my name's Mary Dell and i live in the Dallas Texas area where there's a lot of pollution
okay and i'm up in Wisconsin uh my name is Terry
oh uh-huh
and uh in the small town we don't but uh we're not that far from the city where there's tons of pollution
yes
okay i'll go ahead and start recording that
okay
okay um just in particular here in the Twin Cities we have a lot of big corporations and um i'm sure there's a lot of pollution we uh before moving to Wisconsin lived across from where they were um
oh
gravel pits and also where they were making tar and so we would occasionally if the wind was blowing the right direction would get the smell of tar and
um-hum
ooh
it would uh smell the continuous you knew that you were also breathing that into your lungs so and it was like miles away but just the idea of having that
right
come across the way it did in the wind kind of made you know that there was a lot of pollution and that was just one small corporation that was doing the pollution of that but
um-hum
um-hum
also um where we also lived too it was very close to a highway so we got a lot of fumes from uh trucks
um-hum
and cars and you would literally see the pollution on your furniture i mean it was on your tables you would dust every day and it was dirty um
oh gosh
type of uh dust i mean it wasn't the typical dust that you get way out in the country
um-hum um-hum
um
i live in a small um town now quite a ways from the Twin Cities about an hour away and i may dust once a week and that's all it needs versus every day when i lived in the city
huh i'd never thought about that being a cause i have to dust a lot as well
so
oh yeah it it comes right on through through the screens the only way that you could
yeah
actually live in the in the city is to close your windows and have an air cleaner system right in your home that would take the air from the outside and clean the air before it would get into the house
um-hum
my goodness
and so it was quite a dirty city um if if you were well protected by trees which catch a lot of the pollution
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then you're fine but most of the time in the city you have lots of high rises you have lots of other things that are not
catching the pollution and it's just going for miles and miles and miles and it's landing somewhere with the wind but
um-hum
that's kind of the way Dallas is we're so flat and open and i live in a suburb that doesn't have much vegetation trees it was all cotton fields so
sure
sure
we don't have that advantage and ours i think is primarily cars where we don't carpool like we should
yes yes
an airport i work in a building i'm nineteen floors up and i look out toward DFW International and there's just an awful brown haze all the time
uh-huh
uh-huh
and i can imagine it's even worse for people living over near the airport
oh sure sure yeah it's i mean our air quality um
in the Twin Cities is a lot better than what we've heard about California and maybe in
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the other areas but um they were always talking about the air quality of today is this you know the ozone or whatever and it's kind of scary because the air is something we take for granted
yes
and many people are too busy getting to work not thinking about okay i could have carpooled with a friend even
um-hum
my husband was uh talking to some of the guys at work now he's uh fifteen miles away from work but he was talking wouldn't it be nice to carpool and the guy says well it's too close it wouldn't pay and so
um-hum want to meet my own schedule those are the arguments we hear
yeah and
exactly exactly and so my husband says well that's fine you know it would save quite a bit on the wear and tear on cars and you know the gas
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and no everybody has their preference to drive by themselves or if they do they
they drive with one little buddy uh at least it's with one person but most of the time people are saying forget it i don't want to carpool it's too much of a hassle it's too much involvement but yet
um-hum
but we're paying for it
yes we are and i think of my daughter and i'm sure you think of your children and you kind of say to yourself
what kind of future will they have when they think back and say well my parents did have the choice to kind of make a difference and i think people are trying
um-hum
but they have to change attitudes
and it seems to me that it's already so evident with our children having a lot more respiratory infections than we had growing up
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sure
you can really see it i i had a chance to go to Bolivia a couple years ago and of course there's no industry
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very little trash they they don't even have that much that they burn because they consume everything down to the thread and it amazed me i i just had totally forgotten how blessed
sure
sure
well they
