It’s not the sound of her Dora-the-Explorer alarm clock that awakens her, nor is it the disturbance of the eighteen wheeler parked noisily outside of eight-year-old Jazzmine Jackson’s bedroom window. It’s the unseen particles of black soot seeping through the cracks of her window, triggering uncontrollable coughing and wheezing, that has her stumbling out of bed.

Toxic soot produced by trucks, trains and ships at the Port of Oakland exposes area residents and workers to high risks of cancer, asthma and heart attacks—more than any other region in Northern California.

“West Oakland children are seven times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than the average child in California,” says Margaret Gordon, a West Oakland resident and coordinating team member of The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WO EIP), quoting from a report by the Pacific Institute.

Gordon, who has lived in West Oakland for the past fourteen years, teamed up with WO EIP and other local organizations to come up with solutions to reduce West Oakland’s air pollution and the increasing number of its community members who are getting sick. According to the group, WO EIP is a “resident-led initiative to identify and address environmental concerns that began in 2000 as a partnership between the Pacific Institute and the 7th St./McClymonds Corridor Neighborhood Improvement Initiative.”

Eli Moore of the Pacific Institute says that he is happy to team up with WO EIP, stating that its members are “the real experts” in finding solutions for the high rate of diesel exhaust pollution. In the area surrounding the Port of Oakland—the fourth largest port in the nation and the most hazardous of West Oakland—children tend to suffer more sickness from toxic-related illnesses than the average child in California. The work and efforts of the WO EIP and other organizations were successful in shutting down Red Star Yeast, a main source of toxic air pollution in West Oakland that mostly affect children.

Like other children with asthma, Jazzmine wakes up frequently during the night—a time when symptoms get worse. “I don’t like the smell from the smoke. It makes me sick. Then I have to miss school,” Jackson says, who began suffering from the chronic lung condition shortly after her family moved to West Oakland in 2003.

Advice nurses at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, doctors, and other medical professionals say the exact cause of asthma, with its rate of occurrences increasing among the West Oakland community members, remains a mystery. However, they say the best way to treat it is through prevention. But for West Oakland residents, dodging the toxic smoke in and out of their homes is nearly impossible.

Diesel exhaust is the toxic soot often seen coming from big-rig trucks, trains, or ships. One WO EIP coordinating team member says that the truckers in his neighborhood do not have a place to park their trucks and are forced to take the trucks home from work. The particles coming from the trucks are so small in size that they are invisible to the naked eye. In fact, the Pacific Institute compares the size of these particles to less than the width of a single strand of human hair.

The Pacific Institute has come up with some solutions for the diesel exhaust air pollution that affect the residents and workers the most. Some of their ideas include increasing punishment for those who violate pollution laws, re-routing the trucks, and decreasing instances of idling trucks, among many others.

Port renters like Mark Menezes of High Mountain Transport disagree that most of the air pollution comes from trucks. “It’s the pollution from the ships and car traffic on the nearby major highways,” says Menezes. He suggests that expanding the ports will lower emissions and reduce the amount of air pollution and notes that old big-rigs are in the process of being replaced by new ones that will run on natural gas instead of diesel.
And if the initiatives of WO EIP and other local organizations continue to be approved, then West Oakland community members would be able to breathe a little easier.