Before I biked to work Wednesday morning, I read this newspaper headline:
“State issues air quality alert for Pittsburgh area.”
I should say I don’t bike to work to save this planet or any other one. I bike because I’d rather visit a proctologist than pay to park.
But when I clicked on a U.S. air map, I saw that Wednesday’s alert was in effect throughout the entire Ohio River Valley. The warning ran clear — or rather clogged — to Missouri. Even so, I mainly wondered why the city I love can still have such horrific air from time to time.
It’s been seven decades since Pittsburgh took major steps to clean up its air, nearly a half-century since the federal Clean Air Act, about three decades since most of the steel mills shut down and, more recently, power plants have switched from coal to cleaner natural gas. Yet the air can still get so foul the elderly, the young and anyone with any kind of respiratory problem is warned not to go outside.
The state Department of Environmental Protection called Wednesday a Code Orange Action Day for the seven-county Pittsburgh region. The alert goes out, and we are encouraged to alter our behavior. We’re supposed to turn up the thermostat on the air conditioner, try to use a car pool and hold off refueling our cars until after dusk.
That’s an alert about as effective as suggesting that America’s Largest Full-Time State Legislature get the annual budget done on time. People are going to fill up if they need gas and turn up the a/c because it’s so danged hot. If they hadn’t set up a car pool before Wednesday, the only pool they’ll want to join when the thermostat nudges 90 is one with chlorine and a life guard.
In other words, by their very nature, these warnings are issued too late to do anything to alter the dire situation. Short of a drive to Somerset — after organizing a car pool — you could not breathe good air before the sun went down.
The good news is that this was the first warning the DEP issued for Pittsburgh this year, and there was also just one last year, on May 25. That said, “it’s really hot” isn’t a satisfying explanation for why we had this action alert, given that it was above 90 degrees from Des Moines to Denver to Dallas on Wednesday and their air was still breathable.
Neil Shader of the DEP said it wasn’t just the heat but the lack of wind Wednesday that hurt Pittsburgh. Ozone production is a photochemical process, and when the sun is allowed to cook vehicle exhaust and power plant emissions all day, the result is dangerous air. It’s exacerbated by what floats into Pittsburgh from power plants and traffic jams farther down the Ohio Valley.
A large area of high pressure across the lower Mississippi River Valley drove the sunny skies and heat into the Ohio Valley and Western Pennsylvanian on Wednesday, Mr. Shader said.
Despite days like that, “the overall air quality is improving,” he said.
It had better be. It was 69 years ago this October that one of the worst air pollution disasters in American history hit this region. Lingering smog in Donora killed 26 people and sickened thousands more in that blue-collar town on the Monongahela.
A Johns Hopkins University study of particulate pollution said almost 10 times that number died annually in the Pittsburgh area from 1987 through 1994 from the inhalation of tiny specks of dust and soot. That study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2000, and federal air quality standards have been strengthened since.
I suppose the good news is that there was a time in Pittsburgh when the air was so bad, a day like Wednesday was more the norm than the exception. But that’s easy for me to say. I don’t have asthma.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill.
First Published: July 20, 2017, 10:15 a.m.
