“Exhausted at School” is an investigation by InvestigateWest and KING 5 Television into toxic road pollution and its effect on kids’ health at school — the place they spend hours every day. Gaze out a window at Seattle’s John Marshall Junior High and you’ll see cars and trucks speeding by on the busiest road in Washington, Interstate 5. John Marshall is one of at least 28 public schools and more than 125 day cares built within 500 feet of roads carrying at least 50,000 vehicles a day, according to an analysis by InvestigateWest. That’s close enough to put children’s health at risk, say health researchers. The ill effects can last a lifetime, and can include aggravated asthma, increased school absenteeism, and injury to developing immune systeschools in the danger zone were built within the past 10 years — after the health risks of traffic pollution were well established. An additional 166 schools and 439 day cares are located within 500 feet of the state’s heaviest truck routes, exposed to diesel fuel exhaust so toxic that the World Health Organization classifies it as a carcinogen. For the series, InvestigateWest combined and analyzed data from multiple state agencies, pored over dozens of academic studies to understand the threat to kids’ health, and examined hundreds of pages of public records to understand how school siting decisions get made. We found that officials in Olympia and in Washington, D.C., considered and then rejected plans to ban or severely restrict construction of schools inside the traffic pollution plume in the last five years. And state officials revealed in interviews that rules requiring day cares to be built on environmentally safe sites are not enforced. It’s a combination of indecision and inattention that allows schools and day cares continue to be built in the places where children’s health is unambiguously threatened.
