01 · True
The dot is small.
EPA’s picture: a hair about 70 micrometers across, a fine particle at 2.5. Some particles that small can reach deep in the lung, and some may enter the bloodstream. The same drawing fits a grill, a diesel truck, a wood stove, a burn pile, and a wildfire.
02 · True
The stack has a weight.
The August 13, 2026 application lists 207.83 tons a year. Divide by 365 and the average is about 1,138.8 pounds a day, the post’s “about 1,139.” That is a year of exhaust, weighed at the stack.
03 · The leap
Then a diagnosis.
The post quotes EPA on heart attacks, irregular heartbeat, aggravated asthma, and earlier death in people with heart or lung disease. Those lines are about air a person breathes, in micrograms per cubic meter. The post never produces that number for a porch in Cedar Creek.
Put the two true sentences next to the health quotation and the campus looks examined. A medical finding about this site would be a concentration: how many micrograms are in a cubic meter of air where a person breathes. The annual line is 9.0. The 24-hour line is 35.
The application does not contain that measurement for a neighbor. It contains an inventory. The same filing says Bastrop County is attainment or unclassified for these pollutants, and it puts the annual particle total under the 250-ton line for a major Prevention of Significant Deterioration source. PM, PM10, and PM2.5 are the same 207.83 tons, listed three ways because the filing treats the exhaust as fine particles.
Two hundred and eight tons is a real regulatory number. It sits above the 10-ton significance level EPA uses for fine particles. Weight at the stack still leaves the dose unmeasured.
The county’s own year
What the county already puts on the books.
These are EPA’s 2020 totals for Bastrop County, in tons of fine particles. The Pacifico bar is the application’s annual stack total, not a measurement from 2020. Same pollutant. Different years. The inventory describes what the county’s roads, fires, farms, and traffic did. The application describes what the permit lists.
Fine particles, tons in a year
Prescribed fire, 2020
511 tons
Pacifico application
207.8 tons
Farm dust, 2020
201 tons
Unpaved roads, 2020
198 tons
Gas plants already here, 2020
101 tons
Paved-road dust, 2020
85 tons
Wood heat, 2020
25 tons
Commercial cooking, 2020
25 tons
On-road vehicles, 2020
22 tons
EPA 2020 National Emissions Inventory, PM2.5 primary, except the Pacifico bar, which is the August 2026 application. On-road is the vehicles themselves: exhaust, brakes, and tires. Dust kicked up by those miles is the paved and unpaved bars. Bars share one scale.
Dirt and gravel
198 tons
EPA’s 2020 estimate for unpaved-road dust in the county. The county road map labels 118 miles as gravel and 1.5 miles as dirt, and leaves 821 miles with no surface. TxDOT counts 1,015 miles of county roads of every surface. The 198 tons are the inventory, not a sum of the labeled dirt.
A year of burning
511 tons
The county does not publish a tonnage of backyard brush piles. The burning EPA did total for 2020 is prescribed fire, 511.5 tons of fine particles, and agricultural field burning, 7.1 tons. Wood used to heat houses was another 25 tons.
Cars and trucks
22 tons
TxDOT counted 3,802,359 vehicle-miles a day in the county in 2025, about 1.4 billion miles in a year. Trucks were 386,748 of those daily miles. EPA’s 2020 inventory put the fine particles from the vehicles themselves at 22.1 tons. The dust those miles raise is the separate road bars.
Already on the ground
Cedar Creek has burned gas since 2002.
EIA lists about 1,850 megawatts of gas nameplate in Bastrop County: Sim Gideon at 623, Lost Pines 1 at about 609, and Bastrop Energy Center at about 619. LCRA describes Lost Pines output as about 540 megawatts, which still leaves the three plants near 1,780. Bastrop Energy Center is in Cedar Creek and entered service in May 2002.
Those plants have a stack inventory too. The record people actually breathe is the monitor, and the monitor reads micrograms per cubic meter.
The air people breathe
The standard is a concentration.
TCEQ lists Austin-Round Rock as unclassifiable/attainment for the 2012 fine-particle standard of 12.0 micrograms per cubic meter. EPA lowered the annual line to 9.0 in 2024. Travis County’s 2023 monitors were about 9.6 before days the state treats as exceptional events; after those days, TCEQ expected the area-wide monitor to sit at 9.0. The area meets the 24-hour standard of 35. Designations for the new annual line were still open. The gas plants were already running through that record.
When the air was actually full of it, the number was a concentration.
NOAA recorded the Bastrop County Complex at 34,068 acres by the end of September 2011, including the Union Chapel fire. A modeling study of that month put a peak daily average near 252 micrograms per cubic meter, against the 24-hour health line of 35. That is smoke in the air someone could breathe. This page does not convert those acres into tons. Fuel consumed in a crown fire is not the same as a ton of piled brush.
The 2011 fire is the other lesson, and it is not in the 2020 bars. When fine particles filled the county’s air, the record was micrograms in a cubic meter. The hair chart never turns Pacifico’s 207.83 tons into that kind of number, and neither does a year of road dust.