Delays in Clearing Parks’ Haze Criticized : Environment: Study finds slow progress by EPA in carrying out congressional mandate.

Fifteen years ago, Congress was so shocked by the hazy, dirty air that spoils the beauty of America’s national parks that it mandated a crackdown on pollution sources affecting the parks.

Polluters were to be sought out by the Environmental Protection Agency and made to mend their ways so that future generations could enjoy the scenic treasures of the Yosemite Valley, Grand Canyon, Shenandoah Valley, Great Smoky Mountains, the Acadia region of Maine, and other national parks and wilderness areas.

But a two-year study released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences says that little progress has been made in cleaning up the haze that keeps Americans from fully appreciating the nation’s grandeur.

The long-awaited report paints a gloomy picture of an ineffectual effort by a government hampered by flawed methodology, lack of funding and an agonizingly slow bureaucracy.

“Visibility is quite bad at many of our parks and getting worse,” said Jack Calvert, vice chairman of the Committee on Haze in National Parks and Wilderness Areas. Calvert is senior scientist at the National Center for Atmosphere Research in Boulder, Colo.

EPA spokesman David Ryan said the report, although well-intentioned, gives short shrift to key EPA efforts. Such measures include acid-rain rules that are intended to significantly decrease East Coast pollution by the end of the decade and pollution control measures at the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Ariz., 80 miles from the Grand Canyon visitors’ center.

The report, though, said that the Navajo measures will probably have little impact on the hazy, smoggy, eye-irritating air that mars the Grand Canyon experience for many visitors. The problem at Grand Canyon and other parks, the report said, is that most pollution is blown by the wind from multiple urban and industrial sources hundreds of miles away.

“Even if you were to get rid of the (Navajo) power plant altogether, it would probably only make a difference at the Grand Canyon one or two days a year,” Calvert said.

The report calls for a regional approach to pollution control in which urban centers such as Los Angeles would be targeted. It says that the EPA approach of looking for major polluters such as the Navajo plant is “doomed to failure.” It also recommends increased funding and more aggressive prosecution of pollution cases.

Committee Chairman Robert Duce, dean of the College of Geosciences and Maritime Studies at Texas A&M; University, said the EPA’s attempt to “determine how much a single source contributes to haze is often extremely time consuming, expensive and unlikely to lead to definitive answers.”

The report says haze “reduces contrast, washes out colors and renders distant landscape features indistinct or invisible.” Scenic vistas in western parks that should stretch for 100 miles have been reduced to a half or a third of that distance; in Eastern parks, haze has cut visual range to a fifth of what it would be without pollution.

The report was compiled by a committee organized by the National Research Council, which is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The committee’s research was sponsored by several federal agencies and the Chevron Corp. The report was released simultaneously in Washington and in San Diego, at a meeting of the Grand Canyon Visibility Transport Commission, which was created two years ago by the Western Governors Assn.

The Environmental Defense Fund, a private watchdog group, said the report exposed “15 years of foot-dragging and delay by the EPA.”

The U.S. Park Service, which has no ability to enforce pollution standards, saw the report as aiding its effort to call attention to the plight of the national parks.

“It reaffirms our view that visibility is at the heart of the park and wilderness experience,” spokesman George Berklacy said. “The recommendations we’ve looked at seem very constructive.”