 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and we are so glad that you are here to join us this afternoon for this briefing on Mapping Environmental Justice. How can you use EPA's EJ screen tool? We are very very glad that we are able to hold this briefing this afternoon and to have someone to present this information who has done this presentation many many times in an effort to really help inform people all over the country about this important tool that EPA has developed and basically started using or had ready to begin talking to people about to demonstrate last year and and this actually is part of a fulfillment of an executive order that was issued clear back during the years of the Clinton administration. So it is an important tool that has many applications in terms of helping EPA be able to help its own agency as well as other federal agencies really have a better look at what is happening in terms of of impacts from the whether it's energy plants or other exposures to toxics to really look at some of the critical issues around environmental justice issues. What are those impacts? Where are they? And this is a way that we can learn much more about that with regard to thinking about states, regions, communities across the country because we can all do a lot better job the more we know about what kind of situations everyone's constituencies are facing what our communities are facing and how we can do a better job in terms of protecting both our environment, but also really protecting human health. And so to give us a demonstration about this tool both what it can do, how to use it, how you can make use of it in terms of helping to do your work and actually in terms of thinking about people in your organization, in your office, how you can all make use of this to learn a lot more about what's happening in your state and your congressional district. We hope that this will be a really really effective way to just sort of feel like you're getting on the job training and to demonstrate this and to talk about what its role is and how it can be used and what you can learn and what you won't learn from it is Kevin Ulp who is the director of communications for the Office of Environmental Justice at EPA and Kevin has been at EPA for about five years and as director of communications there is responsible for for really overseeing the development of EPA's website materials, a lot of stakeholder outreach, and engagement with regard to environmental justice issues. Kevin? All right, thanks Carol. And thanks everybody for showing up today. I'm excited to talk to you about EJ's screen, EPA's new geospatial data tool for analyzing environmental justice issues. And before I get into the presentation, I wanted to start off by playing a video actually to sort of remind people of the very human costs associated with environmental pollution and exposure and to understand the importance of being able to use a tool like this to be able to quantify and analyze those impacts and understand them when it comes to community involvement and analysis when it comes to rulemaking, grants and all sorts of different ways. So let me play this video. Hopefully it works. I think for me the moment where I realized I had an epiphany around environmental justice was after my first born son was born. I was born and raised in a little village. I lived there pretty much my whole life and when he was about four or five months old he had an asthma attack and I was a single mom. I had no health insurance, no car, and I didn't really know what to do. So I called my mom and I called my boyfriend's mom and she walked me through, you know, calm down, get him dressed, get him on the bus, go to the hospital. And we spent about two days in the hospital and I learned that he had asthma and he was put on a nebulizer. But it was incredibly scary. I was 21 years old and I was upset. Actually I was pissed. I was pissed because I thought that I had done something wrong. I thought maybe I ate something wrong, maybe I exposed him to something. And so I started to want to understand why my son had asthma and I talked to the pediatrician at the local clinic and I talked to my parents and I started talking to our neighbors and what I found was that there was a lot of kids in our neighborhood that had asthma. But what did it make sense to me is when I would do my research, Chicano's Mexican Americans in this nation don't have a very high percentage of asthma in children. And so it made me even push even further to try to understand why this was happening, what had I done wrong as a mom that my child had asthma. And in walking around my neighborhood and understanding where I lived, what I found was that there was a huge coal power plant. About five blocks away from our home, that was putting out a lot of air pollution. And as I started to do my homework, actually ironically at the same time, Harvard School of Public Health published a report about the two coal power plants in Chicago. One is in Little Village and one is in Pilsen, the neighborhood right next door to ours. And what I found was that part of the problem was the air pollution that was coming out of these smokestacks. And I think what made me even more upset was understanding that these coal power plants did not power any homes in our community. They didn't power any homes in Chicago, much less the state of Illinois. And so we were bearing the brunt of this coal power plant for no electricity in our community, for no jobs in our community. And it really riles me up to want to do something about it. So I went door-to-door with... So this is just to sort of provide a little bit of context behind what it's like to experience those types of pollution and the impacts that can be felt especially on young children and having to deal with that as a parent. The two power plants that she referenced, the Fisk and Crawford power plants in Chicago, were shut down in 2013. And the study that she referenced from Harvard University actually showed that about 160,000 pounds of soot came out of that those coal-fired power plants every year. About 500 pounds of mercury came out of those power plants every year. And about 30,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide, which can cause acid rain and also create particulate matter that speeds up the process of asthma. And so when we're talking about coal-fired power plants, a lot of the times we're thinking about climate change and we're thinking about faraway impacts that will affect future generations. And we forget there are people that live in the backyards and the neighborhoods around these power plants that, as she mentioned, are bearing the brunt of the pollution in their communities. And so environmental justice is about making sure that low-income and minority communities are properly protected and ensured the same basic rights that we, all as Americans, do access to. And the definition that we have at EPA emphasizes fair treatment and meaningful involvement. And EJScreen is really helpful in terms of analyzing fair treatment. Our community is getting a disproportionate share of the burden of pollution compared to their neighbors. And also meaningful involvement. When we go out and talk to communities and understand their needs, we have to understand that a lot of the reason that it's hard to reach environmental justice communities is that they have different needs, they have different issues. And if we don't think about those in advance before we engage with those communities, a lot of the times they're lost and they're left out of the conversation about decisions that very much affect their lives. And I promise I'm not going to be on PowerPoint too long because these are really boring. And so when we're talking about environmental justice, we obviously want to consider environmental exposure, but it's also important to understand demographics. And why is it important to understand demographics? We have two reasons that we want to talk about. The first is one that I think everybody here is pretty familiar with and it's vulnerability. We already know a majority of the pollution is in this country disproportionately exists in lower income and minority communities. It has to do with unhealthy homes. It has to do with proximity to polluting facilities. It has to do with exposure to lead paint and other issues like that. So that's not anything that's particularly a surprise to most folks. But the other side of the coin that's equally important but often less discussed is susceptibility. And susceptibility is more biological. It's more intrinsic to ourselves in terms of when we do have environmental exposures, not everybody can react in the same way. And there's a reason behind that. So for example, when it comes to asthma, we know demographically that lower income communities and households generally have healthy houses. So exposure to molds, exposure to cockroach allergens, exposure to dust mites can all be triggers for asthma. And then if a child also lives in a community that's vulnerable, because every time he goes outside there is a lot of heavy metals in the air from air pollution coming from coal fire power plants, those cumulative impacts make those children much more susceptible to negative health outcomes. Another good example of this is with lead paint. We know that children are very susceptible early in their life to lead pain exposure and the effects from that. We also know that children that have less access to healthy foods and less nutrition are a lot more vulnerable to the negative health outcomes because we know that lead actually competes with calcium in the body. And if the body doesn't have healthy nutrition and doesn't have a lot of calcium, then lead actually will stick to bones and be absorbed more into the body. And so it's important not only to understand environmental exposure but also demographics and the communities that we're in and why some communities have such negative health outcomes compared to other communities with different demographics. And so EJ's screen, a little bit of background is EPA's new geospatial data tool for environmental justice analysis. It was released in June of 2015. So it's been about a year now. It's a web-based GIS system. It's really similar to Google Maps. So if you've ever used Google Maps, it's actually based on Bing Maps but nobody uses Bing, so I'll just say Google. But you don't have to download anything. You can zoom in, zoom out, you'll see it, but it's accessible. You can pull it up on your phone. So it's pretty cool. It's a product of PLAN EJ 2014, which is EPA's strategic plan to integrate environmental justice throughout the federal agency. The tool was built heavily with the support and academic assistance from the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which produced a 112-page report that a lot of the assumptions and the way that tools were built was based on those decisions and recommendations. And then finally, it was peer reviewed in 2013. So we have worked with academic experts and got a lot of feedback and used that to make sure that the tool is being used in a way that understands the restraints of the data but also it can be made as useful as possible. So some of the key features in the tool. We have 12 environmental justice indexes and I'll be demonstrating those soon. What those do is actually combine demographic information with environmental information so we know those places that are truly most vulnerable and susceptible and we can prioritize those places when we're doing analysis at EPA. We update the data in the tool annually, which is really helpful. So when you're using the demographic data that's in the tool, it should be the best available data that's out there as soon as we refresh it. So we're going to be refreshing it and putting out a new version of the tool sometime next month and that will have the most recent data. It comes from the American Community Survey. So it's a sample of data that is recent to 2014 for the next version. All of the stuff that's in the tool is very easily accessible and you can get printable reports, maps, bar graphs. It takes really complex data and it turns it into something that's easily understandable and I think that's one of the real powers of the tool. We have these data sets of stuff that's really important like cancer risk and diesel exposure but a lot of the times it sits in an Excel spreadsheet and even if you can access it then it's for census tracks and where are those and being able to take all that and put it in one place and put it in plain English in a way that is accessible is really important to expanding the conversation and allowing for people to understand and have meaningful involvement. It's also based on census block group data and we'll show you what that means in a little bit but basically we push the data as far as you can go. Neighborhood level data is very important because we know that environmental justice really does change neighborhood to neighborhood not every county is everybody demographically the same. There's lots of variations so being able to understand where those populations are sometimes of 600 residents sometimes 1200 residents being able to get that high resolution data is very important and then lastly all of the data that's in EJ screen is available for download for the public so you can take the data you can put it into your own tools you can bring your own data into EJ screen we try to make it as modular as possible for all of the people use it for various reasons it can be incorporated for different use and analyses. A few limitations that I always have to say before actually going to the tool. EJ screen is a starting point I like to refer to it as kind of like a sifter you know if you're going out and panning for gold you run everything through it and it helps get rid of all the stuff you clearly don't need and what's left you can sift through but that's not all gold you need to really look you can initially consider but it's not the endpoint it doesn't use it as a basis for decision making it just helps us when we want to get initial information so we can take a deeper look. It does help highlight places for further review but it is not a decision-making tool and that's an important distinction. It's always important to realize that this data because we're taking stuff that needs to be nationally consistent across all 50 states and have full coverage that oftentimes there could be better state and local data so before any decisions are made it's important to understand the different options available and if there is better data and local experience it should be supplemented into any decisions or analyses and then finally lastly it's important to realize that EJ screen does not designate EJ communities. Environmental justice movement started outside of EPA so it wouldn't be our place to make those decisions and beyond that practically speaking there's so many different things that can affect communities in terms of environmental justice so we don't capture in the tool that it would be inappropriate to use this is a way of making designations for places that are or aren't this is just simply a tool that can be used to see if there may be potentially environmental justice concerns in the area that you're analyzing so I'm done with the PowerPoint now. So this is our website and you just need to go to epa.gov slash ej screen. We have pages here that are pretty useful for understanding how EPA uses it and how it was developed there's more background here I'm going to be clicking through a lot and there's so much stuff to actually cover that if you actually want to replicate some of the things you're seeing today or learn how to use it this how to use EJ screen page has these little accordion files that you can sort through to find out how to do pretty much everything that you see me doing today so this is really helpful for actually learning to use the tool. We also have a quick five minute video so it's important to understand how to describe what EJ screen results do and don't say and learn the language. This five minute video I think is really helpful in walking through and being able to speak the EJ screen language and then lastly you know this is great for all you technical experts this is where the data is and more information but we also have this additional resources page where we have links to our technical documentation a fact sheet here's our full user guide we have FAQ and we have a full hour and a half presentation on YouTube that you can view as well and then here's links to other tools that are useful for environmental justice analyses that have been developed by EPA and other federal agencies so without further ado let me actually go to EJ screen and so we're going to start out here in the United States and you can zoom into any place and since the video we were looking at was in Chicago we can start there so I'm just going to just like you would in any other browser or mapping software you can just type in you can type in an address you can type in a city you can type in a state county and it will take you to the resolution that you actually type and so EJ screen really presents data in two ways that is most useful the first is through maps and that's helpful when you want to zoom out and understand the community and be able to zoom in on hot spots so that's good for being able to look at the data one at a time but if you know a place that you want to look at say around a coal fire power plant say around a river that needs cleanup any different site you can actually map a site and then pull up all of the data into one easy to use standard report and get a lot of other information so I'll start off by showing you the maps because I think that's really helpful for understanding how EJ screen works and I'm actually going to pull up the power plants that we were talking about the Fisk and Crawford power plants so I mentioned to you sometimes the data is not as recent as possible those power plants were shut down in 2013 but they're still in our system actually so we can look at them and understand how it can be useful to understand analyzing power plants in the day that we have for those types of work so right here is actually the Fisk power plant and the Crawford power plants located right around here and this is the neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village so I'm going to start off by going into the demographic information so what we're looking at here is what are called census block groups all these irregular shapes there's about 217,000 of them that cover the entire United States they're defined by census a block group is literally just a collection of residential census blocks so we all live on a block on average block groups are about 1400 residents and we have census block groups that cover all 50 of the United States so everybody here lives in a census block or another and the data that's displayed is displayed in percentiles which is really helpful so it helps to understand are the problems that we're looking at relatively common or rare or is the the view that we're looking at rare or common so when we're looking right here at percent minority we can see that all the block groups that are in yellow are in the 80th to 90th percentile compared to the rest of the United States for percent minority so what that means is the percent of residents that are a designated minority is higher than 80 or 80 to 90 percent of the rest of the nation so in other words only 10 to 20 percent of all the 217,000 block groups have a higher percentage of minority residents the areas in orange tell us the places that are in the 90th to 95th percentile meaning places where they're in the top 10 or excuse me 10th or fifth percentile and all the places in red are in the 95th to 100th percentile and so for example if I click on this block group I can see that there is about 3520 residents that live on all of the blocks that are part of this block group it's a 99 percent minority which is at the 97th percentile meaning there's only about three percent of block groups in the rest of the country that have a higher percentage of minority residents so I'm going to go through these one at a time we also have low income here we have linguistic isolation well let me say we define low income as two times the federal poverty threshold we have linguistic isolation which is defined by census says no one in the household over the age of 14 speaks English very well and we can see there's a lot of linguistic isolation right around where the Crawford plan is see percent less in high school education this is all adults over the age of 25 that don't have a high school degree or equivalent and then we also have under age five and over age 64 and again understanding susceptibility we know that people children under the age of five and adults over the age of 64 tend to have a higher susceptibility to air pollution and other types of contaminants and so we're looking at things like coal fire power plants this can also be very useful data we also have this for all of our environmental indicators as well so right here I'm clicking in particular matter and I can click on any one of these block groups particular matter in ozone the first two are more of a regional air quality phenomena so you'll notice there's not much variation between the individual block groups that's because this is something that usually if you go within a mile of any area the air quality is generally pretty similar when it comes to PM exposure or ozone so I can see here that the particular matter is 12.7 micrograms or cubic meter which is at the 98th percentile so again it means that in terms of air quality exposure to PM 2.5 only 2 percent of areas in the rest of the United States have an exposure similar to these block groups that we're looking at so there's a lot of particular matter that's already being dealt with by the communities that are living in or around these facilities near or around these facilities we can see overall it seems like ozone is much less of a problem in this community we can see traffic is high again when we want to take a step back actually and uncheck this for a second and if we look at this we can also I should just show you this this is cool too everybody knows you have these different map features but it's important in terms of just understanding a community switching to a base map so you can see actually what is going on we can see for example along the river there's a lot of industry right here and then there's a community here but then we see there's a highway on the other side so the community is literally couched in between I-290 and the all of these industries that are along the river so again now that we look at traffic proximity they're seeing red along all of these makes a lot of sense in fact if I click on one of these block groups we can see that about 680 cars passed by the average household in this census block group every day which is a 97 percentile you know only 3 percent of places have more than 680 cars have passed by their households in the United States compared to this location so I have lead paint this is an indication of older housing but also a potential for exposure to lead paint as a stock of housing pre 1960 this is approximated to superfund sites and it doesn't appear that there is a superfund site close to this area we also have approximated facilities with risk management plans these are facilities that are permitted under the Clean Air Act to be able to store large amounts of potentially dangerous or volatile chemicals so they have to have risk and safety plans we have approximated transfer storage and disposal facilities these are handlers and movers of solid waste landfills and then we have approximated major water dischargers and these are going to be people that are legally permitted to discharge large amounts of pollutants into the river and we can see right around where the two power plants are because they do have water discharges those are a large source of water pollution in the river and then we have what are called our EJ indexes and so what an EJ index is helpful for is basically what we do is we multiply each one of our 12 environmental indicators by what we call our demographic index so I'm going to show you now and the demographic index is very simple it's just percent low income plus percent minority divided by two and that we use this as the basis for understanding demographic vulnerability because the executive order 12 898 for environmental justice specifically references these two populations as being the federal government's primary duty to protect those communities and so basically we use this as our proxy for understanding demographic susceptibility and vulnerability we multiply this by each one of our environmental indicators to understand where are the places with the highest amount of pollution but also low income in minority communities so again when we look at p.m. now we see that the block groups that are lighting up in red will have both a very high exposure to particular matter but also have a high percent of low income and or minority residents so to understand that I can actually click on this block group and I can see that the again the p.m. 2.5 exposure is at the 97th percentile so it's very high and then the demographic index percent low income plus minority divided by two is 92 percent which is at the 99th percentile so this would be a place that we would probably look at more closely understanding the again those basic principles of susceptibility and vulnerability we could do that for all of these but you see generally where there's a lot of traffic but also high low income minority populations those areas light up red and we can go through these all the time all the way but I'm trying to make it through and have plant time for questions so I think you get the idea we also have other map layers that can be really useful and these are in our map supplementary layers so again I'm going to find exactly where those power plants that we were talking about are so I'm going to zoom in where I know one particular plant is and I'm going to go to toxic releases I see a dot here so I'm going to click on that and that's not it that's the Welsh ready mixed plant but here we have the fist generating station and that's useful for being able to see exactly where the facility is but there's so much more information you can access here so remember when I told you all of those numbers in terms of the total amount of heavy metals and other pollutants that were coming out of these facilities we can actually see all of that right here in this really easy to use and very useful tool this is our TRI indicator so what we're looking at here is total releases from just the Fisk power plant from 2003 through 2012 at the peak year in 2008 there was about 378,785 total pounds of just barium that was put out into the surrounding communities into the air and it looks like there was just under 500,000 total pounds we can see that here there's 11,000 pounds of copper 36,000 pounds of hydrochloric acid 36,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride and we can also go through these one at a time so I'm going to just uncheck all of these the ones that we talked about at the beginning one of them was mercury so let's go to them look at that look at that in about in 2005 there was 125 pounds of mercury emitted from the power plant which the powerful neurotoxin is very much can affect the developmental abilities of especially young children so even 100 pounds dumped in the community can have a substantial effect you can look at sulfuric acid and see especially in these two years 2006 and 2007 there was 13,000 pounds of sulfuric acid or 11,000 pounds so you can go through this tool there's a lot of information buried in there you can also try to see if water quality we know that there's issues with air quality but what about the discharge is happening in the river and so I'm going to go to map supplementary layers I'm going to go to water features and I'm going to click on impaired streams see do these streams meet EPA standards for being fishable and swimmable rivers so I'm going to click on this stream segment right so I'm going to click on this one that's by the Crawford power plant we can see that the area that we're looking at this is specifically the Chicago I don't know what sand is an abbreviation for and ship canal anybody oh okay and and we can see what the causes of impairment are we have ammonia an iodized we have dissolved oxygen phosphorus and PCBs and so all of these make this river that's in this community's backyard unfishable and unswimmable it's not a safe river to swim in for obvious reasons and so these are additional things when we're thinking about the totality of community and the things that they're dealing with also understanding that the water quality that's here is also a problem another thing that's important when we're looking at the power plant is proximity for schools that was something I mentioned earlier while kids are playing outside one of the things we never really thought about a lot of us in the communities we grew up in is is the air quality actually harmful for us while we're running around on playgrounds and so we know the power plant is right here let's see if there's schools nearby so I'm going to go to places and I'm going to get rid of this and let's see where all the schools are and we can see that within less than a mile there is a number of schools and very close proximity to the power plant we click on it and see exactly what the name of the school is this is an art studio this is a commensi school this is actually an elementary school and this is another elementary school so we have under places schools we have churches which are also a good place in terms of if you want to do community outreach finding out where that data is and we also have hospitals in terms of access to health care this can be a good proxy and we can see there's not really a close hospital nearby so there's a lot of other things in the supplementary map layers we have transportation if you want to see where freight lines are or where airports are we also have tribal boundaries we have areas to see are they in a attainment for air quality standards for different things like particulate matter ozone sulfur dioxide we also have boundaries so if you want to see the county boundary if you want to see the congressional district if you want to see the state you can pull up those different boundaries so we have a lot of other data that you can pull into the tool that's very useful for analysis but now i want to show you the reports because that actually can be really helpful and in terms of understanding and community now we're going to go over to little village so if i'm doing an analysis and i know the the crawford power plant i mean just is right over here it's around here and i know that the area i want to study is right here i'm going to actually get rid of this stuff and do an analysis of the place specifically so one thing that you can do if you want to do just a circular buffer so you know the specific site you put a dot on the map you can specify a buffer so i want to make a two-mile buffer and just hit add to map that's two miles and that's two miles in every direction what this is going to do is some uh add up the average of all the block groups that are within this circle and give me the average demographics and environmental exposure for every all of those maplers you saw in one place sometimes you might want to do an analysis around a highway or a river so you can do a path or a trail so i can follow just do a bunch of single clicks and then when i finish i'm going to double click i can also add a buffer on either side of that if you want but in this case if possible it's always best to actually specify the exact boundaries of the area you want to look at and so what i'm going to do is draw in a regular polygon i'm going to start here just again through a series of single clicks this usually always goes wrong so i'm impressed that it has and then i'm going to just double click to finish and so i can go explore reports is a good quick look at all of the data that we saw in one place we'll start with demographics and takes a second to load takes two seconds to load so while it's loading all of the information that we saw it sometimes will take a little bit to pull up it can be we'll show up in one place we have the demographic index we have minority population low income linguistic isolation uh less than high school education and and also another feature that's pretty cool is you can also now compare to the rest of the state region or us so for example and let's try that for environmental exposures this isn't a great example because most of these pair but a lot of the times you might see for example that pm 2.5 could be at the 40th percentile nationally but at the 99th percentile compared to the rest of the state and so what that will tell you is within the state this is a very high value but compared to the rest of the nation it's not that high of a value another way of looking at it is i'm from montana right and so if you want to look at uh transportation or a number of cars are passed by the average household if the number is 150 or 200 that number might be close to the us average but in montana that number could be very high so it helps you get the sense of is this relatively rare or common within my state uh as well as compared to the rest of the country and sometimes it's a lot more useful to compare just to the state uh for your for your needs so it gives you a sense of again that commonness rarity but at different perspectives so we have all of that data here you can check it this is for epa regions which is less useful for people outside of epa and then we also have that for our ej indexes as well but what we can see though across the board is is there does seem to be a lot of a particular matter is a particular issue there does seem to be a lot of old housing in this area there is proximate to a number of facilities with risk management plans and major water dischargers which are both indicators of living near uh facilities or industry uh so we can see that there are things going on as well as uh potential for demographic vulnerability and susceptibility as most of our indicators demographic indicators are are high around the 95th percentile or higher if you want to get all of that information in one place in a report this really easy use all you need to do is click this button hit printable standard or get printable standard report you have to have patience with this too but while that's loaded i'm going to pull up another report that is also pretty useful so here's all the information for our um ej indexes that we saw here's the graph that goes along with it if i go to page two here's the map of the area that we pulled up and then if i go to page three i can get the actual raw data to interpret all of that and then also uh you know understand this a little bit more bless you so for example if i'm looking at linguistic isolation i can see that it's 33 percent is the actual raw value so i mean one in three households in the area that we're looking at which is 73 000 people one in three households no one over the age of 14 speaks english very well oh yeah go ahead absolutely so all of the demographic data is from the same vintage and from the same source that's from the american community survey the data that we're using in this version of ej screen and let me actually go back to show you it we can see it's 2008 to 2012 the next version we're updating to 2010 to 2014 so it will in the next version be the most recent available demographic data available to the public the vintage of the different environmental data sets does vary and that's an important thing to note actually so if i go back to the web page and i just go here we have the environmental indicators or demographic indicators if i click on environmental indicators i have the uh where it's from um what year that it was uh developed and where i can get more information on it and so these are all links to to that information as well so all of that information is detailed and if you want really explicit detail if you go to the uh technical documentation right here that also has a lot of really the couple pages per environmental indicator why we select a rationale for inclusion um you know environmental effects things like that so the technical document uh is also a really good resource let's see where were we uh and then so this is the so basically this is the um one of the main features the ej screen standard report and it has all the information we've covered today but i also want to point out the acs demographic report because this is also very useful um so we can see for the area that we've selected which again is just this community that's highlighted right here the population is about 73,600 residents that we have the population density we see the total number of households here in housing units we also have a population broke down by race with extreme detail we also have information on educational attainment and so this is going to be really helpful because sometimes you'll see a community that has 35 or 40 percent with a bachelor's degree or more but you also see 35 or 40 percent with less than a ninth grade at education and so understanding the variability that exists within a community is that homogenous is it all the same or is there a lot of differences within a community it's really important for understanding context on the ground for a lot of different reasons that's also true in terms of income we have income levels broke down we can see for example that it seems like 18,000 or excuse me 18 percent of households um make less than 15,000 dollars a year um 21 percent make between 15,000 and 25,000 dollars a year 34 percent make between 25,000 and 50,000 dollars a year per household to get a sense of what the average economic levels are and if there is again disparities or if it is relatively the same so just a lot more demographic information that you can use so really understanding the potential for communities in terms of doing community engagement and then also those questions about vulnerability and susceptibility so that's basically EJ screen in the nutshell I there's a few other features I can quickly point out for those of you that do have other data that you have built out you it's very easy to add it into the tool you just need to publish that and ArcGIS copy and paste the link and hit add to map and you can bring your own data layers in so if you have state or local data you want and you also want to access the demographic or environmental data and look at them side by side you can bring your own data into the tool if you know about other layers that are already out there you can click on this search available data and we do have some map layers that are in here that you can get in terms of this is some better schools data here's information about other hazard environmental hazard pollutant risk so just a lot of information that's available but at the end of the day I think this is just a really good tool as a starting point for considering environmental justice in a lot of different ways and understanding the real human impacts that are behind the work that we're doing and and I think that story at the beginning really sticks with me in a lot of the work we do especially with coal fire power plants to realize that there are a lot of people impacted by that by those effects and we need to keep that in mind in the work we're doing why it's so important so that's a great question we have translated some of the materials including fact sheets and some of the pages into Spanish it is a longer term objective to translate it we have very limited resources and there are real costs in between you know building another version of the tool that's in another language I think that's a point that's very well taken and it's something that we have talked about with this first public rollout and release of the tool we had about 250 requests for different features and functionalities and we expect those to level out over time and I would say you know we'll definitely work to make future versions available in Spanish and I 100% agree in the importance of that and this tool is not only about being able to find places where there's linguistic isolation so we can do translation but also it should be translated for the very principles that it stands on yeah so C first is more of a cumulative impacts or risk analysis tool and so EJ screens really good as a starting point we have a lot of data and it's really about being able to have user to find areas and zoom in and get all of that with C first you have risk characterization profiles and you have the ability to go in and sort of tell a story and pull in pollutants in and analyze and what are those health effects and kind of walk through a series of steps to talk about something more in depth so we have used these things hand in hand we actually have done presentations where we show how communities use EJ screen to identify priority areas to focus on and then they use C first to develop risk profiles and plans for action so they really do work well and there is a lot of overlapping data but in terms of functionalities and the different ways to use them C first is a lot more for digging in deep and understanding things more and EJ screens more about trying to understand everything that's out there and then zoom in on those places that are most affected or most impacted it's been really overwhelming honestly and I think unexpected we were excited to release it to the public and we knew there would be a lot of potential users in the first month though when we released it we had over 150,000 users access the tool and we've had a lot of regular users since then and we I've done presentations for every stakeholder group imaginable so there's a lot of different users we have had some big successes in working with FEMA to integrate the tool into their own geo platform so when they're considering cleanup efforts after things like Hurricane Sandy they can target those places they know are most vulnerable they had had the least capacity to weatherize and protect themselves from storm surges and other places that might have pollution issues that could be exacerbated by storms so incorporating it into FEMA to consider environmental justice as a layer of analysis was really important we also incorporated the tool into HUD's community development block grant tool so states can decide when they're delegating funds for where new housing and assistance is going they can consider environmental justice issues it's been used by states and local governments in a variety of different ways it's actually been proposed in legislation in New York City and it's being used by community groups in a lot of different ways in fact we're working with climate justice experts that have been using the tool just to pull in the demographic information to see where there is communities that are less prepared and resilient and ready for adaptation for climate justice issues so they look at those this information with their own data and we're working with them on the next version of EJ screen which as I mentioned will be coming out in June to see if we can't bring in additional map layers on climate change and climate vulnerability as well so it's being used by EPA to look at places that we should be targeting for grants understanding places that we should take a closer look at when it comes to enforcement and permitting efforts there's been a lot of different uses and different purposes and I think that speaks to what there was a real need to be able to access a lot of this data that is available by different federal agencies in a really user-friendly accessible way that's what we're working on right now and there's a lot of great federal agencies that have developed tools on that already and so we're looking at where we can find maps where we can see where there's potential for coastal flooding for places where there are heat islands and heat vulnerability we're looking at places in terms of a lot of different indicators there's hundreds of map layers that have been developed and we want to really narrow that down so I would say there is a lot of that data that's out there in a CDC health public health tracking network has a great tool that would definitely recommend you look at that's the CDC public health tracking network and they have abundance of data that they have these things so you can look at heat vulnerability by county and you can go from 2010 to 2020 to 2030 all the way up to 2080 to see in Texas or Florida how temperatures are going to change over the next 60 to 80 years and again understanding vulnerability in places to focus on that could be useful so we're looking at places where it makes sense obviously we don't pull everything under the sun into the tool but those few map layers that are most critical for understanding will bring bringing into this tool over time so the other question I was curious if you can understand my previous understanding was that you couldn't overlay both like multiple environmental things like smog and water and lead and also see that in terms of the demographic. Yeah and that is correct so each of the environmental indicators you can only look at one at a time but these are pre-calculated the EJ indexes and so specifically how it works is we take the raw environmental indicator scores to say it's traffic and there's 280 cars that pass by the average household every single block group in the United States has a number associated with that environmental indicator we multiply that by what is our demographic index which you know in an area right here we can see the demographic index is 82 percent and but actually to be more specific what we multiply it by is the demographic index minus the actual national average and so what that means is that any place that's below the national average for demographics of 35 percent is not going to show up as an issue because mathematically that'll be a negative number but anything above that and the higher that the demographic index gets that's a multiplier so we understand both of those things together and we have in the technical documentation and an explanation about this again I mentioned on the page we have this how to interpret a standard report this five minute video I think does a better job of explaining it than I'm doing right now but that's again just trying to understand those places where there is that individual environmental indicator a high level of exposure or potential for exposure and as well as high demographic indicator as well yeah absolutely absolutely for houses you mean for energy efficiency or that's stuff that we've looked at and unfortunately you know we're really limited by the data that's actually collected and this has been a great exercise for us because as a result EPA is developing new datasets that we can incorporate in the future unfortunately I have looked into that and there's nothing that has been developed at a national level I would say though the lead paint indicator which is just stock of housing pre 1960 is a really good proxy for energy efficiency because houses that's older generally will have less recently been built with insulation that's more modern or windows or doors where there's you know gap underneath and so older housing generally or the lead paint indicator is a good proxy for understanding whether there's energy efficiency or not well I did mention on the additional resources page we have these are all of the EPA ones and I and we were putting more on here as well and there is a lot of good stuff out there in fact we should be putting more of those things the CDC public health track network has is a great tool HUD's developed a lot of good tools about healthy homes and if you're looking for any specific data and you have a question afterwards I'm happy to help you do point you to people or websites that might be useful I Kevin I wanted to ask them to follow up on that when you were talking about you know that they're that you're building out a variety of new datasets and everything like that but there are certain areas where there just isn't information available so are you also like identifying those bringing because it seems to me that this is a great opportunity to identify where there really is a lack of information that would be very useful as as you were indicating so that it's very hard to to unless unless we identify those gaps to really get those issues addressed and that that could be another great service that this whole tool could could provide and could help other agencies in terms of thinking about and help Congress in terms of knowing here's where we really do have some very important information gaps to make sure that that gets followed up I mean I think that would be very important and then the other thing would be as you were saying to really expand the list of other like cool data information like the CDC or the FEMA maps or whatever if they're not going to be able to be layered into this but so that there really is a comprehensive list and then if we could make sure that the different agencies are kind of also providing the same sort of information including EPA's EJ screen in terms of their various platforms so that we really get it all coordinated and be awesome yeah I think that's a great point so I have a few thoughts on that first of all in terms of data gaps I have a lot of thoughts on that and I'll keep most of those to myself I think there are a lot of places where we can constructively work to fill gaps and sometimes it happens for different reasons I mean for example there are very regional issues so if we're talking about mountaintop mining if we're talking about KFOs or controlled animal feeding operations those are more regional so the data set does exist but we don't have it in as an environmental indicator because it's not nationally representative but we are looking for other map layers so when we talk about you know these map layers the supplementary map layers when we're looking at places and transportation water quality issues and sites we're looking to bring in things like KFOs and other places where we can find data to bring in for those more locally useful issues in terms of data analysis and gaps I don't want to share them now because it's controversial but that's a long conversation and it is complex but I think the federal agencies are doing a better job of responding and creating these you know we always kind of lag five years or ten years or more behind the private sector on some of those but I think agencies are rapidly putting a lot more resources and there's always so much stuff happening it's hard to keep track of it we absolutely will make a commitment and it's one of those things on our list that we're doing as a part of the update to add a lot of other tools that are out there in federal agencies to our list on our website so that's going to be published shortly and I think we're also trying to do a better job working and when we go to conferences and talking between agencies that we present these tools together because this tool can be really useful when you use the HUD AFFH tool that has a lot of data about housing and and where public housing is and access to affordable transportation and you know those types of issues when we're talking about community things we need it's really important to get out of our stovepipes and understand the interrelated nature between a lot of these things and I think it's something we're doing better at we still have a long way to go great any other questions or comments okay um and we and as I mentioned earlier to to Kevin we would be very interested in taking another look in a few months after you have new data and hopefully if if you all are interested let us know because we'd be happy to have Kevin come back again and and go through more specifics and in terms of the new data and what it tells us yeah and can I make a quick plug for that real quick sure absolutely make that plug sorry I'm sure that my boss would get so mad at me if I didn't do this we would not want that to happen no you know I wouldn't either so when we're looking at environmental indicators some of the data that's missing that's really useful is this what's called NATO data it's the national air toxic assessment and that's a combination of air monitor data that we fuse with modeling data to understand each of these issues so we're going to be moving into the tool in the next version diesel particulate matter which is a very prevalent issue especially when we're talking about goods movement in and areas close to heavy traffic cancer risk which is obviously very important as well as respiratory and this is increasingly becoming more of an issue with wildfires in particular matter that is caused by that and so all of this data is going to be included in the tool there's going to be some other really cool features you'll be able to zoom out so right now all you can do is look at block groups but you'll be able to zoom out and get averages for what are called census tracks which are larger units than census block groups and zoom out and then look at counties so not only can you look at within counties but now you can look between counties to understand the differences between them you're going to be able to have a save feature so you'll be able to save multiple sessions which you can't do now so there's a lot of really great things and the best thing about all of those updates is that we did a really intentional push during the last year to get as many comments as we could to how we can improve the tool and we received over 250 public comments when you say a hundred percent of all the changes that are made and the update were requests from the public so this has really been a collaborative process and I think we're trying our best to understand stakeholders needs across a variety of sectors and expand this tool to make it more useful in that way so one last comment that I had is based upon this what sort of collaboration or are you doing with NIEHS the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences because I could see in terms of what it could mean for driving some of their research and the kinds of data that they are gathering or want to do for their analysis on that this could be a very very interesting correlative effort there's probably 10 federal agencies or offices in federal agencies we should be doing a better job of working with we are working with a lot of federal agencies right now especially in HHS like CDC and ATSDR and that's an area where we should work a lot more in terms of thinking about pairing this with academic needs and really doing studies that help advance the actual understanding of the impacts in terms of risk and exposure right because this helps you know where some of those hot spots are which could be very useful for them to think about they need to drive research very very interesting well I want to thank you all for coming and I want to thank Kevin great job