September smog violations highest in a decade

By Ty Tagami

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Day after day, the warnings have come: it's going to be smoggy, so keep your kids indoors.

Enlarge photo

AJC file photo To limit exposure, the experts say, it's best to avoid exercise outdoors between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. And to help clean the air, carpool, take the train or find some other way to drive less, the Clean Air Campaign says.

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The unusually hot and dry weather this summer has contributed to a remarkable string of ground-level ozone alerts, and the bad air trend has continued into the early days of fall.

Wednesday was what environmental regulators call a "Code Orange" smog day, meaning the air violated federal standards for ground-level ozone and was unhealthy for children, the elderly and anyone else with sensitive lungs (that's you if you feel chest pain or a burning sensation with each breath).

It was the third such day in a row, noted Brian Carr, spokesman for Atlanta's Clean Air Campaign, an environmental advocacy group.

And those three Code Orange days were part of a streak of nine this month -- the most in a September since 1999 when Atlanta coughed and wheezed through 14 smoggy days, he said.

Not all Code Orange days are equal though: the air is actually cleaner now than it was back then.

That is because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency changed its dirty air classification system two years ago.

The current standard -- 76 parts per billion of smog --  triggers a Code Orange alert at a level when the air would have been considered clean previously, said Susan Zimmer-Dauphinee, a manager with Georgia's air regulatory agency, the Environmental Protection Division.

The old threshold for a Code Oorange day -- 85 parts per billion -- was established in 1997 and lowered in 2008, said Zimmer-Dauphinee, who runs Georgia's Ambient Monitoring Program.

"The air quality is actually better than in 1999," Zimmer-Dauphinee said. "The Code Orange is a lot lower under the new standard."

The standard changed because of new research that showed that pollution levels that were considered safe actually caused harm to some people, especially children.

They breathe more air per pound of body weight than grownups. They also are more active when outdoors, so they breathe faster and more deeply. That means dirty air reaches into more sensitive parts of their still-developing lungs.

Atlanta has had 25 violations of federal air standards so far this year, and today -- Thursday -- is expected to be another.

To limit exposure, the experts say, it's best to avoid exercise outdoors between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. And to help clean the air, carpool, take the train or find some other way to drive less, said Carr of the Clean Air Campaign.

"There has never been a better time to give your car the day off," he wrote in his blog, "as half of all smog-forming emissions in the Atlanta region come from the tailpipes of cars."