Something is in the air in America’s happiest city

Last month, Fremont’s school district told parents at the Lila Bringhurst Elementary School that the Bay Area Air District asked for its help in distributing a notice about air pollution.

Read more High tides overrun Newport Beach’s famous peninsula as city urges safety

Air quality is often on the mind for Bringhurst parents. The public school is less than 1,000 feet from Tesla’s factory, which is under investigation by the air district for allegedly submitting inaccurate emissions reports. But this new message was an easy one to miss, multiple parents told SFGATE.  

For Bringhurst parent Jenny Lin, the air district’s letter was vague. She pointed out that it didn’t say emissions could increase, only that they would be modified and that the company wanted to install new abatement equipment.

“It was sort of obfuscating,” Lin told SFGATE.

An Oct. 1 anonymously authored Substack post claimed the factory would spew “THIRTEEN times more emissions” from two aluminum furnaces. As the post spread in community group chats in America’s happiest city, parents’ alarm bells started ringing. The article uses calculations from the air district’s own engineering documents to show how emissions were expected to increase. It also pointed out eyebrow-raising redactions in the proposal’s latest engineering review.

A Change.org petition posted Saturday, which surpassed its goal of 1,000 signatures, called on the air district to pump the brakes on the permit, alleging that the notification process did not clearly explain how Tesla proposals may affect the air their kids breathe. But now that the Monday deadline for public comment on Tesla’s proposal has passed, parents are asking the air district to extend it so they can get a better sense of what the proposal means for their kids’ health, and what precautions they may need to take.

“We’re not asking for the impossible,” said Bringhurst parent June Hu, who posted the petition. “We just are asking for a chance to understand.”

‘Easy to miss’

Bringhurst parent Phoebe Yu is a former air quality advocate and has worked with organizations like the OpenAir Collective, an organization that promotes carbon dioxide removal. But like some of her neighbors, the Fremont Unified School District’s one and only email blast about the air district’s notification on Sept. 3 didn’t catch her attention. 

“There are a lot of messages that are moving around, and it’s really easy to miss stuff like this,” Yu told SFGATE. “If you only mention it once, and that’s it, and the wording is not that strong, you’ve already lost me.”

The school district uses an opt-in app called ParentSquare to send mass communications to its community. Though district spokesperson Jesse McGrath told SFGATE Wednesday that “100%” of the parent population at Bringhurst have signed up, several parents told SFGATE that they only found out about the notification after it started making its way through parent group chats. That includes Yu, who said she took a closer look at the district’s message after her own group chat started discussing the issue two weeks ago. Then, when the Substack post dropped a little over a week ago, worries escalated.

“Air pollution is a real thing. It could cause health problems down the line,” she said. “I don’t want my kid to be affected. I don’t want to be affected. I don’t want other people’s kids to be affected.”

The district’s communication through ParentSquare included three PDFs of the Air District’s letter, in English, Mandarin and Spanish, per an email obtained by SFGATE. Those two-page letters state that Tesla “has applied to modify emission limits for their existing aluminum melting furnaces,” and that the company applied for new systems that will “abate emissions of nitrogen oxides” from the furnaces.

Lin told SFGATE that only mentioning “abatement” and “modify” in relation to emissions is misleading.

“The notice only says that Tesla wants to modify emission limits,” Lin said. “It doesn’t actually say that it is going to be an expected increase in metal toxic air contaminant emission limits.”

Without the Substack post drawing attention to the matter, parents would have to do more digging to find more details on the proposal. Though the notification letter states that recipients can find more details about the project and links to the air district’s public permit database, a Sept. 3 draft engineering review of Tesla’s plans is buried under more than 20 other filings. On the first page of the review is a summary of Tesla’s permit request, noting that the company is requesting to increase metal toxic air contaminant emissions for two aluminum presses along with adding new abatement systems.

In that summary, though, a line is blacked out, and there are several more redactions throughout the draft engineering report. The air district told SFGATE that the agency is required to redact “confidential business information and protect trade secrets.” However, in multiple instances, the agency redacts its own rules that it would impose on Tesla, including how much aluminum Tesla is allowed to melt and natural gas fuel it can burn per hour. 

The agency, which is charged with regulating air quality in the Bay Area, also redacted information that had previously been made publicly available, the Substack post pointed out. In 2022, Tesla applied for a temporary permit on one of the same aluminum furnaces, asking the district if it could temporarily increase its operations. The application, which SFGATE reviewed, included calculations for emission rates and specifications for the company’s machinery that were then omitted or blacked out in the most recent report for the same furnace. 

Air district spokesperson Miranda Iglesias told SFGATE the agency would review the documents again for any errors. However, the public comment period for community members has ended as of Monday.

Read more SF college chancellor placed on leave amid financial misconduct allegations

“We understand the community’s concern, the Air District’s role is to rigorously evaluate projects like this to ensure they meet the Air District’s strict air quality and health standards,” Iglesias said in a statement.

‘If this was my kid …’

The emissions that the Substack article addresses are a total accounting of all particles emitted from the factory, not all of which are necessarily toxic. 

The thirteenfold increase it highlights pertains to total suspended particulates, or TSP, which are tiny, solid particles that can linger in the air. Sizes of these particles range between 1 and 100 microns (a human hair is about 80 microns), and the smaller they are, the more harmful they can be to humans, according to UC Davis air quality researcher Nicholas Spada. Larger particles, like dust, don’t last as long in the air or travel as far as smaller particles, which can enter the human body.

The air district told SFGATE it doesn’t classify TSP as a toxic air contaminant, which Spada said is because larger particles can dominate a TSP measurement. The air district told SFGATE that while it estimates TSP emissions will increase at the Tesla plant, those estimates don’t exceed the agency’s limits. 

“If you’re looking at a TSP mass value, most of that mass is going to be large particles that don’t enter the human body, and so they’re not really health relevant,” Spada said. “That doesn’t mean that TSP doesn’t also include small particles; it’s just that they’re heavily diluted by the much bigger particles that are dominating the signal.”

Still, Spada called the thirteenfold jump “significant,” and the air district said in its engineering report it would require Tesla to equip its machinery with continuous monitoring systems due to the “highly variable nature of the aluminum melting operation.” Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Spada did note, however, that there isn’t enough information at this time to tell whether the school would need to take precautionary measures –– like buying new air filters or constant masking –– over air quality. Where particulates travel can vary based on weather conditions, and “a production number alone won’t really tell us how dusty it’s going to get at the school,” he said. But he suggested that parents instead should be on the lookout for indicators that any dangerous dust has landed on campus.

“If this was my kid, if this was my school, I would have masks on hand, and I’d be looking for metallic-looking dust,” Spada said. “Probably at the first sign of it, I would send my kid to school with a mask.”

A cost-benefit analysis

The Lila Bringhurst Elementary School is a relatively new addition to the school district, opening in 2022 with a population of about 1,250 students. Its sought-after Mandarin immersion program has attracted parents from all across the city to get their children in the door, but parents are now left weighing an elite public education against potential health risks.

Lynn Chen, another Bringhurst parent, told SFGATE that air quality concerns over Tesla started after community members saw SFGATE’s prior reporting on the air district investigating the site over several violations in June. A group chat to discuss concerns back then reignited over the recent developments, drawing in several concerned parents.

That included Bringhurst parent Mon, who asked to be referred to by first name only out of fear of retaliation. When deciding where to send one of her kids to school, Mon chose Bringhurst over a private school because of the former’s immersion program and the latter’s proximity to a concrete plant. Now, she’s concerned her child will get exposed to even more pollution. Before the Substack article was published, Mon was the one who found and circulated the original engineering documents among parent group chats, including Spanish-speaking groups that may have missed the district’s original email.

That’s when she met Irma Robles, who lives directly across the street from the Fremont Tesla plant. Robles told SFGATE her daughter, a student at Bringhurst, has needed to visit the emergency room twice due to developing asthma. Had she known about air quality issues two years ago, Robles said she wouldn’t have moved there.

For the Bringhurst parents, their children’s safety is paramount. But with the lack of explanation about health risks and limited window to inform other parents who missed the notice, the Bringhurst community is pleading with the air district for time. Lin told SFGATE it comes down having enough information to make the right decisions for their kids.

“As parents, we have to make a lot of difficult decisions for our kids on a daily basis … especially the choice of school and where to put them for the majority of their day,” Lin said. “As a first order ask, can we get the information that’s supposed to be guaranteed to us by law?”

Contact tech reporter Matthew Brown at [email protected] or matthewbrownsfgate.11 on Signal.