Question from Jenny

Hi Debra,

We recently moved in with family to save money. We are contemplating what might be a safe area to live in -in the future:

What distance is ‘safe’ to live from a natural gas plant up to 550-600 megawatts. It’s hard to understand how much can travel in the air. We’ve been told the power plant will be like adding 60,000 more people in the area. Is 4.5 miles or even 11 miles far enough?

Debra’s Answer

This is a difficult question, because in an urban or suburban area, if you go out 4.5 or 11 miles you’re likely to run into another pollution source.

The question is where do you have to be in relation to the pollution source to not be affected by it. And the answer to that is more than distance.

When I was a little girl, there used to be a coffee roasting facility on the San Francisco waterfront, right at the San Francsico end of the Bay Bridge. As my family would drive across the Bridge into the city, there was a point where we would smell the coffee roasting.

I’ll tell you that we had to be practically on top of it before we could smell it. Less than a mile. And it also depended on which way the wind was blowing.

So when I look for a place to live, I check around for pollution sources, but I also find out the direction the wind is blowing. Where I live now, virtually 100% of the time it’s blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. No agriculture, no factories, just blowing over a sleepy little downtown and residential streets. And beyond that, miles and miles of open sea.

There are usually government agencies in local areas that are tracking wind directions. In the San Francisco Bay Area it’s called the Bay Area Air Quality Management district. Look for a place like that in your area and they should have maps of wind directions and how many days per year the wind is blowing from that direction. This kind of information will help a lot to determine toxic exposures from environmental sources.

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