The air children breathe may have an impact on their upbringing.

A study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows certain low-income populations are being exposed to higher levels of dangerous fine particulate air pollution more than other groups.

Victoria Petro-Eschler, a mother of three, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. They are all too aware of how the air they breathe affects their daily lives.

“We never have just a quick little 48-hour head cold. We have a cough that starts, and we try to like Dimetapp it out, you know, and then it always settles into their lungs,” Petro-Eschler said. “You can't avoid it here. It is part of everything. It determines if my kids get to play inside or outside on certain days. You know, my kids go from one highway that they're in the shadow of for school and another highway that they're in the shadow of that home.”

The air quality also determines how often the children are able to attend school.

“My kids have been late for days out of the past two weeks because we have been dealing with chronic coughs and upper respiratory,” Petro-Eschler said.

They live on the west side of Salt Lake City, a community with a median income of $49,000. An airport, an interstate interchange, a quarry and multiple refineries are their neighbors.

Richard Holman was one of the founding members of the Westside Coalition, an organization that made enough noise about the problem that they gained the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency. While each individual company meets EPA standards, it’s the combination that affects nearby residents.

“And it's not difficult to prove what's happening on the west side. These people are compromised,” Holman said.

A University of Utah study of 174 Salt Lake City County public schools showed schools with predominately minority students were exposed to worse air quality. A separate study showed there were more school absences when the air quality was poor.

Harvard professor Francesca Dominici was part of a study that looked at air quality throughout the United States. The study showed that air quality is not just a problem in Salt Lake City.

“The most polluted area is the one that there is a lower socioeconomic status where they have multiple environmental stressors,” Dominici said.

Environmental stressors forced Holman to eventually move, out of fear for his health. Those same stressors ignited Petro-Eschler to run for city council.

“To fix environmental issues is going to be slow and tedious. To fix the equity issues, the racial, the ethnic, the gender disparities, tt's going to be slow and tedious,” Dominici added.

The EPA is evaluating environmental stressors for the next six months.

Petro-Eschler worries a fix won't come soon enough.

“My doctor, when I told her this last time, when I went to get the steroids, I looked at her and said, 'Am I killing my kids by living where I live?' And she looked at me and said, 'One of these you know,' she doesn't want to tell me that.”

Residents of the small Ohio village of East Palestine gathered in a high school auditorium on Wednesday night to speak directly to community leaders and lawmakers about the train derailment disaster which sparked an evacuation of residents within a one-mile radius.

The train's operator, Norfolk Southern, said representatives for the company would not attend.

In a statement released to the media the company said it had become "increasingly concerned about the growing physical threat to our employees and members of the community around this event stemming from the increasing likelihood of the participation of outside parties."

The moderator of the meeting told the crowd that Norfolk Southern was invited multiple times but they did not accept.

"I know you're frustrated!" He responded, as people shouted from the crowd.

Congressman Bill Johnson, who represents the area, told the crowd to come down to him after the meeting and give him the questions and he will make sure they are answered by Norfolk Southern. The audience continued yelling, asking "why are we getting sick" if there is nothing in the air. The crowd kept pressing, asking why animals are dying.

Johnson said, "I'm not a doctor and I'm not a chemist."

"If you've got ailments and conditions that you did not have before February 3rd, go to your doctor, get that documented, keep that health record," and Johnson promised to "elevate that issue" and get an answer.

Residents complained of headaches and not knowing the exact cause because of a lack of testing for chemical toxicity that "may be causing these symptoms," one resident said at the meeting.

"Who determined the one-mile radius evacuation zone?" one resident shouted out from the audience.

One of the speakers addressing the audience said that the radius was determined by the Department of Transportation and other subject matter experts for an evacuation zone, and claimed the same is used across the country.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) updated its website Wednesday and said on Feb. 14 the agency completed screenings for 459 homes, and had 28 screenings scheduled for Wednesday.

The EPA said the total drinking water wells that were sampled as of Feb. 15 was 21. Air monitoring by the EPA in ongoing according to the agency.

The EPA and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine have said that there is no evidence of contaminants associated with the derailment to the water supply, but the EPA said on Feb. 15 that Norfolk Southern is delivering bottled water to East Palestine and will help distribute it.

Local police were seen in front of the community members seated in bleachers as the energy in the room became increasingly tense.

On Feb. 10 the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency released information on water quality sampling for surface water and said it showed "very low levels of two contaminants, butyl acylate and ethyl hexyl acrylate" in an area called Leslie Run, and said it would dissipate quickly.

The state agency said it detected no butyl acrylate in an area called North Fork Little Beaver Creek or in another location called Little Beaver Creek. The agency said it detected lower levels of hexyl acrylate in North Fork Little Beaver Creek, about a 20 minute drive southwest of the City of East Palestine.

The agency said it did not detect vinyl chloride in any of the waterways it tested.

The White House said it is deploying additional resources to East Palestine, Ohio, nearly two weeks after a train derailment prompted environmental concerns in the region.

Although officials say the air is safe, there remain lingering concerns over the long-term impacts after vinyl chloride and other chemicals were released into the atmosphere.

State officials ordered the town to evacuate late on Feb. 5, nearly 48 hours after the derailment. Within days, residents were allowed to return.

Although Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said that he was told the region doesn’t not meet the standard for it to be declared a federal disaster area, White House officials are deploying additional resources there.

In addition to having the Environmental Protection Agency continue to monitor air quality, the White House said it is holding Norfolk Southern accountable for the costs associated with the cleanup. DeWine echoed on Friday that it was Norfolk Southern’s responsibility to pay for the cleanup.

To date, Norfolk Southern has said it is reimbursing East Palestine residents for their evacuation costs.

“Norfolk Southern responded and has agreed to fund response costs but we will continue to exercise the full authority under the law to hold the company accountable under the Comprehensive Environmental Remediation, Compensation and Liability Act,” a White House officials said.

The administration also said it agreed to a response from DeWine to send teams of federal health officials and toxicologists “to conduct public health testing and assessments.”

Federal officials said that they are still in the emergency response phase, but that will soon shift to a remediation phase.

Reporting from Scripps News White House correspondent Kellan Howell was used in this report.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to reaffirm its authority to regulate toxic mercury from power plant smokestacks.

The EPA action restores the 2012 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rules imposed under former President Barack Obama.

The rules were nixed under the Trump administration in 2020 when they were deemed not “appropriate and necessary.”

The 2012 rule requires significant reductions in emissions of mercury, acid gases and other harmful pollutants, primarily by coal-fired power plants.

According to the agency, mercury emissions were down significantly five years after the rule took effect.

Mercury emissions went down 86% in 2017 compared to 2010.

Acid gas emissions were also reduced by 96% during that time.

Now that the standard will be implemented again, other hazardous pollutants apart from mercury will also be monitored.

The EPA said this will improve public health by reducing the risk of heart attacks, cancer and reducing delays in brain development in children.

Most coal-fired power plants have already made the technological upgrades required by the 2012 rule.

The agency will take public comment on the proposal for 60 days and will hold a virtual public hearing on the rules.

Technology is changing the way pollution is tracked across the United States.

That is clear in California, where a tool called CalEnviroScreen allows users to find out the relative impact of pollution on their community.

"The idea was to try to understand and address this issue of cumulative impacts," said Dr. John Faust, who works in California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. "CalEnviroScreen is a geographic screening tool that's intended to identify communities in California that are burdened by multiple sources of pollution."

The team at California's OEHHA first published CalEnviroScreen in 2013. The tool is now in its fourth edition.

Californians or other interested parties can look up the relative pollution in any U.S. Census tract in the state.

"There are about 21 [indicators] that represent different types of pollution," said Dr. Faust, "like air quality, water quality ... the presence of solid waste, landfills, and so forth. Each of those has an indicator that is scored in relation to all the other Census tracts in the state. For example, an 89 percentile in a given Census tract means that the score is higher than 89% of the other Census tracts across the state."

The publicly available tool is just one way the data is used.

A 2012 California state law required the state's Environmental Protection Agency to identify communities that are disproportionately impacted by pollution.

CalEnviroScreen was developed to help meet that goal. Data scientists had to assemble a variety of statistics from different state and federal agencies. Experts have called the finished product groundbreaking.

"Bringing all the data sets to a uniform geography, the Census tract, was pretty new for a lot of the data sets in CalEnviroScreen," said Laura August, a scientist at OEHHA. "The data might have existed, but we had to develop methods to aggregate it at a similar uniform scale for all the data sets."

"At this point," said Dr. Faust, "several billions of dollars have been allocated to disadvantaged communities as a result of this program."

The federal government has a similar mapping tool, EJSCREEN. It contains many of the same features as CalEnviroScreen, but does not include state-specific data, such as pesticide reporting.

Other states are developing their own tools.

"Washington state has had a similar initiative, and I know the state of Michigan has also started on this path," said Dr. Faust. "And as I understand, the state of Colorado's department of public health and environment is also committed to looking at the development of a similar tool."

OEHHA leaders say this tool would not have been possible without the technological innovations of the last decade.

"When I started 12 years ago, online, interactive maps weren't as easily developed and created," said August. "And now, it's just kind of a standard, that we can put our data on a map, that someone can search their address. That technology has definitely been a benefit."

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that American households contribute an extra 1 million tons of waste a week to landfills between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

However, experts say that making just a few small changes over the holidays can reduce the impact on the environment.

Creating a more sustainable holiday season starts with reducing food waste, which ends up in landfills and contributes to the emission of greenhouse gasses like methane.

"There are apps now that you can get on your phone for meal planning, and folks can RSVP if they're coming (to a party) and (noting) what meal they're going to bring," said Nathan King, the sustainability manager at Virginia Tech.

King also recommends that homeowners start using composting units, some of which are small enough to fit under a kitchen sink.

He also encourages people not to use single-use plastics for holiday meals.

Gift wrap can also lead to an increase in waste over the holidays.

"A lot of the wrapping paper that you buy this time of year is not necessarily going to be recyclable in your typical recycling programs, just due to a lot of the dyes and inks," King said.

He suggests re-using packaging and shipping materials and using newspaper, fabric or reusable bags as gift wrapping.

King also suggests shopping locally to avoid buying items that travel long distances.

For electronic gifts, King also suggests purchasing re-chargeable batteries.

Gifting experiences like event tickets or memberships can also reduce holiday waste.

"Those are going to create lasting memories and bonds with your family and friends that will mean a lot for years to come," King said.

Homeowners can also swap out older Christmas lights with LED bulbs. LED bulbs are about 80% more energy-efficient, and putting them on a timer can also help save homeowners money.

Planning for holiday travel can also be more cost-effective and reduce emissions. King suggests carpooling to and from the airport or driving multiple family members to the same holiday party.

CINCINNATI — Cincinnati-based First Student, the largest school bus service company in the country, has claimed it's using a disinfectant on school buses that can kill the coronavirus for up to 30 days.

"Zoono Z71 will provide lasting protection against the Covid virus for up to 30 days," Kenn Jones, a First Student senior location manager said last week during an interview with WCPO 9 News.

But a WCPO 9 I-Team investigation confirmed the EPA hasn't approved the disinfectant Zoono Z71 as a product that kills the virus, much less for 30 days.

On Wednesday, the I-Team reviewed First Student's public website designed for parents. There, First Student claimed Zoono Z71 kills the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and provides up to 30 days of protection, adding that the product is registered with the EPA.

The product is registered with the EPA as a disinfectant, but the I-Team learned Zoono Z71 is not among the 475 products approved by the EPA to kill the coronavirus on surfaces.

"We cannot make that claim in the USA," Zoono CEO Paul Hyslop told the I-Team Tuesday during a Zoom interview from his corporate office in New Zealand. "Everyone is looking for a miracle product. Our product is a good product. I don't believe it's a miracle product."

Hyslop told the I-Team a national government lab in a country he declined to name proved Zoono Z71 can kill a lab-created surrogate coronavirus up to 30 days after the disinfectant is applied to a surface.

He said China and South Korea accepted the test results and allow Zoono to claim the disinfectant can kill the virus for 30 days.

Hyslop said in Australia and the United Kingdom, Zoono can claim its product kills the virus, but Hyslop said those countries did not accept test results supporting the 30-day claims because of the methodology used in the tests.

"It would be a whole lot easier if there was a global standard," Hyslop told the I-Team.

Still, Hyslop said, Zoono sold over 1 million liters of Zoono Z71 in April alone.

Hyslop said he's optimistic Zoono will soon be added to the EPA's approved list of disinfectants that kill the virus that causes COVID-19.

"We have applied directly to the EPA for an emergency approval. We have got testing underway at the moment in the U.S. for 30-day claims," Hyslop said.

In a written statement provided to the I-Team, First Student said, "At First Student, there is nothing more important than the safety, health and well-being of our passengers and employees. Since the interview last week, we have been in contact with Mr. Hyslop regarding the claims that can be made about his product in the U.S."

The I-Team asked First Student spokesman Chris Kemper if that meant First Student would retract or clarify its claims about the disinfectant, and Kemper said First Student is changing its claims to reflect what Zoono is allowed to say about its product.

On Thursday, First Student removed all of the previous material about the disinfectant and the claims First Student made about it.

"I knew that there weren't any products licensed by the EPA to do that (kill COVID for 30 days)," said Spencer Bouldin, the WCPO 9 viewer who encouraged the I-Team to investigate First Student's claim about the disinfectant.

Bouldin, the owner and CEO of Spencer's Environmental Services, said his company distributes disinfectants in the Cincinnati area.

He said he was concerned about health risks facing students, especially African American students and employees who have tested positive at higher rates than whites.

Bouldin was surprised and impressed that First Student had removed the claims about the disinfectant so quickly.

"It's absolutely the right thing to do. No question," Bouldin said.