PUBLISHED BY MOSHOLU PRESERVATION CORPORATION

Worries Over Plant's Impact On Asthma

By JORDAN MOSS

Critics of building a filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park frequently cite asthma -- particularly among children -- as a key reason why they think five or more years of construction in a residential community like Norwood is unacceptable.

The city's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has generated very little data on this issue. 

The draft environmental impact statement recently issued by the agency addressed two other proposed sites for the plant -- at Fordham Landing on the Harlem River and at an industrial site in Westchester -- and does not mention the Mosholu Golf Course at all. The city maintains it does not have to do an environmental impact statement for Van Cortlandt Park because it did one for a much larger plant three years ago. 

The Norwood News' request for an interview with a DEP staff person familiar with the scientific study of the project's effect on air quality and asthma was not granted.

However, Charles Sturcken, the DEP's director of public and intergovernmental affairs, said that concerns about construction of the plant should be no greater than for any other construction project in the borough.

"Any construction is going to come with attendant dust," Sturcken said. "So the logic to say that this particular construction project compared to the new Bronx courthouse or the cumulative impact of 10 years of affordable housing -- you have to put it in perspective. This is not the only construction project going on in the Bronx." 

But aside from that view, judging from the documents DEP has prepared, whether and how much the plant will adversely affect children and adults with asthma has apparently not been determined. 

City health officials have, however, studied the extent of the asthma problem in Norwood and the surrounding communities.

According to the New York City Department of Health, there was a 114.3 percent increase in asthma hospitalizations from 1988 to 1997 in local zip codes 10458, 10467 and 10468. 

In 2000, asthma, a disease marked by labored breathing, chest constriction and coughing, was the leading cause of hospitalization for children up to 9 in those same zip codes. Sam Fuster, a nurse practitioner at a clinic run by Montefiore at PS 95, estimates that of 1,300 kids at the school, which serves many children who live in the Knox-Gates section of Norwood, 300 have some degree of asthma. 

One of those kids, 9-year-old Ashley Diaz, attends an after-school program at the COVE on Gates Place and is moving back to the neighborhood with her mom soon after a brief absence. Ashley has become an activist on this issue and has testified at Assembly and City Council hearings on the issue in recent weeks.

"If you build that hole, all that dust will come out . . . I have chronic asthma and allergies," Ashley told the Assembly committee, though only two members of the committee were there to hear her. Ashley was referring to the digging and blasting needed to build the plant underground.

Every day, Ashley, who looks as healthy as any other kid, must keep to a strict regimen of medicines taken in pill form and through her pump. At PS 95, she has to stop into the school's health clinic every day so that her "peak flow," a measure of how open her lungs are, can be checked. Her mother, Vivian Ramos, says she gets sick about once a month. Just two months ago, Ashley spent a week in the Children's Hospital at Montefiore after an attack. Ashley said she hates hospitals, and she would correct her mom. She was in the hospital for a week plus half a day, she said. 

Her mother described what it's like when Ashley gets an attack. "I start to see my child, below her Adam's apple, . . .breathing in and out," Ramos said. "It's going back and forth constantly, like she's pulling for air. She starts crying."

By all accounts, Ashley is an excellent student, but she misses 30 to 50 days of school a year. "I could imagine if she was there 100 percent of the time," Ramos says. "Forget about it."

And while Ashley will probably do fine in school despite the absences, many others with asthma won't. "For every one Ashley, I can name at least six other children who will have a problem being promoted, doing well and staying caught up," Fuster says.

One major contributor to asthma rates in the Bronx is a "sedentary lifestyle," Fuster says. For a variety of reasons, kids are "less inclined to be outdoors exercising," she explained. Kids in Knox-Gates play in the southeast corner of Van Cortlandt Park, which is practically their backyard. But critics say that because of the proximity of the plant site to the playground, few parents, particularly those of kids with asthma, are going to continue to let them play there. Ramos says she would keep Ashley inside more, where she can control her environment. 

All this is why Ashley Diaz has become an activist at age 9. 

"She really feels strongly about this," Ramos says. "She doesn't want this to happen at all."