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LA reclaims smog city crown; Move over, Houston: Los Angeles is back

Sunday Herald, The, Nov 4, 2001 by Ros Davidson

IN the land of Mickey Mouse, smog is once again king. For two years Los Angeles has been relegated to second place in the contest to be America's smoggiest city. But it now looks as if Tinseltown will topple Houston on November 30 to regain its embarrassing ranking as the worst place to breathe in the US.

When the Los Angeles "smog season" officially ended on Wednesday, ozone levels had exceeded national standards on a total of 36 days. So far this year, Houston has had 30 days with dangerously high levels of ozone, according to standards set by the Environmental Protection Administration.

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Although Houston's summer smog season lasts for another four weeks, the weather in November is less likely to cause high levels of the colourless gas. "They won again!" jeered Kathy Barton of the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention, or Ghasp. She notes too that Houston has never been worse than LA in terms of the other major contributors to air pollution such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and lead. Texas officials have only just started to address air pollution and thus, they say, Houston should be able to make more progress in the next few years. In contrast California has been fighting smog for years.

"We've still got a few rabbits to pluck out of the hat, but your hat is getting kind of empty," Gene McMullen of the Houston Bureau of Air Quality Control told a Los Angeles newspaper this last week. Ozone, the main ingredient of smog, is a lung-damaging gas that is especially dangerous to children and the elderly. It is formed when volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides from car exhausts and industrial combustion mix with sunlight.

Wind, rain, cloudiness and air pressure are additional factors in making the pungent gas, which causes chest pain, coughing, headaches and eye irritation as well as damage to cells in the lungs. When smog shrouds Los Angeles, America's second-largest city, your eyes smart and your throat hurts. The towering San Gabriel mountains, to the east and inland, are barely visible in the brown murk. The famed Hollywood sign, a few miles north on a hillside overlooking the city, appears smudged.

Only near the Pacific coast, in the suburbs of Santa Monica and Malibu, does the air seem breathable. Pollution in the entire LA region is so bad that Sequoia National Park, 150 miles north of the city, is now smoggier than any other national park. Last year, ozone was unhealthily high in the park, which has more giant sequoia trees than anywhere else, on more days than in Los Angeles and New York combined.

The news that LA is poised to dethrone Houston as America's smog capital came on the same day as the Californian city was shaken by an announcement that terrorists might attack its bridges during rush- hour. On Friday, armed soldiers patrolled bridges a few miles from Disneyland, usually touted as the "happiest place on earth". Houston, the fourth most populous US city, is also a sprawling metropolis where cars are an obsession and public transport is almost non- existent.

Indeed, until recently the damp, semi-tropical city was arguably the most unplanned in the Western world - it had no zoning laws whatsoever. The highest level of ozone recorded so far this year in Houston is 194 parts per billion, the lowest annual high since 1994. Nor has Houston this year had to issue a Code Purple, which is when ozone stays at 120 parts or more per billion for an hour and children and the elderly are advised to stay indoors.

Southern California's fight against ozone was hampered this summer by unusually high temperatures which created a layer of warm air that traps car exhaust and factory emissions dangerously near the ground. Houston, however, had cooler, wetter weather than usual, which helps disperse pollution. Officials in both cities are well aware that smog is dangerous and costly, even if the smog rivalry is often light- hearted.

More than 120 million Americans live with unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to a report issued last month by the US government. Over the past decade, tighter regulations have forced the most polluted cities - Los Angeles, Houston, New York and Atlanta - to reduce air pollution drastically. Even so, air pollution kills from 50,000 to 100,000 Americans yearly and is second only to cigarettes in causing lung disease, according to a 1997 report by the American Lung Association.

That is a higher fatality rate than heart disease, Aids and car accidents. Since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1991, the federal government has required cities to reduce air pollution over the years. If cities do not reduce air pollution fast enough, federal funding for freeway construction is halted. Critics note, though, that many of the dirtiest factories and power plants benefit from industrial exclusions and need not meet the Clean Air Act's standards.

If LA's dirty air were not enough, new research shows that the Santa Monica Bay is one of the most polluted stretches of coastline in America. A study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency found four times as many drains that dump directly into the bay as had previously been mapped. During wet weather, 72% of the drains contain water too polluted with untreated sewage for humans even to touch, according to the study issued in late October by the environmental group Baykeeper.

LA reclaims smog city crown; Move over, Houston: Los Angeles is back

Sunday Herald, The, Nov 4, 2001 by Ros Davidson

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