Ashley Diaz is 11. Last year she missed 41 days of school. Since last December when site preparation for the Croton water treatment plant began across the street from where she lives, Ashley was admitted to the hospital to treat her asthma a dozen times.

Ashley is not alone. In the half mile surrounding the construction in Van Cortlandt Park, the United Hospital Fund says 240 asthmatics spend time in the hospital. Thousands more visit the emergency room. In areas of the Bronx and Harlem, one in four children has asthma, the highest rate in the nation. And that dark green area of high asthma on the Fund’s map extends right up through Ashley’s neighborhood where a mammoth water treatment plant is being blasted into bedrock.

Causes of asthma are complex to track, but the disease is attributed by scientists to breathing “bad air.” The American Lung Association gives New York City an “F” for bad air, and says exhaust from diesel trucks is one of two primary causes. The fine particulate matter (invisible soot) produced by burning diesel travels miles on the wind, sneaks past our body’s natural defenses, and embeds deep in our lungs.

In Washington, industry has managed to postpone federal regulation of diesel until September 2006 when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will require that trucks use ultra low sulfur diesel fuel (ULSD is 10 percent improvement) and 2007 when new trucks must come equipped with exhaust controls.

Now, for the good news. In New York City, people are increasingly aware of the problem. In the south Bronx, after years of work, Mothers on the Move, The Point, Congressman Jose Serrano, and NYU recently got the city to reroute Hunts Point trucks away from densely populated neighborhoods. City Council legislation now requires buses and other city owned vehicles to clean up their diesel exhaust, and Local Law 77 requires on-site equipment working city construction to use ULSD and best available emissions controls.

But, in the midst of this progress, the Bloomberg administration decided to build a water treatment plant underground in Norwood. Rock from a hole the size of eight football fields blasted eight stories down into bedrock must be hauled away through neighborhood streets in huge diesel trucks. The Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) own Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) estimates a diesel truck will leave the park every two minutes for the next two years. The same EIS estimates a 2 percent increase in deaths and incidents of asthma in the half mile surrounding the construction site.

We celebrate the DEP’s recent agreement to comply with Local Law 77 and retrofit on-site equipment with best available technology. After 10 months’ work without any controls on the exhaust, these new filters will cut 95 percent of the deadly soot produced by the bulldozers, backhoes and drills. But local residents ask: what about the trucks? Diesel pollution created by the trucks dwarfs the amount created by on-site equipment.

What can be done? Experts at work on the Big Dig in Boston say the DEP could cut harmful truck exhaust by 95 percent if they dedicated a fleet of 60 trucks to this job and retrofitted the fleet with best available filters.

The DEP admits the technology is available, and says cost is not an issue. According to the site manager, what stops the DEP from retrofitting a fleet of trucks is the way truckers organize their business. Following accepted practice, the site-preparation contractor subcontracted the work to many small companies. Trucks working this job one day are often not the same trucks working there another day.

We encourage DEP to write a “change order” and reorganize their trucking. At the September Facility Monitoring Committee (FMC) meeting, Assemblyman Dinowitz asked why “so many trucks have New Jersey license plates. Wasn’t jobs for Bronx residents the major reason for building the plant in the Bronx?” Hiring of Bronx residents at the Van Cortlandt Park site has now dropped to 20 percent.

At the same meeting, DEP announced they will retrofit the trucks and offered 30 percent effective Diesel Particulate Filters (DOC). A DOC does not control particulates (dangerous soot), and because two other technologies listed as options by DEP consultants are 50 percent effective and 76 percent effective with control of particulates, community members of the FMC are asking DEP to complete research on those options before settling for 30 percent effective DOC.

The Bloomberg administration convinced New Yorkers it made good sense to build this plant in a Bronx neighborhood because Bronx residents would get “thousands of good jobs,” and there would be “no significant health impacts.” At present, few good jobs are going to Bronx residents, and for at least the next two years local residents like Ashley Diaz will be paying with their health. We think the DEP should reorganize their trucking, dedicate a fleet of “cleanest possible” trucks, and keep their word.

This article was written by Gil Maduro, PhD, Fay Muir, and Lyn Pyle of the COVE Environmental Justice Committee; Monsignor Robert Trainor of St. Ann’s Church; Dr. A. H. (Hal) Strelnick, MD, Professor and Director, Department of Family & Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center.