Fine Weather for a Brown Study

Days as gorgeous as these--a sky scoured clean, mountains so vivid you can count every pine needle--tend to scour our memories clean too, erasing other seasons, other years, when the whole vast valley would sink to the bottom of a bowl of smog soup.

Days as gorgeous as these make the work of the Air Quality Management District seem victorious, or superfluous. Diamond Bar, the AQMD’s command post, one notch away from the buckle on the smog belt, is, for once, gem-bright. The purging wind pulls at the official AQMD banner, a white bird on a field of blue, until it snaps and whips like a locker-room towel.

Caltech gives us quake readings, Caltrans gives us SigAlerts, and the PSI, the pollutants standard index, comes from the AQMD.

Its daily report--”The South Coast Air Quality Management District predicted air quality that will be in the good to moderate range in the South Coast Air Basin tomorrow”--grades the air the way hospitals adjudge their patients’ conditions: good, fair, critical. The AQMD’s scale is good, moderate, unhealthful, very unhealthful--we haven’t had one of those since 1987--and hazardous, which hasn’t happened since a Mustang was still just a horse.

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Across the four counties of the South Coast Air Basin--a lamentable acronym, understandably unused in a culture of PM-10s, TSPs and PPBs--are 28 AQMD monitoring stations.

The busiest of them is the station formerly known as Glendora, re-christened the East San Gabriel Valley monitoring station, after a protest by a council member who did not want her town known as the Smog Capital of the World just because some machine said so.

At 3 o’clock every morning, each of these stations runs a zero-gas through its equipment like a technical reveille. All told, about two dozen devices test different bits of the air, scooping or filtering or sampling. Not every station has every device, but across the SCAB, you check for your carbon monoxide, your nitrous oxide, your sulfur dioxide, your solar radiation, to name a few, and the coefficient of haze, measured on something quite wonderfully named a heffalometer or hephalometer. (The lab manager wasn’t sure of the spelling, but it sounds like a device contrived to count heffalumps from Winnie-the-Pooh.)

Some data get transmitted back to Diamond Bar every minute, some get mailed in every six days--grist for the iron chromatograph, the atomic absorption spectrophotometer. Stainless steel gas canisters that look like Jules Verne diving helmets are ferried in to Diamond Bar from the stations, full of the raw matter for testing some 60 compounds.

Now, this filter--the lab’s senior manager, Rudy W. Eden, pulls one out of its white envelope--this shows what particles filled Diamond Bar’s air on Nov. 5. It looks like dryer lint, gray-brown, opaque. This other filter is Riverside air on Aug. 21. More lint, darker, denser.

Smog is an air stew of mixed ingredients: big chunks, little flakes, broth, steam--stuff you can see, and stuff you can’t. What you can see, the particulates, make great sunsets and lousy breathing. They can be natural, dirt and sea salt, or man-made, like the end-product gunk that chuffs out of car exhausts and trains and planes and even the little trucks that trundle your baggage out to the planes.

Ozone is the invisible stuff that Al Gore keeps going on and on about. Forty-some years ago, the only way the smog boys could measure ozone was by setting a hunk of rubber out on the office windowsill. The more it cracked, the worse the ozone was. The science is more sophisticated now, but when the citizens of SCAB must replace fan belts and windshield wipers with dismaying frequency, it’s ozone that’s to blame.

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Two hundred years before the internal combustion engine, the Gabrielinos were calling this the Valley of Smokes. Into the 1950s, everyone burned his trash in his own backyard incinerator. Until the 1960s, citrus growers set smoky smudge pots among their groves on frosty nights. Still, the smog didn’t go away.

“The science got better,” says Rudy Eden, “so you could understand what was happening. As you understood more, you understood more of the problems.”

There are offices and boardrooms across the SCAB wherein “problems” translates to “rules,” where Washington and Sacramento and Diamond Bar are mentioned in the same breath, an unholy regulatory triumvirate. The AQMD is the Death Star, a smog palace staffed by bureaucrats creating bureaucracy the way sharks exist: eat more or die.

And there are frontyards where folks can go out of a morning and draw in a pretty good chestful of air, or--compared to what it once was--a chestful of pretty good air.

With new federal clean-air rules being floated, these interests--AQMD, business, politics, health--will soon engage in a war whose battle lines are measured not in miles but in microns, over particles smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair.

Where in all that data are the equations of acceptable risks? Where the acceptable costs? Who computes, who can, the differential of devastation, a lost job against a lost lung?