the problem.
Think of this next time
you’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-95 or the parkways. Metro-North mostly runs its trains on
electricity, but its diesels are downright filthy as are local buses, though
many fleets are converting to natural gas or electric operation.
Even shipping by water
contributes to pollution, though you hardly think about it as you’re breathing
in the brisk air of Long Island Sound.
So it was great to read recently that Connecticut will soon have its first “hybrid” cross-Sound cargo vessel, “Harbor Harvest”, named after the natural food store
and café in Norwalk.
The 65-foot, aluminum catamaran
will carry everything from fresh produce to craft-brewed beer back and forth
between Connecticut and Long Island. The
$2.8 million dollar vessel will charge its batteries using shore power for the
45 minute crossing. Its owners estimate
their cargo will take one or two trucks off of I-95 by cutting the travel time
in half.
Mind you, the project
wouldn’t even be possible were it not for a $1.8 million federal grant which
the owners hope will keep them running for a couple of years. Then we’ll see if it’s economically
viable. One shipping veteran on the
coast tells me that’s “possible but not probable.”
Not that one little boat,
displacing two trucks a day, is going to make our air breathable again. But it’s a start.
Meanwhile in California, the
shipping industry is “going green” on a massive scale. The twin ports of
Long Beach and Los Angeles are the two busiest ports in the US, handling 400
ships a year.
To reduce pollution, the
ports introduced a speed limit of 12 knots for ships as far as 40 miles from
the docks. Those vessels used to
constantly keep at least a generator running to power the vessel in port but
now they too are “plugging in” when they tie-up to unload containers and
freight.
Here’s an astounding
statistic: Allowing just one container
ship to use shore-power for a single day is the pollution-reducing equivalent
of taking 33,000 cars off the road for that day. That’s a major impact on air quality. But it’s only the beginning of the needed “greening”
of this transportation hub.
Containers offloaded from
the vessels will soon be moved around the port on electric trucks, then mounted
on railcars and carried away by fuel-efficient (but still very dirty) diesel-pulled
trains and 16,000 long-distance (equally dirty) trucks. So there’s still much to be done.
We worry so much about
traffic and getting where we must, quickly and safely. Maybe we should also think about how our
transportation choices effects on our health.
Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media
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