You can kill the Assemblyman’s rail yards bill, but his heart will go on … talking air quality

It was 10 a.m. Tuesday morning and eighteen hours earlier, Assembly Bill 2332–fledgling 55th District Assemblyman Warren Furutani’s (D-Long Beach) try at banning construction of new or expanded railyards within a quarter-mile of schools–had rather quietly burned to [...]

Tuesday’s Long Beach Harbor Commission approval of a five-year plan to clean up diesel truck pollution by 2012 will forever change the faces of the truckers hauling your food, flat-screen TVs and furniture.
The question, as the Port’s first deadline for potential polluters looms–Oct. 1, the date when pre-1989 rigs will become verboten–is how.

Port cargo container fees to pay for cleaner-running trucks
The Long Beach Harbor Commission has approved charging fees of $35 or $70 on every container entering or leaving the Port of Long Beach by diesel truck, starting next year.
The money–an estimated $1.6 billion per year by the measure’s end in 2012–will help pay for cleaner-running, short-haul [...]

Our beaches needn’t feel lonely: now our air sucks, too…

…and will again, every fire season. Lucky Long Beach is situated at the neck of a “wind funnel.” It’s “very dramatic,” says LAT.

Bad air quality in Long Beach, and Kimora Lee Simmons
The fires still reign as the Press-Telegram’s top story today, though Kelly Puente has the local angle with a piece on air quality.
Elsewhere in the P-T, there’s more excitement: Kevin Butler writes about the Long Beach Unified School District superintendent banning teachers’ union leader Scott [...]

Some of the fallout from the wildfires that are consuming Southern California — casting what ought to be crisp and sunny autumn colors into a flat and depressing sepiatone  – is so microscopic that it may lodge permanently in our lungs, bloodstreams and organs, causing potentially serious health problems far into our futures. A crisp but not-so-sunny account [...]