New Strategies Against an Old Enemy : From Experiments on Human Guinea Pigs in Downey to New Strains of Smog-Resistant Crops, the War on Air Pollution Continues

When a California farmer is forced off his land, it’s usually by circumstances beyond his control. Canceled crop subsidies send some limping to the city; others give up when commodity markets plummet or petroleum prices soar.

Next month, citrus grower Robert M. Howie will deed over his last orange grove and reluctantly retire. In Riverside, where the acreage devoted to citrus is shrinking at an annual rate of 10%, a decision to sell out is not uncommon. But the reason behind Howie’s parting with land that has belonged to his family for over half a century is less obvious.

Howie is a fourth-generation farmer who served 28 years as county agriculture commissioner. His orchard did not fall prey to blight or the banks. It is the victim of agriculture’s most underrated villain--smog.

“Damn it all,” says Howie, turning his back to the whoosh of nearby traffic, “you can’t tangle with automobiles and expect to win. The people in those cars would rather have smog than agriculture. If the choice is between the environment and cars, personal transport always wins.”

Last year, smog cost the American public $2.3 billion in lost crop yield. In Southern California, the annual damage is extensive. Lettuce, endive and spinach no longer can be grown commercially in Los Angeles County. Few orchids can tolerate the air south of Oxnard. In Riverside, once the home of the navel orange, only 2,000 acres of citrus groves remain, and commercial production of alfalfa and turnips is marginal.

Smog no longer stops at the Tehachapi Mountains. Last year in Kern County, 20%--or $61 million worth--of the grape crop was lost, and an acre of land that used to yield three bales of cotton produced only two and a half because of smog generated locally or blown south down the Central Valley from the San Francisco Bay area.

According to Howie, air pollution finally caught up with his 10-acre grove when traffic began to increase on a major road bordering his trees, Van Buren Boulevard, which links March Air Force Base with the Riverside suburb of Arlington. Five years ago, a traffic light was installed 200 yards upwind of his orchard. Since then, his navel orange trees have been blanketed by exhaust from accelerating automobiles.

“After the signal went up, the first four or five rows just stopped producing,” Howie claims. “I hoped that would be the extent of the damage, but now the whole orchard is in decline. My production is down at least 40% because of smog. The 1985 price for navel oranges was the highest ever paid,but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t have enough oranges to sell.”

The consequences of living with smog are not always apparent. Many Southern Californians believe our thick yellow haze is no more than unsightly and occasionally irritating. Others insist, without much proof at present, that every breath of Los Angeles air takes a person one step closer to cancer. The truth is somewhere in between, but one reality is undeniable: Smog is here to stay, and it affects everyone in undesirable ways. The L.A. Basin’s weather and geography may mean that a total victory against smog (and now the latest scourge--acid fog) is all but impossible. Nevertheless, the fight to at least make Southern California vastly more livable goes on, and the regulatory and scientific arsenal against air pollution continues to grow.

The irony of Howie’s plight is that it comes at a time when air quality throughout the Los Angeles Basin is improving. According to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the quasi-autonomous agency that enforces federal emission standards in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, smog levels are down 18% from five years ago. Since 1976 the number of Stage 1 alerts, which signifies an ozone buildup that starts to irritate the respiratory system, has declined 33%.

“We’ve made tremendous progress,” says James Birakos, deputy executive officer of the SCAQMD. “The thousands of complaints about eye irritation we used to receive every summer have literally dropped to zero. Our toughest job is convincing people things have gotten better when they still can’t see across the street.”

Though statistically more pure than before, Los Angeles air can become a chemical gumbo in the months from May to October. Lead and sulfur dioxide have been reduced to safe levels, but the main building blocks of photochemical smog, reactive hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, continue to exceed federal guidelines established under the Clean Air Act of 1970. Spewed forth from factories and freeways, these dregs of the combustion process unite in the atmosphere to make particles that attract moisture and form a cottony haze. In most American cities the haze burns off or blows away. In Los Angeles, where it remains trapped by temperature inversions and mountain terrain, it floats eastward, the batter of an uncooked souffle slowly baking in the warm Pacific sun. By midday, the aerosol haze that blanketed Santa Monica several hours earlier has become ozone, or smog, and is hovering over the civic center.

By 2 p.m. the cloud of noxious air is picking up speed and heading east along the San Bernardino and Pomona freeways. Particulants from refineries in El Segundo and Long Beach have traveled across the basin, lapped at the Chino Hills and are riffling through Santa Ana Canyon toward Riverside. Smog generated by LAX and the Westside freeways seeps through Griffith Park and Chavez Ravine. At Eagle Rock it runs into the San Gabriel foothills, where it parts--some floating past Glendale and Burbank into the San Fernando Valley, the rest heading toward Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley beyond. Ozone shunted westward loses momentum and disperses along the northern rim of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. But the smog that flows east intensifies as it slowly cooks in the sun, eventually forming an amber haze that by 4 p.m. will shroud communities like Azusa, Glendora, Upland and Fontana.

“We have reduced the dimensions of the problem, but L.A. still has some of the worst air in the world,” concedes Arthur Davidson, chief of the SCAQMD’s Air Quality Evaluation Section. “Every gain we achieve is erased by added growth. Perfect air quality just isn’t in the cards for L.A.”

Unable to eliminate the sources of ozone that last year cost cotton growers $54 million in diminished production, plant geneticists in Kern County several years ago began developing a smog-tolerant substitute for the SJ-2 variety of cotton that covers 40% of the county. The new strain, SJ-5, is more tolerant to ozone, but its lower yield almost negates the benefit it was designed to provide. In theory, other smog-resistant cultivars could be produced, but so far there is little enthusiasm in agriculture or academe for expanded genetic research. “It’s hard to get farmers excited about a problem they can’t see,” says Robert Musselman, a research plant physiologist. “We know that ozone reduces the yield of leaf crops, but sometimes the injury is so subtle it’s hard to see the leaf injury.”

Some reseachers oppose the genetic engineering of smog-resistant strains on philosophical grounds, insisting it’s better to eliminate the problem than minimize the damage. “We can’t breed more-resistant people,” says UC Riverside research botanist Patrick Temple. “The goal should be to eliminate pollution, not breed more-resistant varietals.”

Various schemes have been proposed over the years to minimize pollution in Los Angeles. One advocates a switch from gasoline to methanol-powered motor vehicles. This single change in engine design could eliminate more than 300 tons of airborne pollution a day. Unfortunately it would require a massive retooling by Detroit, and it would still depend on catalytic converters.

Some steps toward cleaner air are simply not practical. Controlling urban sprawl by adopting a plan of clustered communities--in which people live near their work--is too late for most of the basin and is unenforceable where it is still possible. Telecommuting, by which employees work at home via computer, would reduce freeway traffic enough to eliminate 144 tons of carbon monoxide from the air per day, but though it is technically feasible, telecommuting is not--and may never be--very popular among the work force.

Staggered commuting hours are one possibility that already has proved successful. Trying to minimize congestion during the 1984 Summer Olympics, many large companies made slight changes in work schedules. The elimination of the morning rush hour resulted in a 12% decline in ozone.

SCAQMD officials believe 76 tons of reactive gases could be eliminated every day from the basin’s atmosphere with the establishment of emission levels for motorcycles, civilian aircraft, trains and construction equipment--all currently unregulated. Twelve tons of pollution each day, for example, are added by gardening equipment such as lawn mowers and leaf blowers. In September, air quality specialists at the SCAQMD will try to bring such equipment under emissions guidelines, but success is doubtful since a previous attempt several years ago failed when hundreds of gardeners protested.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of smog may be that the majority of the 11 million people in the L.A. basin insist it never reaches their neighborhood. Beverly Hills residents routinely believe that smog lies to the east. In Hollywood, smog is “a Valley phenomenon.” Everyone between Sunset and Ventura boulevards seems to believe they live above the smog.

Even scientists who wax eloquent on air-quality trends in the basin stiffen when asked about their hometown pollution. “I would take Riverside over Pasadena any day,” says James Pitts, director of the Statewide Air Pollution Research Center on the UC Riverside campus. “And I personally would rather be in a first-stage ozone alert in Riverside than breathing acid fog near

the beach.”

Because California has no acid rain problem, no one looked for acid fog until the early 1980s, when Los Angeles County firemen noticed brown splotches on tree leaves in the Angeles National Forest. The damage was similar to that caused by ozone, but it occurred in winter when ozone levels are low. What winter air does have is morning fog, so that was where Caltech atmospheric chemist Michael Hoffmann began his investigation.

Before fog can be analyzed, however, it has to be caught. Hoffmann did that by developing a propeller that, when spun at 1,700 revolutions per minute, created enough centrifugal force to push moisture into collection bottles. When Hoffmann analyzed the fog water from the San Gabriel Mountains, it turned out to be 100 times more acidic than acid rain. Back into the field he went to collect more samples, all of which, when analyzed, proved equally depressing. The fog that produces lesions on pine needles in the mountains was mild compared to that along the coast. In Lennox, the ground fog had more acid than vinegar. Corona del Mar was even worse. At a pH level of 2.16, the fog there had more in common with lemon juice than water.

Hoffmann’s findings, published in November, 1982, produced considerable consternation--and a fleeting sense of retribution. For years the Inland Empire had choked on smog blown from the beach. Now, a pestilence almost equal to ozone had come to smite the paint jobs of Westside BMWs.

“So, you want to smell acid fog. OK, I’ll show you acid fog,” Hoffmann says. Opening a refrigerator marked LIVE BACTERIA--FOOD STORAGE RISKY, he reaches through a row of sack lunches and begins pawing through the boxes. “Here it is,” he beams, removing a white bottle from behind a can of Foster’s beer. “We took this sample at Casitas Pass near Santa Barbara. It’s Catalina fog that got blown north.”

The proffered sample, once unscrewed, is something of a disappointment. The fog water within smells like spring rain.

“That’s because it traveled up the coast and not over land,” Hoffmann says. “You could drink that stuff and probably not notice a thing. Wait until you get a whiff of Riverside.”

After rummaging unsuccessfully through the fridge, Hoffmann proceeds to an adjoining lab equipped with a Butcher Boy meat locker. Hoffmann fishes another bottle from a box and passes it under his nose, as though it were a goblet of Beaujolais. “Ah, Bakersfield,” he says, as though no further explanation were necessary. In fact, the acid fog of Bakersfield is rather evocative of the lower San Joaquin Valley, a subtle amalgam of pine and manure spiced with a soupcon of diesel.

“Arrgh, this is Riverside,” Hoffmann says with a wince, displaying a vial of fog water that has a layer of black sediment and the smell of Mephistopheles’ socks. “Aldehydes, carboxylic acid, a variety of organic compounds . . . ,” he says, tolling the list of chemicals inhabiting the bottle. “An ammonium ion, vanadium and ammonia. I’d hate to imagine what would happen to Riverside if the San Bernardino Valley ever lost its sources of ammonia.”

Acid fog is created by smog particles--from power plants and automobiles--that mix with water vapor in a humid atmosphere. The chemicals clinging to the smog particle dissolve, yielding concentrations of sulfate, nitrate and ammonium ions. As more water is absorbed from the late-night air, sulfur dioxide interacts with the hydrogen peroxide to form sulfuric acid. Eventually the droplets form an early morning acid fog. When the sun comes out and the fog water begins to evaporate, the acid concentration increases, burning plant leaves with almost pure sulfuric acid before sending smog particles back into the atmosphere, where they will contribute to the afternoon’s buildup of ozone.

Smog in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino valleys is worse than that along the coast because of all the accumulated pollutants blown east. But fog in those areas, which forms around the same particles of smog, is much less acidic than that found in coastal areas such as Lennox and El Segundo. “Riverside benefits from the ammonia produced by chicken and dairy farms,” says Hoffmann. “Ammonia is the polite term for animal waste and urine from feedlots. As smog blows east from Los Angeles, its acidic elements are partially neutralized by the ammonia from 300,000 dairy cows in the Chino Hills. The Dutch dairy farmers out there moved once before--from Cerritos. Now their Chino property is becoming more valuable, and some are considering moving again.”

UC Riverside plant physiologist David Olszyk has a $145,000 grant from the California Air Resources Board to study the effects of acid fog on certain field crops. Together with research associate Brent Pakemoto, he has constructed plastic bubbles equipped with special devices that envelop crops with varying levels of acidity. “On celery we’re seeing isolated lesions on the leaves and stems,” says Pakemoto. “The damage is less on carrots and onions, which grow underground, and tomatoes seem to be protected by their leaves. Alfalfa leaves turn from gray to white and eventually fall off, making it worthless as animal feed, since all the protein is in the leaves.”

Despite a $30-million annual budget, the SCAQMD, like the Internal Revenue Service, relies largely on voluntary compliance in its enforcement. It has little alternative, since it must monitor more than 60,000 sources of air pollution across the 6,600-square-mile Los Angeles Basin with only 113 field inspectors. The problem is especially acute in the South Bay region, where most of the basin’s oil refineries, electrical power plants and heavy manufacturing is concentrated. The six inspectors assigned to the SCAQMD’s Carson office have 15 communities sprawled across their 500-square-mile area. “Since each inspector has 1,000 companies to monitor, only the largest industries can be checked regularly,” concedes supervising engineering inspector Michael Czap. “Many of the smaller air polluters are identified by citizens who complain.”

“The first time I smelled it was on May 9,” rasps Richard Miller, a 62-year-old loading dock supervisor for Matson Shipping on Terminal Island. “The guard said it was bad cabbage. Seemed like battery acid to me.”

What “it” was nobody knew, but as to the culprit there was no doubt in Miller’s mind. “A Champlin Oil tanker (truck) was doing the dumping,” Miller says, pointing across a desolate stretch of rusting railroad tracks, weeds and cracked asphalt to a neatly plowed field. “It’s all here,” he says, proudly withdrawing from his pocket a tattered spiral binder labeled Diary of Smell. “After I reported the dumping twice to the Harbor Department, I brought my camera and took pictures. I’ve been back to the Harbor Department three times, written the mayor and notified Matson, but nothing’s happened. I even complained to the Champlin driver, but he says he’s been dumping here for 10 years and the stuff don’t stink.”

After carefully rewrapping his snapshots, Miller waves two trucks loaded with containers through the gate and removes his hard hat. “Look, I’m no bitcher,” he says, mopping a sleeve across his forehead. “I worked in an aluminum smelter for five years and never complained when all the fish died because there’s things you have to live with down here. But this stuff is so strong it’s near choking me to death.

“I quit smoking 10 years ago so I could live a bit longer, but recently I’ve been having trouble with my voice. It’s like a popcorn shell is stuck on my vocal cords. The doctor at Kaiser says ‘post-nasal drip’ and just gives me more pills, but I think it’s the smell.”

The trail of the phantom smell ends at a “land farm” less than 300 yards from Miller’s work station.

“Yeah, I know the smell,” admits John Theodosiou, climbing off a tractor in the land farm to restrain a slavering Labrador. “It comes from that stuff they can’t refine. But, hey, don’t worry. Champlin got a permit to plant it here.” From the air, a land farm looks like moist Nebraska loam. At ground level it resembles the mephitic goo from which celluloid monsters in 1950s movies used to emerge. Worthless petroleum byproducts and other chemicals are mixed with water and plowed into the ground. If tilled properly, the land will ingest gunk like a sponge. The goal of every land farmer is never to reap what he sows.

The SCAQMD cites about 200 companies each month for purposely polluting the air. More than half of the violations issued to industries in the San Pedro-Long Beach area lead to criminal prosecution. Few companies, however, find cause to worry. Champlin’s land farm, for example, may emit noxious fumes, but because the company has a permit to plant its waste, the odor cannot be declared a nuisance until at least five other people, and preferably more, join Miller in his complaint.

Though Los Angeles’ emission standards are stringent, the penalties for their violation are not. Because industries rarely are threatened with closure, some large companies view air pollution fines as part of the cost of doing business. In October, 1983, Mobil Oil Corp.’s own inspectors reported that a defective electrostatic precipitator at the company’s Torrance refinery was illegally venting 1 1/2 tons of particulant matter into the air each day. Though the emission was seven times greater than the maximum level allowed, Mobil suppressed the report and continued to refine gasoline for another 11 months until the company was finally forced by the SCAQMD to make the repairs. To shut down for repairs would have cost the company $100,000 a day in lost production. The maximum daily fine for breaking air pollution rules is $1,000.

Regulators believe the embarrassment of public exposure is the greatest deterrent to pollution, but some of the largest polluters are the most image-conscious. Chevron, for example, tells the public in numerous television commercials how its rural exploration and drilling crews dig burrows for foxes and erect platforms for eagles who might otherwise be fried by high-voltage wires. Yet Chevron USA’s El Segundo refinery, according to the SCAQMD, is the largest polluter in the basin. It spews 11,111 tons of chemical and particulant matter into the atmosphere each year.

Why is there a reluctance to let the punishment fit the crime? One factor is an attitude that equates progress only with economic expansion. Another is that the damage caused by smog is difficult to assess. Doctors agree that Stage 1 ozone above 200 (on the Pollutant Standards Index running from 0 to 500) can irritate sinuses and temporarily aggravate the respiratory system. This was established in 1967 by Dr. Paul Wehrle, a Hastings Professor of Pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine who charted the inverse relationship between ozone and athletic performance. Wehrle spent five years observing the San Marino High School track squad. When the air was clean, cross-country runners improved at a steady rate as they progressed through a season of 21 competitive meets. On smoggy days there was no improvement, and many athletes ran slower.

But 19 years and millions of research dollars later, environmental scientists still can’t agree on whether prolonged exposure to ozone causes permanent medical damage. One 1984 study, which has yet to be published, compared 12 groups of Los Angeles children with an equal number from Houston, a city with much cleaner air. Dr. Kaye Kilburn, a USC professor of internal medicine, found that the lungs of the Los Angeles children functioned 5% to 10% less efficiently than those of the children from Houston. “The results can’t be explained except by the hypothesis that chronic air pollution does affect the flow rate and vital capacity of the lungs,” he says. Does growing up amid Stage 1 smog stunt little lungs? Says Kilburn: “My findings suggest that it does.”

In laboratory experiments with rats forced to run on a treadmill while repeatedly exposed to Stage 3 ozone (which Los Angeles has not experienced since 1973), the Air Pollution Health Effects Laboratory at UC Irvine can induce inflammatory lesions that lead to emphysema and chronic bronchitis. “But we can’t prove yet that air pollution produces disease in humans,” says Dr. Timothy Crocker, a member of the laboratory research group and a professor of community and environmental medicine at the UCI College of Medicine. “Nobody knows. Too many confounding influences, like smoking in the home, can skew the findings. Besides, you can’t expose humans to these levels of pollution.”

Behind a pair of locked doors deep within the Medical Science Building at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, a computerized laboratory is set aside for the Environmental Health Service. Staffed largely by USC medical students, the lab quantifies the effects of atmospheric pollution on public health. If the pace of research seems slow, it’s because of the methodology. The subjects on whom this lab experiments are human volunteers.

“Blast it out,” the nurse yells as she scribbles on a clipboard. “Come on, deeper. No! Deeper. Blast it out. That’s right.”

The object of her exhortation is a florid volunteer paid $50 a day to exercise in a pressurized chamber filled with smog, then to exhale into a spirometer that measures the diminished strength and capacity of his lungs. “It takes about a second for a healthy person to exhale 80% of the air in his lungs,” explains Dr. Jack Hackney, a National Academy of Science member in charge of Rancho Los Amigos’ smog research. “Particles in the air can weaken the lungs. We’re trying to find out at what point they deposit in the respiratory system and cause damage.”

After 17 years studying smog, Hackney, who is the first volunteer for every experiment, can also identify communities by smell. Glendora air is “pungent,” he reports. And as for the effect of acid fog on the senses, “Corona del Mar is the world champion, with Long Beach running second.”

For medical researchers frustrated by years of inconclusive ozone experiments, acid fog is like a breath of fresh air. It is the subject of a $130,000 Environmental Health Service study. Three times a week, 24 volunteers spend an hour--including 30 minutes on an exercycle--inside a chamber cooled to 48 degrees and filled with acid fog. During rest intervals they fill out questionnaires while nurses monitor their heartbeat and ready the spirometer.

“I enter the chamber, take two deep breaths and start coughing,” says Terry Brown, an asthmatic 26-year-old Cal State Long Beach computer science major. “The longer I pedal, the harder it is to breathe. By the end of the hour I usually have an attack.”

Southern California long ago lost the battle to keep its urban and rural areas in ecological balance. The main effort now is to minimize existing pollution by “new source review,” a state scheme designed to improve air quality without restricting economic growth. In practice, NSR views the atmosphere above the Los Angeles Basin as a huge inverted bowl. A new or expanded company that wants to emit one ton of particulate matter into the air each day can’t do so until another company closes, or reduces by an equivalent amount the pollution it emits. The formula worked well when it was devised in 1979 because heavy industries, such as steel mills, were moving outside the basin or reducing their output because of overseas competition. After four years of sustained economic growth, however, there are fewer “emission offsets” available.

Though statistics show a gradual improvement in air quality, it is hard to be optimistic about the future. The 11.3 million people now living in the Los Angeles basin will be joined by 3 million more by the year 2000. Even more destructive than the cars each new family will bring is the trash it will produce.

Cities in Southern California traditionally have disposed of garbage in sanitary landfills. Indeed, one of the Westside’s classiest neighborhoods, MountainGate, is built around a trash-filled canyon. But besides being in short supply, landfills today are politically unacceptable. The alternative to burying garbage is to burn it. This, too, is an unattractive prospect, but promoters of incinerators surmounted the difficulty by coming up with the “waste-to-energy” solution, in which a community not only gets rid of garbage but also earns money selling the electricity generated to Southern California Edison.

Thirteen incinerators are already planned for the Los Angeles Basin. Special legislation exempts eight of them from the offset requirement of the new source review rule. Indeed, those producing less than 50 megawatts of electricity won’t even be regulated by the state, a fact that disturbs Arthur Winer, a 44-year-old research chemist at UC Riverside. “This headlong rush to incinerators doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he says. “We’re just transferring a problem from the land to the air. By 1995 these incinerators will be adding an additional 30 tons of NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) alone into the atmosphere each day. Does it make sense to emit additional tons of pollution in a basin that already has the worst air quality in the nation?”

Communities like Azusa, which is downwind from Irwindale, where a huge incinerator is planned, have spoken out against the waste-to-energy proposal. But the main focus of criticism is an incinerator, planned for Rialto, that will burn 27,000 tires a day. The 35 megawatts of electricity the plant is expected to produce will meet the needs of 30,000 households. But the incinerator would also become the basin’s 19th-largest polluter and the major source of sulfur oxides in the San Bernardino Valley.

“Every little community wants to turn a liability like garbage into a revenue-producing asset,” says Winer. “But some of these incinerators will be burning hazardous wastes. Will there be birth defects 20 years from now? Nobody knows. We’re all guinea pigs.”

There are many front lines in the war against smog. One of the more perilous is the port area of Los Angeles, which is patrolled by Michal Haynes, a 29-year-old SCAQMD air pollution engineering inspector. Half of the 110 citations he issued last year resulted in criminal prosecution. “I’m down here by myself, surrounded by longshoremen and truckers,” he says. “Yes, you can say that I have run into some problems.”

Haynes’ immediate problem is a Blue Diamond rock crusher that is turning rubble from a condemned warehouse into rock suitable for concrete. The process spews dust into the air, but it is permitted because it eliminates the need to transport rubble in open trucks to a landfill. But Blue Diamond, Haynes’ investigation has shown, is operating in excess of the eight hours per day its permit allows. Under pressure from Nissan to complete an enormous dockside parking lot, Blue Diamond has been working the crusher two hours overtime.

“Your logs show two hours of repairs on each of the past five days,” Haynes says to the disgruntled foreman, who spits in the dirt and scowls.

“If that’s what the log shows then that’s the way it happened,” he says.

Haynes sighs and issues the violation. Having checked the amount of rock delivered to the contractor, he knows the crew has been working overtime. “We’re running out of land and air, and the only thing these companies down here care about is profit,” says Haynes, climbing into his car and driving out of the Stygian wilderness of whirling dust and fumes. “If some companies have a record of compliance, it’s because we have people monitoring their emissions on nights and weekends. You have to fight for cleaner air.”