Fall Smog Season Opens With Eye-Smarting Stage 1 Alert

A soupy brown haze enveloped much of the Los Angeles Basin on Tuesday, leaving many residents teary-eyed and gasping for breath and forcing schools from Pasadena to Pomona to curtail physical education classes.

The appearance of the ugly nitrogen oxide-laced air marked the beginning of the fall smog season, South Coast Air Quality Mangement District officials said. “The leaves are falling, the pigskin is flying and the nitrogen dioxide is rising,” AQMD spokesman Tom Eichhorn said. “It must be fall.”

For the first time this year in the Los Angeles Basin, the AQMD declared a Stage 1 alert for unhealthy levels of nitrogen dioxide, which comes largely from accumulated tailpipe emissions. AQMD monitoring stations along a 30-mile stretch from downtown Los Angeles to Pomona registered unhealthy levels of the corrosive compound.

With slightly cooler temperatures today, smog conditions are expected to improve, Eichhorn said.

The murky air Tuesday was a sure sign of the changing season, Eichhorn said.

“We’re making the transition from summer ozone smog to fall smog,” he said. “In the fall, there are high concentrations of nitrogen oxides, about three-quarters of it from tailpipe emissions.”

Unhealthy Levels

It was the regional agency’s 56th alert of the year, but the first 55 warned about unhealthy levels of either ozone or carbon dioxide.

Those suffering from its effects variously described the smog as “muck,” “gunk” or “murk.”

“It’s like sticking a mascara brush in your eye,” said Janet Moreillon, who said her eyes were tearing freely as she drove from her home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles to Glendale Tuesday afternoon. “I actually got frightened in the car, the air was so bad.”

Wolf Hofer, a real estate agent who frequently bicycles through his Echo Park neighborhood, said the pollution has been accumulating for several days.

“On Sunday, when I was riding the bike, I started feeling this terrible pressure on my lungs,” he said. “It was as if I had smoked a pack of cigarettes.”

The best view of the smog was from above, said workers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, 5,800 feet above sea level and at least 3,000 feet above the smog.

“Right now, I can see San Clemente Island, over 100 miles south of here,” said Lu Rarogiewicz, a weather observer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, looking down from the peak at midday. “But I can’t see the buildings of downtown Los Angeles.”

City Covered

Rarogiewicz said that he could “just barely” make out parts of Altadena and Pasadena, which are directly below Mt. Wilson.

“The rest of the city is just covered with a layer of muck,” he said. “It’s a sort of light beige.”

By mid-afternoon, as the sunlight began to burn through the haze, the AQMD was issuing Stage 1 alerts in the San Gabriel Valley and the eastern parts of Los Angeles.

“It’s just generally a bad day,” Eichhorn said.

Red flags flew in front of the Pomona public schools, indicating that strenuous outdoor physical activity was to be reduced. In Pasadena, physical education classes were sent indoors. Both districts said that after-school athletic events had been canceled.

“I’ve got people coming in to ask me, ‘Where are we on smog, Mr. Parcell? My eyes are burning,’ ” said Charles Parcell, chief of security for the Pasadena Unified School District. “I say, ‘What your eyes are telling you is true.’ ”

But a spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District said late Tuesday that about 250 schools in the Stage 1 alert areas in the eastern part of the city inexplicably were not notified.

“We never got a call, and we haven’t implemented anything,” spokesman Don Coleman said.

AQMD regulations require that school districts in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties maintain a radio tuned to a special AQMD frequency, which alerts them to unhealthful air quality conditions.

A district spokeswoman said the monitoring equipment had malfunctioned. She said it would be repaired by today.

Extended Periods

Nitrogen oxides are a byproduct of combustion--72% of it from motor vehicle emissions. In the summer, with extended periods of sunlight working on the emissions, Eichhorn said, the nitrogen oxides combine with hydrocarbons to make ozone, which is colorless.

In the fall, when clouds block the sun, he said, the nitrogen oxides, the most corrosive of which is nitrogen dioxide, accumulate and turn into nitrates, which give the air its brownish color.

“That leads to severe visibility degradation,” Eichhorn said. “I was on the Santa Monica Freeway at about 12:30 today (Tuesday), right at the junction of the Harbor Freeway. I couldn’t see downtown. Visibility was less than one mile.”

The nitrogen oxides have been accumulating for several days, Eichhorn said. But because the federal clean air standard for nitrogen oxides is based on a 24-hour average, it was not until Tuesday that the season’s first nitrogen dioxide episode was declared.

Traps Emissions

Carbon dioxide accumulations are characteristic of winter, when cold air keeps the emissions trapped close to the ground, Eichhorn added.

“Unlike nitrogen dioxide or ozone, it’s worse where it originates,” which is largely in the western parts of the city.

For most of those who choked through Tuesday, such distinctions of climatology seemed academic. It was, as Moreillon put it, “gross.”

Times staff writer Larry Stammer contributed to this article.