There's Hope in the Air

By GARY POLAKOVIC

Jan. 14, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It is a campaign that has lasted more than 50 years, but Los Angeles can finally claim it is winning the war against smog.

The region’s air quality problems are not over, of course. And the gains that have been made in the last decade could erode with the population growth expected in the decade to come.

But as air quality regulators pore over year-end data for 2000, the figures show that, for the second year in a row, no first-stage ozone alerts were reported anywhere in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino or Riverside counties. Not long ago, such days of extremely unhealthful smog occurred somewhere in the region on one day in three.

Indeed, many of the 16 million people living in the four counties--a large majority of residents of Los Angeles and Orange counties and many in Riverside and San Bernardino counties--today breathe air that meets all national health-based standards in force under the Clean Air Act.

Conditions have improved to the point where, even on bad days, the level of ozone--an invisible gas that is smog’s main ingredient--throughout much of the Southland is no worse than in East Coast cities. Ozone levels in Anaheim stack up favorably with those in Memphis; Azusa, which was the nation’s ozone hot spot a little more than a decade ago, now more closely resembles the suburbs of Atlanta; Burbank is comparable to Pensacola, Fla.

In addition, levels of the substances that create visible smog have been falling as well, though not as dramatically. On more and more days each year, blue hues are returning to skies across the region, pushing aside the big brown cloud as well as the smog stigma that has been a staple of the Southland since the boom years of World War II.

The change is no statistical fluke or succession of Cinderella seasons, either. Rather, the decline in smog is real and dramatic, a hard-won dividend that has improved the quality of life for millions of Californians and made Los Angeles a model and a laboratory for cities around the world choking on dirty air.

Houston has taken the ozone title from Los Angeles--not because its air has gotten much worse, but because it has failed to keep up with Southern California’s improvements. But it is not alone; El Paso, Phoenix and Bakersfield are beginning to challenge Southern California’s ranking as the capital of haze.

Unhealthful levels of ozone persist primarily in the Inland Empire, but the worst of it concentrates on a sparsely populated, pine-covered slope in the San Bernardino Mountains 70 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

“I think it’s amazing we’ve taken such a populated city with such poor meteorology and topography and made the air quality better than it was. It’s a major technological achievement,” said Lynn M. Hildemann, associate chairwoman of Stanford University’s civil and environmental engineering department.

“Smog was so wonderfully thick in Los Angeles that I used to wax rhapsodically with my students over how it was in the old days,” Hildemann said. “Now it’s on the boring side. You just don’t have the smog you used to.”

The progress is all the more striking because it has occurred against a backdrop of surging growth. There are twice as many people and three times as many cars in the four-county Los Angeles region as there were 40 years ago. There are 80% more jobs, and the total number of miles driven by vehicles is double the 1970 level. Yet days of unhealthful air quality have dropped by 75% over the last 15 years, according to government figures.

All of that is the good news. The continued bad news can be seen by anyone who flies into the region’s airports or looks down from Mt. Wilson and sees how much pollution remains. Tiny particles--the dust and soot blown off roads, carried from construction sites and spewed from diesel engines--create the brown pall that is signature Southern California. It is a serious environmental health hazard.

New Breakthroughs Will Be Required

And with growth continuing--6.7 million more people expected in the next two decades--simply keeping pollution at its current level, let alone cleaning up the rest of it, will require billions more dollars, technological breakthroughs and substantial political courage.

Southern California’s clean-air campaign has grown into the world’s most sophisticated and successful. Californians drive the world’s cleanest cars powered by the world’s cleanest fuels, use the world’s cleanest consumer products and have some of the world’s cleanest factories and power plants.

The state is a proving ground for methods that frequently shape amendments to the national Clean Air Act. Experts from Houston, New York City, Japan and Mexico come here to seek advice from leading authorities at Caltech, USC and the UC campuses in Riverside, Irvine, Los Angeles and Davis.

In the last 13 years, an estimated 900 tons daily of hydrocarbon fumes and 4,000 tons daily of carbon monoxide gas have been removed from the air, according to air quality officials. Peak ozone concentrations are down two-thirds.

Mountain ranges have reappeared through haze that once obscured them during summer. In Riverside, which has some of California’s dingiest air, average visibility has improved to nine miles and will probably triple by the end of the decade. Long Beach can expect visibility more typical of less polluted portions of the California coast in the next several years, according to officials.

The Los Angeles region now meets existing national standards for three of the six pollutants targeted in the Clean Air Act: nitrogen dioxide, a brownish gas; sulfur dioxide; and lead. The carbon monoxide standard could be met this year, and the ozone and particulate standards are expected to be met by 2010, officials say.

That task could be substantially complicated, though, by new national standards that the federal Environmental Protection Agency has developed to limit ozone and ultra-small particles.

Existing standards--difficult as they are to meet in Los Angeles--are widely recognized as inadequate to protect health or ensure visibility. The tougher new standards are being challenged in the Supreme Court by industry groups. If the high court allows the new limits to go into effect, Los Angeles-area air quality regulators will have to find ways of reducing nitrogen oxides by an additional 30% to 60% and hydrocarbons by 25%. Officials admit that they do not yet know how to do that.

As always, regulators work against the huge handicaps of the region’s climate and topography. Sunny days, weak winds and tall mountains make Southern California a smog trap. Early explorers called the Los Angeles Basin the “valley of smokes” because of haze from fires made by Indians.

Population Growth Could Undo Progress

But the biggest challenge for the future is posed by population growth, air quality regulators say. More people mean more cars and more pollution from small, household sources. Consumer products spill about 88 tons of smog-forming fumes into the sky daily--three times more than comes from all the region’s oil refineries and gasoline stations. Recreational boats and off-road vehicles release about 200 tons of carbon monoxide daily--as much as all the heavy-duty trucks and buses operating in the region, according to estimates by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

“Any time you have an area that is still really growing, as you do in L.A., you have to be careful that growth doesn’t undo the air quality gains,” said Paulette Middleton, director of the Environment Center for the Rand Corp. and a member of the EPA’s science advisory board. Future strides against smog will require coordinated strategies to deal with matters traditionally tackled in isolation--such as urban development, transportation and environmental protection--she said.

Soot and dust pose a formidable challenge. The Riverside area remains the nation’s haze hot spot, and other eastern valleys downwind of Los Angeles fare little better. Even in 1999, an exceptionally clean year, for example, residents of the San Gabriel Valley still could not see farther than 10 miles on one day out of three.

Scientists understand ozone smog fairly well. By contrast, particle pollution is so poorly understood that experts are only beginning to unravel the complex chemistry behind haze.

What they do know is that particles, many smaller than the diameter of a human hair, are linked to cancer, premature death and loss of lung function in smoggy cities. Diesel-powered engines used at ports, freight terminals, construction sites, airports and farms are big contributors and have not been cleaned up as much as factories and cars. A new national diesel standard that the EPA announced in December would reduce the fuel’s sulfur content by 97% and enable use of add-on controls for diesel engines, but it remains to be seen how aggressively the new Bush administration will enforce the rule.

Political Consensus Helps in Air Campaign

“Fine particle levels have not dropped . . . [as much as] ozone, and that’s emerged as the most serious problem” causing illnesses and premature deaths, said Arthur M. Winer, professor of environmental health sciences at UCLA.

A central reason that California has been able to handle those problems better than other states so far is a broad-based political consensus about clean air. For most of the last two generations, clean air has remained a shared value, regardless of which political party was in power. Poll after poll has shown that Californians support blue skies and are willing to pay more to get them.

They will have to.

The cost to clean the Southland’s sky is expected to run $1.7 billion annually for the next 10 years, the date when all federal air pollution standards are supposed to be met, according to the AQMD.

But even the business community, which bears many of the costs and which, in other states, has fought environmental regulations, has generally accepted the clean air consensus.

“There’s been significant cost borne by industries and consumers, but it probably has been worth it,” said Brian White, director of environmental issues for the California Chamber of Commerce.

“We do believe there are other ways to achieve clean air without having to go through more costly mandates,” he added, citing programs to scrap old cars and voluntary cleanup programs.

As long as the public continues to see improvements in air quality, support for the state’s efforts is likely to continue, says UCLA’s professor Winer.

“The public needs to understand what a tremendous improvement has happened, because it requires social and political will to go the rest of the way,” he said. “People have to understand that if it costs a few hundred dollars more for a catalytic converter on a car, or a few cents more per gallon for gasoline, or the extra costs for consumer products, that it was worthwhile.”

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Bad Air Days

The Southland is experiencing fewer days with unhealthful ozone levels. The highest concentrations are in the Inland Empire and the San Bernardino Mountains, while the urban coastal region now meets all federal standards.

Source: South Coast Air Quality Management District

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Cleaning the Air

It has taken the better part of a century, but Southern California is winning its war against smog. Ozone is in

rapid retreat now...

Note: Figures for the Southern California area are for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside

and San Bernardino counties.

Sources: South Coast Air Quality Management District, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Southern California Assn. of Governments

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Southland Smog Sources

Cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles: 49%

Construction equipment, planes, farm equipment: 20%