Experiment in Smog Tank Is Like a Breath of Foul Air

Even on those rare days when the air in the Los Angeles Basin is pristine, some people may still be suffering from a second-stage smog alert--in an 8-foot-by-8-foot room in Westwood.

In an unassuming office on the periphery of the UCLA campus and across from the sprawling National Cemetery, people are hermetically sealed inside a chamber pumped full of enough ozone, sulfur dioxide and other crud to make the lungs scream for mercy.

Dr. Henry Gong Jr., a UCLA professor and respiratory researcher, envisioned and built his “smog chamber” earlier this year to “try to simulate what happens on a typically smoggy day.”

Filtered Air

The chamber, formally called an Environmental Exposure Laboratory, is an airtight cube of Plexiglas and plastic foam insulation fed by a $40,000 air-conditioning system that allows Gong and his two assistants to “dial in” the temperature and humidity. The incoming air is first filtered to a pure state, then mixed with such smog ingredients as ozone, sulfur dioxide or “whatever you like,” Gong said.

He can mix up a stew of pollutants that corresponds with the air during a first-stage or second-stage smog alert. He keeps the artificial smog to a “real-world range,” however, because “we don’t want to overdose anybody.”

Volunteers spend one or two hours in the chamber, alternately resting and exercising on a stationary bike or treadmill.

Other studies have measured and drawn conclusions about the long-term health detriments of smog, but Gong wanted to see what happens to people as soon as they get a hefty dose of pollution, particularly during exertion on a warm day.

Common Experience

The results should sound familiar to anyone who has worked out, or even taken a brisk walk, during a brown-air day.

Most test subjects experience “chest tightness, a little pain on inhalation. (Some get) a dry cough, because ozone is a very strong irritant of the airways. Some people may develop wheezing,” Gong said.

Test subjects have their breathing measured when they emerge from the smog chamber. Gong said most bounce back to normal range within an hour.

Data is still being analyzed from a series of tests on people who also were part of a 10-year study on the long-term effects of smog. The subjects were among 345 adults from the smog-afflicted San Gabriel Valley community of Glendora.

The long-term study found the Glendora group had a faster decline in lung function than a matching group of residents in relatively smog-free Lancaster in the high desert.

Testing Predictions

The whole point of subjecting the same people to the acute effects of smog in the chamber “was to see if we could predict who would have a rapid decline in lung function,” Gong said.

State and federal pollution regulators are funding Gong’s smog chamber studies and he said the results will have far more than academic interest.

By precisely measuring how much smog does how much damage to people’s lungs, Gong provides regulators with the data they need to evaluate the accuracy of current smog-level criteria and whether the threshold for smog alerts should be raised or lowered.

And, he points out, any tinkering with the notion of how much smog is bad smog could have massive implications for industry, transportation and life styles as regulators begin imposing their 20-year Air Quality Management Plan to clean up the air in Southern California, typically the foulest in the nation.