SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA'S ENVIRONMENT At the Crossroads : The Air: SIZING UP OUR PROBLEM SKIES : From Santa Barbara to San Diego, there's little refuge to be found. : Living in the Shadow of Smog

L.A. Times Archives

Dec. 10, 1989 12 AM PT

Once she had retired from teaching, nationally ranked runner and triathlete Mary Storey could have started her daily training regimen whenever she wanted. She still rises before the sun and is on the road before rush hour. It’s not a matter of habit, but a matter of smog.

“I’m health-conscious,” the fit 65-year-old Riverside resident explained. “And while I don’t avoid going to the grocery store or anything like that, I definitely don’t do my running during the smoggy hours.”

As much as affluent, industrious, car-crazy Southern Californian life styles have shaped the region’s worst-in-the-nation air pollution problem, so too has smog come to shape the way even the healthiest Southern Californians live.

Athletes at Chaffey College in Alta Loma, near Pomona, receive instructions for training in smog and schedule workouts after the afternoon pollution peak. Bicycle racer Clark Taylor, 41, drives out to the low-ozone Moreno Valley when he leads team trials, but cannot always avoid competing in smog. “It tightens your lungs, burns your throat and makes your eyes water,” he said.

Young couples moving to Sierra Madre and other San Gabriel Valley towns pay premiums for homes above the “smog line.” Others try to outflank the noxious haze by relocating to southern Orange or northern Ventura counties, their long commutes adding to the problem. The desire to dodge smog is powerful enough to support a new service: relocation counseling. Bill Seavey of Pasadena runs one such agency, called Emigrants, and he said that smog ranks alongside crime and traffic as a leading concern of urbanites seeking solace from the city.

There is, in fact, little refuge. Scenic Santa Barbara has warily watched a chronic brown film develop overhead for at least a decade, and the sea breezes that whisk nitrogen dioxide out of Del Mar also waft it down from Los Angeles. Imported pollution plays a role in about two-thirds of the days when San Diego fails to meet federal ozone limits. San Diego, in turn, is the source of ozone over rural Alpine. Southern California smog has even been blamed by the Environmental Protection Agency for smudging summer views in the Grand Canyon, 555 miles away.

“You could completely turn off all of San Diego, and there would still be days when this county violates ozone standards because of L.A.,” said Richard J. Smith of the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District.

Increase in Asthma

The effects are more than aesthetic and athletic. Smog is blamed for a growing asthma problem in children--the number of asthmatic 6- to 11-year-olds jumped 58% in the 1970s and asthma has since become the primary childhood respiratory disease, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. A recent poll of physicians blamed smog for a 23% rise in asthma-related deaths between 1980 and 1985.

Adults also are affected, whether they are indoors or out, exercising or at rest, on the coast or in valleys. Medical literature indicates that 98% of Southern Californians breathe unhealthful air at least some of the time, and the typical Southland resident spends 16 days a year suffering with tight chest, coughing, headache, nausea or sore throat caused by smog. Redlands Mayor Carole Beswick, an AQMD director, said that smog-related increases in emphysema and other lung diseases claim 1,600 lives annually just in the South Coast Air Basin counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside--roughly the same number of people killed in violent crimes in the area in 1988.

As truly awful as the smog is in the South Coast--it violated at least one federal health standard on 199 days in 1987--the air has actually improved in some ways. Anti-smog measures, including mandatory pollution control devices on cars and factories, have cut peak ozone levels by half since the 1955 all-time high of 0.68 parts of ozone per 1 million parts of air. This was achieved even as 6 million more people flooded into the region with their gas-burning cars.

Even so, Southern California ozone levels can still sometimes balloon to a lung-searing, eye-tearing level nearly three times the acceptable federal standard of 0.12 parts per million. That may sound insignificant, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has said ozone destroys lung tissue almost as well as some chemical weapons. Now, with the four South Coast Air Basin counties ready to grow by 37% to 17.5 million people over the next 20 years, there is no room for complacency.

“From everything we can see now, (Southern California) is going to continue to grow in the future, (and) there will be more and more potential sources of air pollution,” said James M. Lents, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District in El Monte.

“If we do not deal with it now,” he warned, “we are going to end up with air quality worse than today’s and the continued hemorrhaging of $9 billion to $20 billion in costs due to air pollution--which includes some severe health effects, even death in some people’s cases--indefinitely into the future.”

Saving those billions of dollars--and extending thousands of lives--won’t come cheaply. Nor will it come without fundamental changes in the way everyone in Southern California lives, works and plays--changes that will in some ways be even more intrusive and expensive than the measures now used by many people to accommodate life in the smoggiest city in America.

Lents’ AQMD has introduced much of Southern California to a smog-free future with the innovative Air Quality Management Plan, a blueprint for blue skies in the capital of brown air. Already being copied by other cities choking on smog and threatened by federal regulators, the air plan details a 120-rule, 20-year timetable for finally dragging the famously recalcitrant South Coast air basin into compliance with the Clean Air Act of 1970.

The plan, which could cost a typical household between $670 and $2,200 each year in higher prices for everything from electricity to paint, is intended to clean up the air pollution problem by the time today’s newborn enters college. By 2007, particulate matter, or soot, should be cut in half, sulfur dioxide by 79%, oxides of nitrogen by 80%, volatile organic compounds by 84%, and harmful carbon monoxide by an astounding 96%. Some improvement should be visible while that newborn is still in grammar school: AQMD planning chief Pat Nemeth boldly promises that average visibility in the South Coast air basin will grow from a hazy 10 miles today to a remarkable 60 miles in just 10 years.

On an individual level, the plan envisions reformulated consumer products--yes, even underarm deodorants and barbecue lighter fluids--and the extinction of gas-powered garden equipment. Only paints without smog-making solvent would be allowed on store shelves. Idling in a fast-food drive-through lane would be as unthinkable as plowing into the restaurant itself.

Housing would blend with commercial and industrial developments, and people would live significantly closer to where they work. Those who could not stroll to work would commute by electric trolley. Driving would be an anti-social last resort, perhaps under the guise of a car pool, and even then would involve cars that sip low-emitting alternative fuels and ride on high-mileage radial tires. Electric cars would be ushered in as soon as they could be made practical--if they can be made practical.

As Draconian as such measures may appear, they pale next to industry’s lot. Even the so-called clean high-tech companies would come in for fundamental changes, often in areas not associated with heavy industrial pollution. Orange County, for example, had 7 million pounds of toxic chemicals released into its air in 1987--a per-capita rate of more than 3 pounds of gases, from suspected carcinogen ethylene oxide to upper-atmosphere-eating Freon.

Oil refineries, a major contributor to Southern California’s economy, might be regulated out of existence--a sore point with oil executives being lobbied to spend big money developing those low-emitting alternative automobile fuels. At the same time, significant emissions reductions would be expected from area utilities--even as they would be asked to gird their grids to power all those new electric trolleys and other smog-free electrical inventions. The California Energy Commission staff estimates that such a wholesale switch to electricity could gulp the combined capacity of 20 nuclear generating stations.

Will it all work? Is it technically, economically and politically feasible?

Many have doubts. The Environmental Protection Agency, which has spent a decade pressuring Southern Californian officials into complying with the Clean Air Act and will have to approve the plan before it is implemented, already is wondering aloud about the wisdom of depending so mightily on mixed-use zoning, electric cars and other innovations still on the drawing board--or waiting to be invented.

Even though power companies, car makers and other special interests already chafe under rules not yet in effect, there may be no halting the new clean-air juggernaut. Local air officials finally enjoy broad support, from Washington to Sacramento and even down to earnest and progressive individual cities such as Irvine, which has banned chlorofluorocarbons and other gases suspected of dissolving the protective high-altitude ozone layer.

Other regulators are still trying to determine just how bad their local air is, and how to improve it. The San Diego County Air Pollution Control District has supplemented its ground-based air monitors with fleets of boats, airplanes and weather balloons in a $1.6-million computerized study to find the best way to meet clean-air standards.

Determining--and implementing--a program to ease smog near San Diego will be no easier or cheaper than it is elsewhere in the region. But smog can no more be shrugged off with a joke. If Southern California wants to continue to reap the fruits of its entrepreneurial and innovative life style, it must be equally entrepreneurial and innovative in cleaning it up.

REPORT CARD

Average score: 6.3

Three views on our progress, rated on a one to 10 scale

* Mark Pisano, Southern California Assn. of Governments : “The (Air Quality Management) Plan is a 10; it’s outstanding. We have a bold strategy, but we have a way to go to show we can accomplish it. . . . There’s a question whether we have the community’s support.” Score: 7

* Charles W. Aarni, Chevron Corp. environmental affairs : “We don’t attain federal standards for four (main categories of) pollutants. . . . I’m not down on the air quality, I just think we have a way to go.” Score: 4

* Bill Sessa, California Air Resources Board : “Los Angeles has the dual distinction of having the worst air pollution in the country and being one of the few areas in the country where the air quality is actually improving.” Score: 8

TURNING POINTS

* April, 1990--Determination by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of whether the Air Quality Management Plan will bring Southern California into compliance with the Clean Air Act; also, submission of the EPA’s own court-ordered plan, which may adopt part of locally written plan.

* Mid-1990--Congressional reauthorization of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which is expected to include sanctions against major urban areas still out of compliance with the act’s antipollution standards. Southern California is the primary target of such sanctions.

* June, 1991--Submission of “fine-tuning” changes in the regional Air Quality Management Plan; these changes, a kind of mid-course correction ordered by the Legislature, will strengthen weak spots and repeal unnecessary or outmoded regulations.

* Fall, 1993--Implementation of state regulation requiring all auto makers to install new, sophisticated on-board computers in all 1994 model-year cars; computers will monitor and adjust pollution-control systems and alert owner to malfunctions.

* January, 2007--Target date for full implementation of Air Quality Management Plan and for the South Coast air basin to fully comply with air-quality standards outlined in the Clean Air Act of 1970. Local smog regulators promise clean, healthful air in Los Angeles by this time.

VOICES

“It’s really terrible because the smog is burning our eyes, and it’s hazy. You get sick out there because of the smoke coming out from the cars. It’s not fun to drive around in Los Angeles with the smog. I drove in New York and there wasn’t that much smog over there.”

--Yellow Cab Co. driver Kayode Adebiyi, age 32

“I remember when you could drive through the Ontario area, your eyes would burn. It would be miserable. We don’t have those kinds of days any more. I think there’s overall improvements (but) the better we make it the more people come into California and we have to be that much stricter to make it even better. It’s a never ending problem.”

--Larry Stiles, 58, section chief in the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s enforcement division office in Colton,

San Bernardino County

AIR QUALITY ALERTS

Chart measures Los Angeles Basin’s air quality against current Environmental Protection Agency standard.

1980 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 167 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 101 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 15

1981 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 180 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 99 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 5

1982 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 149 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 63 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 2

1983 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 152 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 84 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 3

1984 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 173 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 97 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 0

1985 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 158 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 83 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 7

1986 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 164 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 79 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 1

1987 DAYS OVER EPA STANDARD: 160 STAGE 1 ALERT DAYS: 66 STAGE 2 ALERT DAYS: 0