For years, media reports in concert with environmental activist groups like “Downwinders at Risk” have done a great job convincing people that the air in Midlothian–where there’s lots of heavy industry–causes little kids there to get asthma and just basically chokes everybody else in North Texas to boot. (Theory: Drivers on S.H. 67 see puffy emissions from smokestacks, assume worst.)
So the silence today is deafening, and interesting, after a year-long, $350,000 study found that the air in Midlothian poses, er, no risk to public health at all. While the report for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality called Midlothian one of the most-monitored sites in the state now, critics like Downwinders’ Jim Schermbeck are having none of it. “If there’s a way to exonerate industry,” Schermbeck said, “the TCEQ will find it.”
