No South Bay Alerts Called in Best Smog Season Ever : Pollution: In the last six months, the Los Angeles Basin had the fewest smog alerts since record-keeping began in 1955, air quality officials say.

Clean air is in the eyes--or is it the lungs?--of the beholder.

Air quality officials announced this month that during the six-month smog season that ended Nov. 1, the Los Angeles Basin had the cleanest air they have ever recorded. There were fewer smog alerts in 1990 than in any year since records for Southern California were first kept in 1955.

That trend held true at the South Bay’s lone smog monitoring station in Hawthorne, where there was not a single smog alert in 1990. In fact, the Hawthorne station has reported just six smog alerts in the past 15 years.

Officials at the South Coast Air Quality Management District called the improvements for their jurisdiction--Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties--”mind-boggling” and “dramatic.”

But AQMD officials and health experts also say it is too soon to celebrate a victory over smog. They say ozone levels are still too high in much of the Los Angeles Basin and that reduction of other types of pollutants continues to be problematic.

The Hawthorne smog station, for example, records among the highest levels of two pollutants that come from cars and industry--carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide.

First the good news:

Ozone, the primary component of smog, dropped to new lows in the just completed “smog season.” Smog alerts for the invisible pollutant were called in at least one city on 41 days this year, AQMD records show. That compares to 54 days in 1989 and 77 in 1988.

Air quality officials declare first-stage smog alerts when ozone, the area’s principal pollutant, reaches .20 parts per million. Second-stage smog alerts are declared when ozone reaches .35 parts per million.

Ozone is a “secondary” pollutant that forms in the air when hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides emitted by cars and industry are exposed to sunlight. High pressure holds the pollution close to the ground and prevents it from blowing away. It is worse in inland areas such as the San Gabriel Valley, where temperatures are higher and the air more stagnant.

AQMD officials say ozone has dropped substantially, in large part because of greater controls on car exhausts and industrial emissions. “When you compare it with the past, it’s like night and day,” said Joe Cassmassi, senior meteorologist with the AQMD. “There’s really been a dramatic improvement.”

But Cassmassi also said that most of the improvement in the last year can be attributed to favorable weather conditions. Low pressure systems frequently penetrated the basin, with winds blowing out air that typically stagnates for days.

The favorable weather cannot be counted on to continue, Cassmassi said.

Still, air quality officials agree with the common perception among coastal residents that ocean air blows away most air pollution. Periodic testing has shown low pollution levels near the ocean, although the AQMD has no permanent smog stations on the immediate coast.

The coastal veil of relatively clean air, however, does not extend inland as far as some people think and is not completely pure.

“People who live near the ocean always think, ‘We don’t have a smog problem here,’ ” said John R. Holmes, director of research for the California Air Resources Board. “They don’t usually have an ozone problem, but they do have other pollutants.”

These other compounds are known as “primary” pollutants because they are spewed directly into the air by auto tailpipes and industrial smokestacks.

The Hawthorne AQMD station--three miles inland and just west of the San Diego Freeway--had the highest readings of the industrial pollutant sulfur dioxide in the Los Angeles Basin. The concentration of the pollutant--which can cause coughing and eye, nose and throat irritation--has increased slightly over the last three years, although concentrations are still below the federal safety standard.

Carbon monoxide, which comes mostly from car exhausts, is a greater concern in Hawthorne. There were 25 days in 1989, the most recent year for which data are complete, when the federal standard for the pollutant was exceeded. The standard had been exceeded just 18 times in 1986.

Carbon monoxide limits the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, causing headaches, dizziness and shortness of breath.

“Can you really turn around and tell people the air is improving when you are only talking about one of the constituents, ozone?” said Dr. Russell Sherwin, a professor of pathology at the USC School of Medicine. “We understate, rather than overstate, what the problem is.”

Significant surveys on the impacts of air pollution have not been conducted in the South Bay.

But UCLA researchers have concluded that residents in a Long Beach neighborhood suffered as great a loss of lung function from air pollution as did residents of Glendora, the city with the highest ozone readings in the nation. In the study, residents of Long Beach and Glendora were compared with Lancaster, a control area with relatively cleaner air.

“Young people tend to have an increase in lung function until the age of about 25,” said Roger Detels, the UCLA professor of epidemiology who conducted the study. “But in the polluted areas kids did not have as large an increase as in the control area. And after 25 years of age they had a greater decline in lung function.”

Other research also has documented the health problems caused by air pollution, particularly for children. A USC study, for instance, showed that second graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District had 10% to 15% less lung capacity than a comparable group of children in Houston. And their lung capacity did not increase as much between the second and fifth grades as did the Houston children’s, said Dr. Kaye Kilburn, the USC professor of medicine who directed the study.

And Sherwin, the USC pathology professor, found “notable” lung abnormalities in 80% of 100 Los Angeles-area youths who died in homicides or accidents.

“I think essentially what we have accomplished is to stay in the same place over the last decade,” Kilburn said. “We have absorbed more people and more automobiles and we have managed to not let the air pollution situation get worse.”

The California Air Resources Board is concerned about elevated levels of primary pollutants in southern Los Angeles County, said John R. Holmes, the board’s director of research.

Air board researchers last December and January surveyed thousands of cars and analyzed traffic patterns in Hawthorne and Lynwood, in search of high carbon monoxide emissions.

The investigators theorize that poor residents drive older cars that are not equipped with contemporary emission-control devices. They also suspect that South County neighborhoods suffer because they are crisscrossed by several freeways and because poorly synchronized traffic signals increase stop-and-go driving.

The air board expects to have results from its study early next year, Holmes said.

“The aim is to get some improvement in those areas, to get the numbers back down again,” he said.