WASHINGTON — Volkswagen's pollution
control chicanery has not just been victimless tinkering, killing
between five and 20 people in the United States annually in recent
years, according to an Associated Press statistical and computer
analysis.
The software that the company
admitted using to get around government emissions limits allowed VWs to
spew enough pollution to cause somewhere between 16 and 94 deaths over
seven years, with the annual count increasing more recently as more of
the diesels were on the road. The total cost has been well over $100
million.
That's just in the United States. It's
likely far deadlier and costlier in Europe, where more VW diesels were
sold, engineers said. Scientists and experts said the death toll in
Europe could be as high as hundreds each year, though they caution that
it is hard to take American health and air quality computer models and
translate them to a more densely populated Europe.
“Statistically, we can't point out who
died because of this policy, but some people have died or likely died
as a result of this,” said Carnegie Mellon University environmental
engineer professor Peter Adams. He calculates the cost of air pollution
with a sophisticated computer model that he and the AP used in its
analysis.
