Air Quality Takes Turn for the Worse in ’98

Air quality in Ventura County took a slight turn for the worse this year as El Nino conditions cleared out and smog-building weather moved in.

By the end of the smog season Saturday, federal standards for ozone will have been exceeded five times, compared with only two violations last year.

Despite the small number of violations, Ventura County still ranks as one of the nation’s most polluted regions.

The Ventura County Air Pollution Control District said Simi Valley retained its dubious distinction as the county’s smog hot spot. Cars, ships and factories cook up emissions on the coast and ocean breezes dump them in inland valleys.

A smog siege the week of July 17 pushed ozone to unhealthful levels three days in Simi Valley, followed by another violation Aug. 29. The highest reading occurred July 17, when ozone concentrations reached 174 parts per billion, 45% higher than the federal limit. That triggered a health advisory alert warning residents that outdoor air was too unsafe for most people to breathe for a prolonged period.

The Ojai area suffered one day of unhealthful smog in April.

Air in the rest of the county, although hazy at times, was within federal limits, according to the district.

Although air quality became slightly worse in 1998, air pollution experts say smog levels are continuing their steady downward trend, both locally and across the state. For example, Ventura County residents endured 55 days of unhealthful smog in 1988.

Everything from cleaner cars, reformulated gasoline and solvents, and more effective emission control equipment was responsible for the improvement in air quality since then.

Further, Ventura County is largely free of other noxious pollutants that plague big cities, including carbon monoxide and haze. Although those pollutants are found in the air, their levels did not exceed federal health standards.

Not even smoke from the 12,000-acre Fillmore fire in October did much to ruin the air. The blaze filled the sky with smoke and ash, but most of it was dispersed by winds, said Doug Tubbs, manager of monitoring and technical services for the district.

“We’ve had five exceedances, which is better than normal, looking at historical years and forgetting about last year,” said Dick Baldwin, executive officer of the district. “We’ve been on a long-term trend toward meeting the federal standard, a continuing downward trend, and that can only be because we’re being successful in our air pollution control program. And all of these gains are against the backdrop of tremendous population growth that we’ve been experiencing in Ventura County.”

Weather strongly influences smog. Indeed, California’s sunny climate, tall mountains and deep valleys create conditions ideal for photochemical smog. The storms, winds and generally unstable weather brought by El Nino in 1997 prevented pollution from forming, causing ozone levels to plummet to record lows.

Those conditions helped 1998 get off to a good start, too, but by June, as El Nino retreated, classic smog-building conditions returned, pushing ozone to more typical levels in the latter half of 1998, said Kent Field, meteorologist at the district.

The silver lining to the smog cloud was that air quality actually showed improvement in 1998 when compared with ozone standards imposed by the state.

California law requires that ozone not exceed 90 parts of pollution per billion parts of air in any given hour throughout the year, a more stringent limit than the federal standard. In 1998, pollution levels exceeded the state standard on 27% fewer occasions than in the previous year.

That good news must be taken with a grain of salt. Ventura County violated the California ozone standard 39 times, an average of once every 4 1/2 days during the summer smog season, which began May 1.

But attaining federal standards is more urgent because failure to meet deadlines could result in sanctions against the state, including withholding federal highway funds.

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Indeed, just meeting the more lenient federal standards is proving to be a daunting task in California. Attaining the state’s ozone standard would protect more people from smog’s harmful effects, but it is so far out of reach for California cities that air quality officials haven’t begun to formulate strategies for reaching it.

Despite its breezy beach weather and blue-sky reputation, Ventura County is one of the nation’s smoggiest metropolitan areas, according to the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Between 1995 and 1997, the most recent years for which data are available to make national comparisons, Ventura County experienced 41 violations of federal health standards for ozone, third most in the United States. Ventura County ozone is comparable to New York City and worse than Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, D. C. Only the Los Angeles Basin and Houston have dirtier air, according to EPA records.

Smog in Ventura County is not expected to meet federal health limits until 2005, the deadline established under 1990 Clean Air Act amendments for “severe” polluted areas.

“This was a bad year. It’s totally unacceptable,” said Mike Stubblefield, an auto mechanic instructor at Oxnard College and air quality spokesman for the Los Padres chapter of the Sierra Club. “It makes me wonder if in Washington and Sacramento they are really serious about cleaning up the air.”

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The Ventura County smog-control agency board approved one smog-cutting measure in 1998, the only one called for this year in its master clean-air plan. Approved in March, the measure requires oil and natural gas operations to improve inspection and maintenance of valves, flanges and pipes, which sometimes leak smog-forming fumes.

The measure is expected to trim hydrocarbon emissions by one-quarter of a ton daily, which is about 5% of the total emissions from the petroleum industry in Ventura County, said Mike Villegas, manager of the rules division for the district.

More anti-smog measures are planned for next year, Villegas said.

In September, the district’s governing board will consider a rule to reduce nitrogen dioxide emissions from commercial water heaters. Three months later, it is scheduled to consider two measures, one to cut smog-forming chemicals in solvents used by manufacturers of electronic components, the other to require low-polluting paints.

However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to extract emissions reductions from businesses, factories and households, air quality officials say. Those “stationary sources” have been targeted for decades, and while there is still room for cleanup, reductions are becoming more costly and politically difficult as the government presses companies to trim ever smaller quantities of emissions.

Each day, people, vehicles, farms and factories spew an average of 680 tons of chemicals, smoke and dust into the air over Ventura County. Most of it is untreated. And much of it contains substances capable of causing cancer and neurological damage.

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Among the biggest polluters are vehicles, which produce 53% of the gases that mix with sunshine to form ozone; roads and freeways, which kick up grit ranging from brake lining bits to oil droplets to radial tire fragments that comprise nearly two-thirds of the haze in the air; offshore oil operations, which emit nearly half the sulfur-based gases that contribute to airborne haze and acid deposition, and pesticide use on farms, which accounts for 15% of the hydrocarbons released to the air, according to district estimates.

Smog is a chemical soup made up of thousands of substances constantly changing and recombining in the presence of sunlight to make new pollutants. Ozone is one of the most intractable pollutants, affecting 117 million Americans. Even at low concentrations, it causes shortness of breath, chest pain and nausea, and long-term exposure can lead to permanent loss of lung function.

Meanwhile, microscopic particles, which turn the sky dusky gray, ride on a breath into the deepest recesses of the human lung, where they can lodge--causing disease and leading to shortened life spans, medical studies show.

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Smog Sources and Smog Makers

Smog is chemical soup, made up of ingredients from sources ranging from cars to paint to deodorant. Ozone-forming fumes originate from the following sources in Ventura County:

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On-road vehicles: 41%

Solvent Use: 24%

Pesticides Application: 18%

Petroleum Industry: 9%

Other Motor Vehicles: 6%

OCS*: 2%

Other: 3%

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*NOTE: The term OCS, stands for “outer continental shelf,” which refers to “offshore drilling operations.”

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Source: Ventura County Air Pollution Control District