Pollution | El Paso Texas | QUALITY of LIFE Series

Pollution | El Paso Texas | QUALITY of LIFE Series

Hi, welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña with Peña El Paso Realty Group. Thank you so much for checking out the YouTube channel. And as promised, we said that we were going to do a series kind of on the quality of life

in El Paso, and while overall the quality of life here is very high, it's based off of eight different factors, there is one factor that is not so good, and we're just going to jump right into it and cover that one now, and that is pollution. In this category, we are scored moderate, okay, kind of right in the middle.

Not terrible, but definitely not good. And so, super quick, water pollution, that's not a problem for us. We don't get a ton of water from the Rio Grande, and we don't rely on that water for our drinking water or any type of water, we rely on underground aquifers.

Water pollution, not a problem for us. Land pollution, not a problem for us either. There is one little section though in El Paso, and there's other YouTube videos on this. You can check out, if you, YouTube, like search smelter town, Asarco, I believe, and we used

to have a smelter factory back in the day, and that land actually is pretty polluted, but not a lot of people live there, and unfortunately the poor folks that do live there do suffer from the effects of that. So really, what we're talking about as far as pollution is air pollution, and so I've

got some notes here, I'm going to use them. As you can see, there's a crazy scene behind me, I'm going to talk about what this is, but let's just jump right into, you know, what is the air pollution, what's happening here in El Paso with it.

So, essentially, hot temperatures, hot weather can create prime conditions for what we're going to call smog pollution. So smog pollution is also known as photochemical smog, and it essentially, it occurs when sunlight reacts with pollutants emitted from, let's say, vehicles, factories, power plants, oil

refineries, and other sources, and there's, you know, plenty of vehicles, we have our fair share of factories, but not a ton, but of course, in Juarez, which is right here, there are a number of factories, I believe they're called maquilas, and that's part of the good thing about our kind of, our sister city of Juarez here, is that there are a lot

of, there's a lot of commerce that happens, and the maquilas, or the factories in Juarez, they do a lot with developing auto parts, manufacturing auto parts, things like that, but of course, those factories there are emitting a lot of those pollutants, in addition to what we're emitting here, and since we're so close, they all kind of mix together, so

the resulting mixture of those pollutants includes things like ground-level ozone, which we're going to talk about, particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, which is basically, I'm pretty sure what's coming out of that guy right there, so you know, all of this can have pretty serious health impacts, especially if you have respiratory

issues, say like asthma, so you know, it's going to exacerbate those conditions whenever you live in some place where those pollutants are mixing around in the air, and then for everybody else, could cause eye irritation, headaches, and other symptoms like that, so let's talk a little bit about ozone, so ozone is a major component of that smog that forms

here when those high temperatures, sunlight, and those airborne chemicals react, and so it is important to note that, you know, it's likely that in the summer is going to be when those higher temperatures are, and then that's going to of course kind of increase the chances of that ozone taking off, and so I found a couple of articles, and so in the first eight

months of 2022, just last year, air quality monitors recorded eight-hour ozone levels that were over 70 parts per billion on 18 days, and so, you know, 18 days out of eight months doesn't sound too bad, but at the same time, once you get above that 70 parts per billion, it starts to basically create those conditions that are conducive to air pollution,

and so that's certainly something that is happening, and if you live in El Paso, or if you're from Juarez, you know that a brown haze does occasionally kind of settle over both El Paso and Juarez in the summer months, and that's when those emissions from all the vehicle, tailpipes, all of those industrial sources are reacting with that sunlight, creating

ozone, and so, you know, the city does have an environmental services department, and they're certainly doing everything that they can to help with this. One of the things that they're doing is that they're dispersing and distributing air quality monitors throughout the city, because depending on the wind patterns, you know, different parts of the city will

experience different levels of air quality, and so the city wants to do everything it can to stay on top of that, and yes, there is actually a new air quality monitoring station for ozone and particulate matter in Juarez as well, so it's not like it's just El Paso over here trying to clean up our air and Juarez is doing their own thing. They are obviously

certainly aware of this. They don't want air pollution for their citizens, and so they're doing everything they can to combat that as well, and so that's a good thing, and so, you know, if you look online, if you look up AQI, it stands for Air Quality Index, if this is something that you're really concerned about, you can monitor kind of on a daily

basis, you know, where's El Paso at, and we do typically fall in that moderate range. A lot of times we're good, you know, if, for instance, in the winter when there's not a lot of wind blowing stuff around and the temperatures are nice and cool, our air quality is good because the conditions just aren't right to create it, but in maybe those summer

months or in spring when we get a lot of the wind, that's when you're going to start to see our air quality start to climb up into that moderate area, and so a couple other little things here I thought were interesting. In 2021, the United States Environmental Protection Agency designated all of El Paso County as a non-attainment area for ozone, meaning that

we need to do better, and so by being designated that non-attainment area, it automatically initiated a process where factories, facilities that contribute to air pollution are going to have to be forced to reduce emissions, so places like this behind me, and so let me kind of explain what is behind me. This is the Marathon Petroleum Corporation's oil

refinery. It's basically, it's 94, it's been here 94 years, almost 100 years. It's about on 550 acres. It's kind of located kind of central east El Paso, south of Interstate 10. They refine up to 131,000 barrels of crude oil per day, and they employ 440 people, so basically everything here is controlled, right? In the United States, we're good about

the controlling companies and telling them kind of what they need to do and what they can't do, and so this refinery is allowed to emit up to 934 tons of 10 pollutants from its different fuel storage tanks and other supporting facilities. Now, that's 89 tons less than under its previous permit, because they have to get permitted every, I think

it's 5 to 10-ish years, but that's 89 tons less than under its previous permit, and most of that does include those VOCs, those volatile organic compounds, so those gases that are coming out of these pipes essentially are a main component of smog, and again, they can cause that eye, nose, throat irritation, and in some cases, it's been proven that they

can cause cancer, and so, you know, I was honestly on the phone with somebody just today, and they said, you know, what I like about you is that you seem to be honest, and it feels like you're telling me the truth, that you're being as unbiased as possible, and of course, I'm sure there's a lot of cynical people out there that are like, look, this

guy's a real estate agent, he's just trying to get me to, I don't know, move to El Paso and buy a house with him, he doesn't care about me as a person or anything like that. That's one, not true, and I do believe that it is true that I do try to be as honest as humanly possible.

I've lived in El Paso now for over three years, and I still love it. I loved it when I moved here, and I love it more now that I've been here, but at the same time, it's not perfect, because no place is perfect. It's got so many great things going for it, but I'd be lying if I said it was like this

magical wonderland where there are no problems, because obviously, one of the issues that we are facing in this city is air pollution, and not only are we facing it, but we're facing it also with Juarez, because they're facing it as well. It is an issue that we wanted to make you aware of, so that we can provide as much value

and insight about the city as humanly possible. With that, I'm going to wrap it up. I hope that everybody's doing great, and we'll see you in the next episode.