City residents fail to notice improvements by Lehigh Cement Plant

Down with emissions! Down with pollution! Down with whatever else we can think of complaining about!

For the West Valley Citizens Air Watch, a group of residents living in Cupertino trying to protect clean air, the Lehigh Cement Plant seems like a blessed gift sent from above. The Air Watch can now stand up and petition for nature’s rights as if it were 1973 all over again.

The group has been voicing its complaints to the plant about the pollution and harm to the environment it is causing. But these complaints are all just an overreaction to a typical cement plant. Many are believing the hype about the evils of production expansion without really thinking about the true effects of the presence of the plant.

The real heart of the matter is that Lehigh wanted to expand its facilities with a new 200 acre pit to dig for limestone. However, they were met with great opposition from their neighborhood. This is because up until 2006, Lehigh was run under different, and more irresponsible, management. At the time, Cupertino had frightening levels of mercury pollution from the disruption of the land and the company was not following protocol when it came to using environmentally-friendly machinery, according to the West Citizens Air Watch and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Plant’s practices were definitely to blame, and the Cupertino residents were right in being angry. That was the time to speak up against the dangers the plant was causing to our city. Lehigh was doing something wrong and should have been stopped.

But now, four whole years later, there are new managers and new rules. And even though there will always be pollution caused by this kind of production, the plant is making a great effort to reduce it. Mercury emissions have reduced since the high numbers from 2006 and the new management is correctly following all the regulations set by the EPA. Lehigh has even gone the extra mile to “go green” and try other, non-mandated methods of pollution reduction, including using cloth pipes to filter exhaust gas from trucks and petroleum coke as a heat source instead of carbon-loaded coal.

Yet, even with all of these positive signs coming from the statistics, management, and even the federal government, the West Valley Citizens Air Watch is still petitioning against the building of a new pit. The main part of the problem is that many of the claims the Air Watch is making are unfounded. They are asking for the second pit not to be built based on all the negative findings from years before, like the high mercury emissions of 2006 and the EPA’s accusations of the plant’s polluting machinery from the mid-90s. Another complaint the Air Watch is posing is that the second pit will greatly affect the air close to the nearby homes, but Lehigh confirms that the second pit will be no closer to residential areas the first pit.

It is true that there are still some confusing factors to this whole ordeal. The EPA is currently looking into the problems that occurred with the machinery that the older management changed in 1996 to 1999. And they won’t know for sure what exactly the effects of the older management were until they complete their investigations.

But what’s important to remember is that every situation is different. We can’t react to a change being made in 2010 because of events that happened several years ago. And we can’t judge a company without all of the information. Just because this corporation tended to be negligent about pollution problems in the past doesn’t mean that it is acting the same way in this moment. We should give the benefit of the doubt.