Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

Healthy Indoors | 55 program altogether. • Fence-line monitoring. We ask EPA to include requirements for fence-line monitoring of facili- ties and to develop associated requirements to ensure accura- cy, reliability, and availability of real-time monitoring data. We also ask EPA to make data from community air pollution monitors actionable in a permitting and enforcement context. Moms Clean Air Force and EDF urge EPA to expeditiously adopt a more robust rule delivering the stron- gest possible protections for those who work in or live in the vicinity of chem- ical facilities, including environmental justice communities, first responders, children, and families. Cynthia Palmer is a petrochemi- cal strategy advisor to Moms Clean Air Force. She is keenly interested in ways to shift the world away from plastics and other petrochemicals. MOMS Clean Air Force continued from previous page contractors) to file anonymous reports and to stop work in dangerous situations, and we ask EPA to apply these provisions to all operations. We also support reforms aimed at increasing and enabling workers and their representatives to take part in incident inspections and compliance audits. We favor enhanced information distribution, employee participation and training, and anti-discrimination measures. • Emergency response. Information sharing prior to a disaster is especially important because in the immediate aftermath of a flood, fire, explosion, or other incident, community notification systems may be hampered by power outages, access inequities, or other disruptions. Moms and EDF support proactive emergency response requirements including training, multilingual community notification, and improved information access for first responders. • Information availability. EPA proposes to limit the sharing of chemical hazard information to residents within a six-mile radius — an arbitrary cut-off that does not even include all who live within the worst-case scenario impact zones. EPA dis- regards the risks faced by those residing outside the six-mile radius, and it relies on locational data, supplied by facilities, that is often highly inaccurate. We urge EPA to create a publicly available, readily accessible, consolidated electronic da- tabase that houses program information. In addition, we call on the agency to dramatically reduce the turnaround time in which facilities respond to infor- mation requests. TELL EPA: PROTECT OUR COMMUNITIES FROM PLASTICS INCINERATION POLLUTION • Costs and benefits. Our anal- ysis finds that EPA underesti- mates the benefits of increased public health protections while giving considerable emphasis to the financial costs to hazardous industries, for example in transi- tioning to safer alternatives. • Program coverage. We urge EPA to expand the list of dan- gerous chemicals included in its chemical disaster program. The program leaves out hundreds of extremely toxic chemicals such as the notorious ammonium nitrate, responsible for deadly ex- plosions in the US and globally. In addition, we urge EPA to re- vise the threshold quantities that trigger protective safeguards. The limited number of chemi- cals on the list and the absurdly high threshold quantities mean that many stockpiles of toxic chemicals are excluded from the

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