The Trucker's Lament

Lorenzo Fernandez has been a truck driver at the Port of Oakland, California, for just two years, but he already has a chronic cough and an unrelenting sore throat. Drivers who have been on the job longer suffer from even more serious conditions. He worries that he won’t be able to support his family if his health worsens.

Every day he and other port workers inhale a toxic mix of air pollutants that come from diesel-burning trucks--including the one he drives--as well as ships, cranes, and other dockside machinery. Inside the cabs of trucks like Fernandez’s, the concentration of diesel particulates is often up to 2,000 times greater than levels considered acceptable by state and federal environmental protection agencies. That dismal finding is among the many detailed in a report, Driving on Fumes: Truck Drivers Face Elevated Health Risks from Diesel Pollution, recently released by NRDC and the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports. Drivers don't even receive health care benefits from the companies they work for--technically, they’re independent contractors--and they're also responsible for buying and maintaining their own trucks. It’s nearly impossible for truckers to buy both health insurance and a lower emissions vehicle. Several days after the NRDC report was released, the California Air Resources Board, which sets regulations for trucks at the state’s ports, adopted a new rule slashing diesel pollution from trucks. Now NRDC is working to shift the burden of upgrading the truck fleet from the drivers and taxpayers to the trucking companies and ports themselves.