Smog in L.A. Goes From Worse to Bad : Environment: Signs of 50% improvement are hard to distinguish amid a summer day’s pollution.

Michael Turner-Ortega’s lungs let him know Friday when he hit L.A. The jogger, who is on a consciousness-raising run from San Francisco to Mexico City, seemed to slow his pace, his eyes burned and his chest constricted with a jab not unlike the pain in his legs.

The evidence is incontrovertible that air pollution levels in Los Angeles, the nation’s smoggiest city, are dramatically better than a decade ago. But on summer days such as these one would be hard pressed to tell it.

Children in a Pasadena preschool are holed up inside, playing with cornmeal to avoid overexertion. Tourists at the Griffith Park Observatory are heard to remark “I’ve seen it on TV” when they gawk at the stained horizon. One resident said he gave up outdoor swimming after going 3,200 yards at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center, only to conclude: “This is the first time in eight years I’ve felt worse after exercising.”

Recent studies show that air pollution in much of Southern California has dropped 50% over the last 10 years. Peak levels are significantly less dangerous than before. And the smog that choked the city in the 1950s was three times worse than today’s, the California Air Resources Board reports.

It takes as many as 15 cars to pollute as much as a single car did 15 years ago, said Air Resources Board spokesman Bill Sessa. Smog was so bad in 1947 that the government actually did something about it, banning back-yard garbage incinerators. The annual dose of smog Los Angeles residents breathe yearly is half of what it was 10 years ago. Officials put smog levels all week at “good to moderate,” and they consider this summer’s smog mild on the whole.

But as the mountains disappeared and the skyline faded Friday, it seemed less appropriate to celebrate the progress than to ponder how the city ever survived anything worse.

“I was born and raised here. In the ‘50s and ‘60s I would come home choking, my eyes burning. That’s not the case anymore, although it looks as disgusting as it ever did,” said Jim Yeager, director of public relations for Universal Studios Hollywood, where attendance never suffers from the smog.

A recent USC study found that children in Southern California had 6% to 17% less breathing capacity than those in Houston, the smoggiest city in Texas. Air pollution authorities claim that youngsters exposed to high levels of air pollution are more likely to contract respiratory infections. Infants breathe three times as much air per pound of body weight as adults, and they tend to breathe faster and through the mouth, bypassing the nose’s filtering action to carry pollution directly into the lungs, experts say.

So every summer morning, before anything else, Bobbie Edwards checks the smog reading at Caltech’s Child Educational Center, where she is assistant director. The mountains are half a mile away, but Friday, the children could hardly see them. The air conditioners in the infant and toddler classrooms are turned on less to cool the air than to clean it, she said.

“In the kids with respiratory problems, we see difficulty breathing, the strong inhale-exhale. We see teary eyes sometimes,” she said. “The other kids slow down. Their bodies seem to tell them it isn’t good to be too active.”

Adults who grew up here remember a clenching in the lungs at the end of a school day, going to bed on a summer night with a wheeze in the chest. Somewhere along the way, they say, those things passed. But air pollution experts warn Los Angeles’ air remains far from healthful.

“There is absolutely no doubt L.A. has the worst smog problem in the country. And there is absolutely no doubt it is significantly better that 15 years ago, dramatically better than 40 years ago,” Sessa said. “We’re pleased with the progress, but we’re not satisfied.”