Fragmented newspaper clipping from September 2005

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

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New York choking on diesel -report BY TRACY CONNOR DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER ' THERE’S SOMETHING in the air — and it’s killing an estimat­ ed 2,300 New Yorkers a year That’s the" contention of a new report on diesel fumes that found our city and state are the most polluted in the country. “New York is at the top foj the amount of diesel in the air and number of deaths caused by it,” said Bruce Hill, a scienti^ wilto the Clean Air Task Force, S S The group, which is pushing for a crackdown on diesel en­ gines in buses, trucks and con­ struction equipment, is the first to break down the fuel’s health effects. It took several public health studies on air pollution, and then used emissions data to esti­ mate how many deaths a year are caused by diesel alone. The Boston-based research­ ers estimated that 20,MIO people in the U.S. will die early from breathing in diesel soot. The number of deaths in New York State was estimated to be 2,332. The number for the city alone was 1,776. The figures were high, in part, because there are so many peo­ ple in New York. But the state still placed third when taking into account the large population. The state Department of Envi­ ronmental Conservation said it is “aggressively working” to re­ duce diesel pollution. It cited $5 million in state funding to retrofit school buses, a project to retrofit ferry and tug­ boat engines, and a requirement that construction equipment in lower Manhattan have nondie- . sei engines or low-sulftir fuel. The Transit Authority pointed to its hybrid and natural-gas bus­ es and said it only uses ultralow- sulfur diesel foel. “We have by for the cleanest large bus fleet in the nation,” spokesman Paul Fleuranges said.

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