Jump in ’98 Smog Alerts Dims Odds on Key Goal

With only a year to go, the Los Angeles Basin is lagging far behind official projections that the turn of the century will see the last of smog sieges so severe that people are warned to stay indoors.

The region ends its 1998 smog season this month with a disappointing performance--unable to rival last year’s record-shattering accomplishment, yet not too far off the mark for previous years. On 12 days, smog reached concentrations so unhealthful that children, the elderly and other susceptible people in part of the basin were advised to avoid breathing the air outside. By contrast, there was only a single such full-scale alert last year and seven in 1996.

The air remains much cleaner than when the decade began; the area and the population suffering extreme smog has been shrinking, and the number of Stage 1 alerts has dropped dramatically.

Smoggy Summer

The worst smog in the region has been shifting east, away from the region’s most populated areas. Ironically, those who wanted to breathe cleaner air this year should have spent the summer in the cities, not the mountains.

The hot spot for ozone, the most pervasive ingredient of smog, used to be in the San Gabriel Valley, around Glendora. Now, it has moved to Crestline in the San Bernardino Mountains. Nine of the region’s 12 alert days this year were confined to the sparsely populated mountain towns east of San Bernardino. The metropolitan area recorded only three alerts, all in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. In most of Los Angeles County and in Orange County, there were no alerts. Riverside County and San Bernardino County had one each.

This year’s lackluster outcome is important for at least two reasons. It suggests that the South Coast Air Quality Management District has been overly optimistic, and casts new doubt on whether its projection of ending all alerts and most health advisories in 2000 is realistic.

Also, the 1998 smog season was average in terms of weather conditions conducive to smog. If average weather brought a dozen days of alerts this year, experts ask, what might happen in a year with truly bad smog weather?

By contrast, last year’s excellent performance was the result of unusually favorable weather--El Nino stirred up cool breezes and overcast skies, both of which work against smog formation.

AQMD senior meteorologist Joseph Cassmassi predicts that the Southland “will be close” to finally eliminating smog alerts for all 14 million residents at the end of the century. But he said it could be a bit longer before all summers routinely pass that milestone.

“There is some optimism thrown in there, I’ll be honest with you,” Cassmassi said. “But at all stations, the levels have come down fairly significantly and very rapidly. If we do eliminate Stage 1 episodes by year 2000, it will definitely be a benchmark that was hard-fought.”

Up in the Air

Others now see the target as unreachable by then. “One would question, based on the 1998 air quality, whether it’s really going to happen,” said David Jesson, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air specialist who monitors the AQMD.

Added Linda Waade of the environmental group Coalition for Clean Air: The AQMD “is looking through their rose-colored glasses again; 1998 is a wake-up call.”

The AQMD’s goal for 2000 is purely voluntary. But it is critical that the agency’s projections, based on sophisticated computer modeling, remain on target because they guide efforts to clean the air. The AQMD must, under federal law, ensure that the region will meet national health standards in 2010. If the agency’s projections are too far off, the war against smog, already costly and far-reaching, will have to be amplified.

An enormous challenge still faces the region. Despite a battle waged for half a century, the basin--Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties--continues its reign as the smog capital of the United States.

This summer, ozone levels peaked in the mountains east of San Bernardino at precisely twice the 0.12 parts per million that is deemed safe to breathe,

The AQMD predicted in its 1997 smog plan that in 2000, the maximum concentration of ozone in the region would be around 0.15 parts per million. While that would be above the standard for healthy air, it is well below the 0.20 threshold for a full-scale alert.

But that prediction now seems far off the mark, since there were 45 days this year on which at least one part of the region had ozone concentrations above 0.15.

In fact, 1998 marked the first year since 1988 that smog alerts in the Los Angeles Basin increased--new clean-air records had been set each year for 10 years.

Cloud’s Silver Lining

It wasn’t a bad season by all accounts, because full-scale smog alerts don’t tell the whole story. There were eight fewer health advisories--when susceptible people are urged to avoid exertion--than in 1996, and surprisingly, there were six fewer days exceeding the 0.12 parts per million federal health standard than there were last year.

Still, environmentalists say the outcome for 1998 intensifies their worries that if the anti-smog effort, which has eased in recent years, is not accelerated, the health threat could worsen. Several groups have sued the AQMD and the California Air Resources Board for adopting a state smog plan that scales back many proposals to reduce emissions from businesses.

“We can literally see the progress we’ve made today, and it’s because of rules and regulations adopted five, 10, 15 years ago,” Waade said. “But cleaning the air here in L.A. is like running a marathon. . . . If you don’t build a base of strength and endurance, we’ll hit the wall and just stop. If we stay on track, we’ll finish, and what that means is clean air for the next generation and the generations after that.”

Ozone inflames the lungs, triggering coughing and asthma attacks and reducing lung capacity and causing tightness of the chest. It is formed when gases from a multitude of sources bake under the sun and are trapped near the ground by a strong inversion layer and stagnant air.

The 1998 season started out exemplary, with unseasonal rain in May and cool temperatures through early July. But then Mother Nature made up for it with a vengeance.

On July 16, sweltering, stagnant conditions triggered severe smog, sprawling from the San Gabriel Valley across the San Bernardino Valley and east to the mountains. In fact, smog that day blanketed most of California, all the way up to Sacramento.

Such days of widespread misery, typical through the 1980s, are now infrequent. The July 16 weather conditions ranked in the worst 1% since 1981 in potential for creating smog, Cassmassi said. August also had two extreme smog bouts, but only in the eastern San Gabriel Valley.

“The midsummer smog season was far more potent than average,” Cassmassi said, “but on the whole, you have to say it’s an average year.”

Even though the basin’s population has burgeoned, smog has been in retreat for two decades because of sweeping, costly measures requiring cleaner fuels, vehicles, industrial operations and consumer products. Ten years ago, alerts were called on 77 days; two decades ago, there were alerts on 116 days.

Despite the past successes, the AQMD has come under fire for efforts aimed at the future.

Two years ago, the AQMD staff calculated that unhealthful days could be ended with substantially fewer emission reductions than previously thought. In protest of the new plan, nine of the agency’s scientific advisors resigned, criticizing the modeling behind the projections as flawed.

EPA officials, who are reviewing California’s smog plan, also have called the AQMD’s projections too optimistic, saying they fail to take into account extreme weather.

This year reflects “what most of us assumed we’d see--the [downward] trend would not forever continue because weather changes from year to year,” Jesson said. “That is one of our concerns about the ’97 plan, that it may not have looked at all of the meteorological conditions.”

At the onset of this year, the AQMD predicted that smog would be worse than 1997. But the number of alert days turned out to be higher than in 1996 too.

The culprit could be mid-July’s weather, but it also could have been influenced by a surge in sport-utility vehicles, which put out more exhaust than cars, the higher speed limits on highways and economic growth, Cassmassi said.

“It’s a jump up, there’s no question about it, and we’ll have to take a close look at what actually occurred,” Cassmassi said. “It was a little bit of a return to the mid-1990s and hopefully we’ll see a return to the late 1990s next year.”

Special Delivery

Smog peaks in the eastern part of the basin because pollution coming from one place harms another.

Hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides from vehicles, industry and households concentrated in Los Angeles and Orange County are blown east in a wide band across the San Gabriel and San Bernardino valleys, reacting with sunshine to form ozone.

Experts suspect that it now takes longer for the photochemical reaction to occur because the volume of gases has dropped substantially and they are less reactive, largely because cars have used cleaner-burning gasoline since 1996. As a result, the ozone peaks occur farther east and later in the day than a few years ago.

Last month, the AQMD board authorized a scientific analysis to better explain why the San Bernardino Mountains have become the region’s new hot spot.

Although the smog season runs through Oct. 31, alerts in October are rare. This week brought good to moderate ozone levels throughout the basin.

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Highs and Lows of Smog Days

Days of first-stage smog alerts--when air is deemed very unhealthful--have declined dramatically in the Los Angeles Basin in the past 20 years.

* Stage 1 Alerts

A Stage 1 smog alert is triggered when ozone reaches a “very unhealthful” concentration of 0.20 parts per million. Children, the elderly and people with lung diseases are warned to stay indoors and all others are advised to curtail outdoor activities.

* Smog Alert Days

‘77: 121

‘78: 118

‘79: 120

‘80: 101

‘81: 99

‘82: 63

‘83: 84

‘84: 97

‘85: 83

‘86: 79

‘87: 66

‘88: 77

‘89: 54

‘90: 41

‘91: 47

‘92: 41

‘93: 24

‘94: 23

‘95: 14

‘96: 7

‘97: 1

‘98: 12

Smog Drifts East

The Los Angeles Basin’s smog has shifted east in recent years, leaving the Crestline area of the San Bernardino Mountains with the nation’s worst smog. Previously, the most smog alerts were in the eastern San Gabriel Valley around Glendora.

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Smog Alert Days

San Bernardino Mountains

1978: 73

1988: 38

1998: 10

Eastern San Gabriel Valley

1978: 76

1988: 33

1998: 3

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Days of Stage 1 Alerts

*--*

1978 1988 1998 Central San Bernardino Valley 72 31 1 Metropolitan Riverside 62 16 1 Central Los Angeles 16 2 0 Western San Fernando Valley 16 4 0 Central Orange County 13 3 0

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