San Joaquin Valley Placed on List of Smoggiest Areas

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday designated California’s San Joaquin Valley as among the nation’s most severely polluted regions for its failure to make substantial progress against smog.

The action comes amid a growing body of evidence that California, once a world leader in the fight against air pollution, is slipping in its efforts to provide healthful air for millions of residents in hazy, rapidly growing inland areas.

Threatened with lawsuits from clean-air advocates, the EPA designated the San Joaquin Valley a “severe” ozone region, a change in status from “serious” that reflects the smog problem as well as the lack of progress in solving it.

The reclassification means that the 25,000-square-mile valley becomes one of the 11 most polluted regions in the nation. Concentrations of ozone and airborne particulate matter from Stockton to Bakersfield rival pollution found in Los Angeles and Houston.

Sequoia National Park, which is immediately downwind of the valley, has the worst smog of any national park; more days of unhealthy ozone were recorded there last year than in Los Angeles and New York City combined.

Although concentrations of ozone, a colorless gas harmful to lung tissue, and airborne particles have declined slightly in the valley, the improvements have fallen far short of federal Clean Air Act goals.

Valley smog exceeded federal health-based standards on 80 days from 1997 to 1999, according to the EPA. Much of the pollution, too, blows into the Mojave Desert, as well as to the Central Coast. But rapid growth, a climate conducive to smog formation and tall mountains all help trap pollutants in the valley.

“Ozone in the valley is a more persistent problem than we imagined, and it’s time for us to work together to fix it,” said Jack Broadbent, the EPA’s director of air programs for the region that includes California.

Environmentalists hailed the decision as an opportunity for the valley to play catch-up in the battle for clean air.

“With this decision, the EPA takes an important step to end its decade-long neglect of the air quality problems in the San Joaquin Valley,” said Bruce Nilles, an attorney for the San Francisco-based Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund.

The new designation signals that additional pollution controls will be necessary in the valley. To attain the health-based ozone standard, smog-forming emissions must be reduced about 30%. Among the likely targets of the controls are farms, vehicles, factories and petroleum operations.

The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District must submit a new anti-smog plan by May 31, one that demonstrates compliance with the federal one-hour ozone standard before 2006. Also, state and local clean-air officials must implement six control measures in the valley’s current anti-smog plan.

The San Francisco Bay Area recently saw unhealthful levels of smog, earlier eliminated, recur in the Livermore area. The state Air Resources Board is to consider a more stringent clean-air plan for the Bay Area at its Nov. 1 meeting.

In the Coachella Valley, officials are losing the fight to control wind-driven dust, which was in check in the early 1990s but has since surged. In the Los Angeles Basin, smog has been in rapid retreat for the last decade, although parts of the area still suffer from the nation’s worst ozone, and smog levels this year showed little improvement over last year.