Portland - Graveyard of Polluting Equipment

Recently an article noted that Portland has become a dumping ground of Diesel equipment that can't legally operate in Washington or California because their standards are higher then Oregon. That lead to a finding that:

The latest federal evaluation of cancer risks estimated Multnomah County has more than 100 cancer cases per million people due to air toxics, 10 times higher than the national average.

 How bad is Air Pollution in Portland?  We don't really know because we only have one air pollution monitoring station in the Portland area in North Portland, and according to DEQ air quality expert Sarah Armitage commenting on a 2012 Pollution report,

Almost all the information in the recently released air toxics report comes from models, as opposed to air monitoring equipment that actually tests the air, Armitage explained. The model takes information DEQ has accumulated about which kinds of industries and pollution sources are operating where, accounts for weather and topography and estimates the concentrations of air pollutants.
DEQ has one air monitoring station in Northeast Portland that costs $150,000 a year to operate. Armitage said it would be nice to have more stations actually testing air quality, but that would be too expensive.
So, DEQ took the models of toxic air pollutants and compared them with a health benchmark of 1 case of illness per 1 million people.
Eight of the 19 toxins modeled at more than 10 times over that benchmark. That means they could cause 10 cases of illness for every 1 million people breathing the polluted air (the Portland metro area is home around 2.2 million people, according to the 2010 U.S. Census).

So our air pollution risk is based on models with assumptions on the risk.  Nonetheless, the models paint a pessimistic picture on what you're breathing every day.

Among the DEQ findings Armitage noted:

• There’s a tie for worst toxic air pollution offender between wood smoke and exhaust from cars and trucks.

• Benzene “really is everywhere, but we also saw it in patterns near the major highways.”

• 15 PAH “is distributed region-wide. There’s a uniform layer of it across the region.”

• Heavy metals were more neighborhood-based in “a very tight configuration around industry.”

• Hispanic and Latino populations were found to be at the highest risk from toxic air pollution because of residential wood-burning.

• 2 percent of homes in the metropolitan area are heated with wood, and air quality impacts from wood stoves “can be very local” – varying from block to block.

• People within 500 yards of heavily traveled roadways are at a higher risk from many toxins. “What we're seeing is a pattern of high concentrations within 500 yards of heavily traveled roadways.” The levels fall off around roadways “like a bell curve."