he house will be full of a chemical odor mixed with the smell of burnt coffee. It can even have a tinge of a skunky smell," says Corrales, New Mexico, retiree Joy Tschawuschian. "I take one whiff of it, get a headache and burning eyes, and go out to the garage to get my bucket." There, a couple hundred yards from computer-chip manufacturer Intel, Tschawuschian uses her "bucket" to collect an air sample -- a random grab of airborne chemicals. The device is little more than a bag in a bucket with valves on top. But wielded by Tschawuschian and other members of the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), it is an important first step in addressing residents' fears that air pollution is making them sick.
Intel built its plant just outside the Corrales city limits in 1994, but even after scrubbers were installed on its stacks and volatile organic compounds lowered to less than 100 tons a year, residents still complained about frequent headaches, rashes, sleepless nights, and nausea. So SWOP swooped in. In November 2000, an employee of the twenty-two-year-old social-justice nonprofit learned how to build and use the buckets, originally commissioned by Ed Masery of Erin Brockovich fame, and then contacted Tschawuschian, who agreed to lead the Bucket Brigade.
Over the next year, she took sixteen samples and helped teach two other families near the Intel fence line how to use the devices. Analyzed at a lab in Simi Valley, California, the samples have contained chemicals ranging from methylene chloride, a known carcinogen legal under Intel's permit, to silane, a silicon-based compound.
Intel claims the chemicals SWOP has found may have come from other places. "There's no way to identify the source of a chemical except at its source," says Intel spokesman Terry McDermott. Fumes from nearby gas stations and dry cleaners easily contaminate samples, he says.
SWOP knows its bucket samples aren't absolute proof that Intel is the culprit, but then how, asks Tschawuschian, does it explain chemicals that aren't found in emissions from gas stations and dry cleaners? The state says it plans on doing an emissions inventory of the area someday soon, but has yet to come up with the money. In the meantime, SWOP is fund-raising -- sometimes by literally passing around a jar -- to buy a sophisticated monitor that can analyze up to fifty compounds in the air simultaneously. Price tag: $100,000. With $30,000 more to go, they hope to have it by the year's end -- the ultimate Christmas gift to the community.
