Air Apparent : Alpine Boosters Say City’s Smog Title Is One It Hasn’t Earned

Stand here in the East County mountains and take a deep breath.

Smell anything?

If you put faith in figures kept by the county’s Air Pollution Control District, you just inhaled some of the smoggiest air in San Diego County. Statistics for 1988 show that the ozone level surpassed federal standards in this insular mountain community on 34 days--more than any other monitoring location for the APCD.

But, if you are among the 10,000 zealously proud Alpine residents, what you are smelling is nothing less than a bum rap.

The notion of your town as the county’s air pollution capital just doesn’t square with empirical evidence and a local lore steeped in reverence for the healing properties of the mountain air.

“I think, like myself, most people would argue with that and deny it emphatically,” said Doug Birrell, president of the Alpine Kiwanis Club and a clinical psychologist in town. “I don’t think people believe it. I simply don’t think they believe it.”

The subject of ozone has long been a sore one between air pollution officials and Alpine residents, and it has flared once again because the town finds itself in the middle of a growth spurt.

Lynn Eldred, an APCD spokeswoman, said last week that the agency has received complaints from prospective home buyers who say that a few real-estate agents, eager to close a deal, claim that the APCD “lies” on its ozone figures.

Two months ago, Eldred said she even fielded a call from an angry agent. “He called me up and yelled at me and said, ‘You cost me a home sale!’ ” she said.

Most Alpine residents, however, are more restrained and maintain their stoic support of the community despite the most recent statistics showing that it is still the worst in the county for ozone, the pollutant created when hydrocarbon emissions and oxides of nitrogen mix in sunlight.

One reason most Alpine residents scoff at the statistics has to do with the breathtaking views afforded from Alpine’s elevation of 1,900 feet. From some areas in town, the residents can see clear to the ocean--that is, if the grayish brown haze over the El Cajon Valley doesn’t get in the way.

History Linked to Clean Air

“It’s hard to believe that there are pollutants (in Alpine) that you can’t see that are more harmful than the red haze you see down there. It looks like choke city,” said Woodrow W. Downing, chief of the Alpine Fire Protection District.

Another reason is the town’s history, which is intricately linked to the restorative quality of the air.

Local historian Beatrice La Force said that one of the town fathers, an ivory importer named Benjamin Arnold, moved to Alpine because he was able to “breathe the first free breath he had in a long time” when he first visited the spot in 1880 to escape Connecticut and respiratory problems. During World War I, the government sent mustard gas victims to Alpine to recover, and the town became a mecca for tuberculosis patients in the 1950s, she said.

Even today, testimonials to the Alpine air abound.

There’s Doris Fuller, whose daughter escaped the plague of allergies when the family moved here 25 years ago. And Ina Phillips, whose grown son was spared asthma shots when the family moved from La Mesa in 1977.

“He just no longer required the shots,” said Phillips, a real-estate salesperson for Pierce Realty Co. “He had some problems when he had a cold, but he didn’t require the shots after the move.”

Perhaps the biggest reason for the local folks’ disbelief in the ozone readings, however, has to do with where the APCD has put its monitoring station. The nondescript monitoring post sits near a pass in the mountains where trucks and cars strain over the sharp grade of Interstate 8.

Residents have long argued that the monitoring station gives Alpine bad readings because it is so close to the freeway.

“You can sit up on that freeway, and darn near every other truck on that freeway has hot brakes that are overheating,” Downing said.

Added Birrell: “There’s so much traffic that goes through there, the vapors from the exhaust rise on the land on both sides, where the monitoring station is.

“It would really be interesting to see if the readings were different if they placed a portable station throughout Alpine over a period of time,” he said.

That wouldn’t make a difference, Eldred said. The station’s proximity to the freeway does not affect the ozone readings, she said.

“You could take an ozone monitor and put a probe in the tailpipe in a diesel truck as it chugged up the Interstate 8 grade going up to Alpine and you would not register any ozone, because it is a photochemical reaction,” Eldred said. “It needs two hours to be made into ozone.”

Alpine’s problem, she said, comes from everyone else in the county. As they rev their cars and trucks and industrial motors, the exhaust goes into the air and is blown toward the mountains by the ocean breeze.

Meanwhile, exhausts are converted into smog by the sunlight and are trapped at Alpine by an inversion layer of colder air, which hovers between 1,500 and 3,500 feet.

And that, Eldred said, is what the station is measuring.

“The city of Alpine gets the reputation, but the station is representative of the air quality condition in the foothills area.”

Over the past several years, Alpine has led other monitoring stations in El Cajon, Chula Vista, Escondido, downtown San Diego, Oceanside, Kearny Mesa and Del Mar in numbers of days for ozone levels in excess of the federal standard of 12 parts per hundred million.

Alpine registered 33 days in excess of the federal standard in 1985, 27 days in 1986, 25 days in 1987 and 34 days in 1988. That contrasts with 15 days in 1985, 10 in 1986, 7 in 1987 and 7 in 1988 for Oceanside, the station with the next-highest levels of ozone.

Eldred said air officials consider ozone “one of the most dangerous pollutants in terms of health effects.”

Short-term exposure can produce headaches, dizziness and a raspy throat; long-term exposure damages lung tissue, aggravates asthma and other respiratory ailments and compounds heart disease, Eldred said.

The reddish haze that Alpine residents see in the El Cajon Valley below them is caused by another pollutant, nitrogen dioxide, also a byproduct of combustion engines. Though it is visible, it has not been sampled in concentrations high enough to cause health risks, Eldred said.

Some Alpine residents are actually happy to have the APCD pronounce their town an ozone capital or for television weathermen to point out to viewers that the smog was particularly thick in the mountain community. Those people constitute the anti-growth forces, hoping to scare away would-be immigrants with stories of poor air quality, Birrell said.

But most residents, when asked about the smog reputation, become indignant, including Pat Hutchinson, chairwoman of the Alpine Fire Protection District.

“The consensus of people in Alpine is that the only reason we’ve ever had an air pollution problem is that the APCD says there’s one,” Hutchinson said. “As for us physically, we can’t feel it.

“I kind of wish they would leave us alone.”