It wasn't a great day for people who are worried about the health risks of air pollution.

First, the Allegheny County Board of Health indefinitely tabled a new policy on airborne toxic chemicals yesterday, despite strong support for the measure by several local governments and community groups.

And then, Ronald Vorhees, chief of epidemiology at the Health Department, noted that a recent Environmental Protection Agency report on local cancer risks from air pollution was not nearly as scary as it initially might have seemed.

The report last week said the residents of Clairton and Glassport, both within range of the U.S. Steel's Clairton Coke Works, faced a cancer risk that was 20 times higher than the national average, and registered the third and fourth highest cancer risks from air pollution in the nation.

But Dr. Vorhees noted that because the EPA was talking about lifetime exposure, the overall risk for cancer from air pollution in Allegheny County is a little more than one extra cancer case per year, or about one-hundredth of a percent of all cancer cases annually.

His report did not directly influence the debate on the air toxics policy, which was strongly supported by about 30 visitors to the meeting, 14 of whom addressed the board.

The board's current policy on air pollutants has not been updated in 21 years. The policy is used by the county to approve pollution permits for industries.

Despite the urging of several speakers to approve a new policy, board member and County Manager James Flynn Jr. raised concerns about the impact the new rules could have on local industry, and then proposed tabling them until the state Department of Environmental Protection develops its own new statewide pollution rules, a process that could take two years or more.

The board approved the motion, with a lone dissenting vote from Dr. Donald Burke, dean of the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health.

The vote provoked an angry reaction from the audience.

"You are not the Board of Health," shouted Janet Strahosky of Avalon, who had complained earlier about pollution from the industries on Neville Island. "You are the board of industry. If we had a level playing field, we would not be here today."

"The rest of Pennsylvania doesn't have the same problems we do," added Ben Avon resident Carolyn Andrews, who also had spoken out against Neville Island polluters. "We shouldn't be operating under [the state's] guidelines. We're the ones with the cancer, not them."

While the EPA report had singled out Clairton and Glassport as trouble spots, Dr. Vorhees noted that the Neville Island area was another hot spot in the county, and most of those endorsing the new policy were from towns surrounding that site.

One of them brought a special expertise to her remarks.

Dr. Lara Kunschner of Ben Avon, a brain cancer specialist, said there are about 17,000 new cases of brain cancer in the entire United States each year, and "this past year, I treated 10 patients who are within 15 miles of where I live. I think if we all do a little bit of simple math we can see that is vastly too many -- it's obscene really.

"We have an opportunity to do something about the air quality in our county," she said. "It makes all the sense in the world to take preventative measures and do what we can, and clearly we are impacted by carcinogens that are affecting us on a day-to-day basis."

The policy's supporters were especially upset by the board's action because they considered the policy a modest measure that would only have applied to permits for new facilities or major expansions in new airborne pollutants.

Still, several board members expressed concerns about whether the policy would hurt local industries.

William Youngblood, a board member and executive director of the McCandless Township Sanitary Authority, expressed concern that the new rules might motivate industries and jobs to move outside the county.

"You could have the cleanest air in the world," Mr. Youngblood said, "but if there's nobody there to breathe it, what good is it going to do you?"

After the vote, Pitt's Dr. Burke said he would rather have found a way to tinker with parts of the policy to allow some extra pollution, if the circumstances warranted, rather than setting aside the whole document.

"I wish the board would have taken some action, but instead, they just said 'We'll wait until the state decides what it wants to do,' and that could be years," complained Tom Hoffman, Western Pennsylvania director of Clean Water Action. "I'm just really disappointed in the lack of leadership."