Oh Nos those airplanes are lead bombing our schools! :rolleyes2

http://www.anchoragepress.com/news/it-s-raining-lead-should-alaska-pay-attention-to-lead/article_e1d8ff60-494a-11e1-9608-0019bb2963f4.html#.TyNLTO84Z_s.facebook


It’s raining lead: Should Alaska pay attention to lead in our playgrounds and children?

Posted: Friday, January 27, 2012 2:00 pm

By Scott Christiansen

For the first time since the 1980s, Anchorage has an air quality monitoring station devoted to measuring lead in the air we breathe. The monitor is set next to a windsock on Merrill Field near the east end of Runway 25. It's there because piston-driven airplanes, unlike cars and trucks, still use fuel with lead added to boost octane. It's there because the federal Environmental Protection Agency is attempting to figure out if the most common source of lead in America's urban environs is a health hazard.

At the runway's opposite end is Fairview, one of Anchorage's oldest neighborhoods, with an elementary school and houses near the runway. Fairview also has a community council that has rarely, if ever, considered aviation exhaust a health hazard. There is a debate-a clash that includes politicians and environmental watchdog groups-about avgas (aviation gas) and how fast airplanes should switch to unleaded fuel, but just like the airplanes, that debate seems to fly over Fairview without stopping.

Michael Howard, Fairview Community Council's president, says when airport conversations start, the topic is usually noise. "The council would like to see some permanent noise monitoring put in place," Howard says. "As far as lead in their fuel, we didn't know anything about that."

But the air monitor at Merrill Field, like the neighboring windsock, is an early semaphore of weather to come. It's predictive of turbulence in the political winds that's already begun, even if it doesn't include airport-side neighborhoods such as Fairview. Alaska politicians-particularly those holding statewide offices-have lined up to play defense against an EPA action that seems destined to eliminate leaded avgas, just as the government eliminated leaded automobile gas.

The politicians warn that eliminating leaded avgas too fast could send the standard of living in airplane-dependent rural Alaska backward. Governor Sean Parnell, in a letter to the EPA, told the federal government that without a replacement fuel, a ban on leaded avgas "would truly be a disaster" costing billions of dollars and endangering health in rural Alaska. Rural villages, Parnell wrote, rely on piston aircraft to deliver medicine fuel and food.

When EPA announced in 2010 it would begin studying whether exhaust from airplanes should be regulated, Alaska congressman Don Young was quick to claim the agency was moving too fast. "This premature ban on leaded fuel would kill rural communities in Alaska," Young said in an April 2010 press release. Young's staff also quoted the congressman saying the EPA action was the result of a petition by Friends of the Earth, a national environmental watchdog group.

It is true that Friends of the Earth petitioned the EPA in 2006 to make a finding that leaded avgas is a health threat. It's also true President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970, after Congress voted to pass it. It took more than two decades of tightening regulations and gradually improving technology to take lead out of automobile gas. In the meantime, little was done to put avgas in check. The watchdog group's petition is just one event in a series that includes the EPA tightening its air quality standards in 2008.

"We don't have the ability to ban avgas with a lawsuit," said Friends of the Earth spokeswoman Marcie Keever, a lawyer involved in the petition to the EPA. Keever says researchers are trying to find replacement fuels, and those must be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, not the EPA. She says Friends of the Earth understands Alaska has challenges the Lower 48 doesn't have. "We do get that. In a lot of cases, transportation is different in Alaska," Keever said. The EPA has made exceptions in the past, Keever said, and can do that again. (Past allowances included an exemption for avgas stock car racing. NASCAR went lead free in 2008.) "The [EPA's] notice of proposed action, is not a notice of a proposed ban," Keever said.


Rest of story at link.

_______________________________________________
“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

All that lead seems to explain a few of Alaska's residents. *coughpalinfamilycough*

Actually, I don't know if they're from Anchorage/Fairbanks, nor do I care.

----------
michaela

"A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter." -Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

I don't think lead in avgas is a GOOD thing, but compared to the number of cars on the road, there aren't THAT many aircraft burning avgas in the sky. I don't see it as much of a big deal. The amount of lead in avgas is also lower than leaded auto gas, about 4mg per gallon in typical 100 octane low-lead fuel.

Jet fuel (Jet A) is very similar to diesel fuel and is known to work in diesel-type piston engines. It might be worth looking into to switch from avgas Otto-cycle engines to Jet A diesels.

MarcoPolo, the amount of tetraethyl lead (TEL) in 100LL aviation gasoline, which is by far the most common grade, can be as much as 2 grams per US gallon. This is roughly four times as much as the old Sunoco 260 from way back when, which is usually considered to have had the highest concentration of TEL of any regular production gasoline sold for cars on the street.

TEL is extremely toxic and workers exposed to it in the few places that still manufacture it must wear a full "moonsuit" with respirator. The stuff is no joke. Lead in the environment during the days of leaded auto fuel was really bad news, and we are all better off for getting rid of it. I don't care for the ever-present use of "the children" for the push to stop light aircraft from spewing lead, but aircraft are indeed the biggest emitters of the stuff now. I prefer to think of the animals and wildlife, and lead doesn't agree with them either.

Proposals have been made to eliminate TEL in aviation gasoline for over 30 years now. That's plenty of warning and opportunity for the light aircraft industry to get its act together and develop options. It did not. I can't feel sorry for them. Today's new aircraft engines are by and large the same exact engines that were sold 30 or more years ago. There's been plenty of time to move on to better technology, but it didn't happen.

I also can't feel sorry for the people who voluntarily chose to live in such a remote area that everything must be flown to them—and many of these people are raising (gasp) children in those remote areas! Think of the children! And move back to a more rational place to live, near civilization!

Maybe I meant to say grams. Whatever. I still don't see it as a big deal compared to, say mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, defective cars, cigarette smoke, chemicals in the food, dangerous politicians, and other environmental hazards.