Railroad’s ‘green’ claim is way off track

Matthew K. Rose, head honcho of one of the nation’s biggest railways, made the rounds recently touting a plan to city power brokers for a new “green” rail yard near the port. It’ll have clean trucks, he said. Electric cranes. Natural-gas locomotives.

His company, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, already operates a huge rail yard in Los Angeles County. It’s called Hobart Yard, and it’s in my neighborhood, the City of Commerce. And if the harbor commissioners and port officials want to see how committed BNSF is to green operations, they should come by and take a look.

The Hobart Yard is BNSF’s largest intermodal rail yard, each year loading 1.5 million containers onto trains that deliver goods east of the Rockies. It has at least one other distinction: It creates the highest cancer risk of any intermodal rail yard in the state. A study released last year by the Air Resources Board found that residents in my neighborhood are 70% to 140% more likely to contract cancer from diesel soot than people in the rest of Los Angeles. The study didn’t even look at asthma or other lung disease.

Before the Port of Los Angeles even considers approving the proposed new Southern California International Gateway -- adding yet more train and truck traffic to the region -- BNSF should clean up the deadly diesel pollution at Hobart and its other local rail yards.

“Communities matter,” claims BNSF’s public relations material. And yet the residents of my community have pleaded with the railway for years to clean up its yard. Instead, we get aging locomotives idling for hours on end, engulfing nearby homes with dangerous diesel exhaust. And when the South Coast Air Quality Management District issued regulations to limit locomotive idling two years ago, BNSF and its rail counterparts promptly took the AQMD to court to get out of the new rules.

While BNSF has promised a state-of-the art facility near the ports, Hobart and its neighboring yards have been expanded with minimal consideration given to the use of green machinery. Recently, members of my environmental justice group noticed construction underway at a BNSF yard in nearby Bell. Not only did the railway neglect to notify the community of the expansion, it also had no plan to address the additional deadly diesel pollution this operation would produce. To top it off, BNSF has no environmental review process in place, as required by the California Environmental Quality Act. That would have required public input and an assessment of alternatives and ways to mitigate harm from the expansion.

Despite all this, the port officials appear to be swallowing BNSF’s green claims that the new yard will indeed be green and won’t harm local residents. It’ll do “tremendously beneficial things in terms of the environment,” Los Angeles Harbor Commission President S. David Freeman told The Times last month.

BNSF argues that no one need worry about the huge new 300-acre facility it wants to build directly across the street from homes, schools and day-care centers in west Long Beach. But west Long Beach is worried. More than 400 residents turned out for the first set of port hearings in October 2005 to express staunch opposition.

Rail yards are undeniably needed to move goods from our busy ports to the rest of the country. But the pollution and the cancer risk in Commerce have taught us too well that they should not be located where people live and children play.