CalPilots, in conjunction with CAAPSO (thank you Doug Rice and Stephen McHenry), has finally received air quality data from Bay Area Air Quality Management District. BAAQMD is a public agency entrusted with regulating stationary sources of air pollution in the nine counties that surround San Francisco Bay. It took a year of persistent effort but we finally have baseline airborne lead data samples for RHV. This baseline data is important to capture so that pilots aren’t wrongly blamed for increased airborne lead levels from all of the digging and construction going on around Reid-Hillview for the BART/VTA extension.
As a brief history, this was the timeline to receive the data:
July 2023: CalPilots made a California Public Records Request (CPRA) for information regarding Airborne Lead Levels from BAAQMD PRCA monitoring sites.
March 2024: At San Martin Airport, Doug Rice (CalPilots VP, region 3) engaged with a BAAQMD technician working on the San Martin Airport monitoring site seeking assistance in getting a response from BAAQMD.
June 2024: CalPilots sent a letter to the BAAQMD Executive Director advising him of our prior request and the unusable response (The original response came as comma separated values in a text message). They requested that BAAQMD provide data in a usable data format.
July 2024: BAAQMD provided a spreadsheet containing usable data for Reid-Hillview Airport (37.329841, -121.815438, TSP lead measurement type) for the years 2012 to 2023, as well as miscellaneous data from other monitoring sites. There were two data sets: 3 month averages and 24 hour data.
Analysis of the BAAQMD data shows that lead levels have been declining since mid-2018 — a full 20 months before the pandemic began and almost 4 years before unleaded fuel sales began at RHV.
- 3-month averages contains rolling 3-month average lead concentrations by site, calculated using the 24-hour samples. The NAAQS for lead is based on 3-month averages of total suspended particulate (TSP) lead.
- 24-hour samples contains the individual lead measurements, which are each 24-hour (midnight to midnight) samples.
Analysis of the data shows that lead levels have been declining since mid-2018 — a full 20 months before the pandemic began and almost 4 years before unleaded fuel sales began at RHV. The reason for this decline is unclear but directly challenges some of the, shall we say, “assertions” made by members of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.
Reid-Hillview flight operations peaked in 2018 at 208,000 per year but remain close to 160,000 takeoffs and landings per year currently. The current airborne lead levels at RHV are less than one-tenth of EPA standards. We’ll be monitoring this air quality data for the benefit of local residents.
