Breathless - August Edition of D Magazine

By Terri Meza and Faith Chatham - July 20, 2007
The August edition of D Magazine has a great article on air quality in North Texas. The article is titled "Breathless".

Why Our Air is Bad, How We Can Fix It - D Magazine - Thursday, July 19, 2007

Toyin Sosanya will never forget the day her 2-year-old daughter almost suffocated. Little Myra started gasping for no apparent reason. The gasps persisted in the local emergency room, even after the doctors—and Toyin, a pharmacist—suspected asthma and gave Myra a dose of albuterol through an inhaler. No effect. They put the inhaler to her mouth and tried again, then a third time. They continued this as they loaded Myra back in the car and sped to Children’s Medical Center, where doctors, fearing for her life, gave Myra an IV of epinephrine, or adrenaline, which finally returned her breathing to normal.

But soon after, Myra’s twin sister, Tyra, developed asthma. Their older sister, Alexis, then 4, already had it. Toyin missed a lot of work ushering her children between hospital visits, hoping to figure out what caused the attacks. Finally, Toyin got her answer: the doctor said the attacks had to do with Dallas’ poor air quality.

“Maybe you should consider moving out of Texas,” the doctor told her, “somewhere where the air is better.”

Texas is a notoriously filthy state. We emit more carbon dioxide than any other state in the country. In fact, we emit more carbon dioxide, 1.5 trillion pounds a year, than all but six nations in the world.

But ozone is a bigger problem. Cars, trucks, and power plants emit the nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons that become ozone in the atmosphere. Dallas-Fort Worth’s ozone pollution is the seventh worst in the nation, according to the American Lung Association’s 2007 “State of the Air” report—which is worse than we fared in 2006, when Dallas-Fort Worth ranked eighth. Our ozone is worse than cities with larger populations such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Ozone pollution scars the lungs and leaves them susceptible to respiratory infection. Children are particularly vulnerable, especially asthmatic children. This partly explains why Children’s Medical Center Dallas has one of the busiest pediatric emergency rooms in the nation. Its No. 1 cause for admittance is asthma attacks, which have become so frequent that the hospital has an asthma treatment room in the ER. During the summer, when ozone is at its worst, the brightly lit room is strewn with toys and filled with children receiving medicated aerosols through oxygen masks. The Allergy and Immunology Clinic at Children’s fields 60 to 70 requests for new patients a week. And there are nearly 60,000 estimated asthmatic children in Dallas County..continued

I'm the only person in my family who has asthma. I didn't develop it until after I moved back to the DFW area when I was in my forties. This paragraph caught my eye!

...Gauderman and his team found what might be a link between air pollution and new asthma. That is to say, not only does air pollution trigger an attack in a child with asthma, but air pollution may actually cause asthma in a child who didn’t have it. If true, this may explain why some children develop asthma even if no one in their family has it, even though it’s largely considered a hereditary condition.

....
The author points out something that citizens really need to comprehend.

The Bad Guys in This Fight Will Surprise You
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is the environmental agency for the state. It is difficult to imagine another environmental agency that cares less about the environment.

Consider its “smog plan.” Dallas is, as you now know, a dirty place to live. The Environmental Protection Agency knows this and has told TCEQ to find a way to make Dallas cleaner or the EPA will reserve the right to withhold Dallas’ federal transportation dollars come 2010—as much as $400 million. So TCEQ spent the past three years creating a plan, holding meetings to debate the plan, and then tweaking it. The final draft was presented in May.

But the plan as it stands now doesn’t actually get North Texas in compliance with the EPA. It gets us close, and the EPA in similar situations in the past has said close is good enough. But this time, the EPA’s regional director, Richard Greene, sent the state a memo in late May saying he doubted TCEQ’s plan would cut it. He doubted whether it would get federal approval. The reason: TCEQ had failed to consider the impact of all those diesel engines running drilling equipment in the Barnett Shale, the natural gas field that stretches from the Mid Cities to west of Fort Worth. Nevertheless, the three TCEQ commissioners voted to approve the plan, and the commission’s chair, Kathleen Hartnett White, wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News expressing her “confidence” in this “aggressive” policy and its intent to meet federal air standards...

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While visiting D/Magazine we recommend that you review their archive on the Trinity River Project which can be found under "Environment and Development".

Feds plan to boost ozone standards

By SCOTT STREATER - Fort Worth Star-Telgram - Thu, Jun. 21, 2007

The federal government announced Thursday that it plans to significantly strengthen ozone regulations, concluding that the current health-based standard fails to protect the public from the damaging effects of the lung-scarring pollutant.

Regional leaders have warned that a substantially stricter federal ozone standard could force them to take dramatic steps to lower pollution, including adopting restrictions on driving activity in North Texas, as well as placing additional restrictions on industrial operations.

But just how significant those restrictions could be won’t be known until the standard is finalized in March. That’s because the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a range of alternatives, from substantially lowering the acceptable threshold of ozone that’s considered safe to breathe, to only a modest revision of the existing standard.

The EPA will conduct a series of public hearings across the country during the next few months to gather feedback before setting the new standard.

The new standard would not go into effect before June 2010.

The current standard mandates that average daily ozone levels cannot exceed 85 parts per billion over any eight-hour period.

But the agency’s own science advisory committee last year recommended the acceptable threshold for ozone be lowered to no more than 70 parts per billion, arguing that recent studies show the existing standard fails to protect those most sensitive to ozone pollution: children, older adults, people who work outdoors and people with respiratory problems.

The EPA’s proposal calls for lowering the ozone threshold to between 70-75 parts per billion.

"I have concluded that the current standard is insufficient to protect public health,” said EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson during a teleconference early Thursday with reporters. “I do not believe there is scientific evidence for retaining the current standard.”

Last year, air monitors in Dallas-Fort Worth measured ozone concentrations of 70 parts per billion or greater 642 times over 73 days, a review of state ozone data shows.
Setting the standard at 70 parts per billion could reduce exposures that produce health problems nationwide by as much as 90 percent, said Lydia Wegman, director of the EPA’s health and environmental impacts division.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which does not meet the existing ozone standard, regional leaders warn that dramatic new steps may be needed to lower pollution, such as restricting the number of days people could drive their cars, limiting when construction equipment could be operated and possibly shutting down drive-through windows during peak ozone season, state and regional leaders said.
In addition, further steps would need to be taken to lower ozone-forming pollutants from industrial sources, such as local cement kilns as well as power plants in East Texas. Even if dramatic steps are taken locally, however, that might be enough. Steps would have to be taken in other states to lower pollution emissions that blow into North Texas each day and that impact regional air quality. Ozone review

The federal Environmental Protection Agency is under a federal court mandate to review the ozone standard to ensure it adequately protects public health and the environment.
The American Lung Association and other groups threatened to sue the EPA in 2003, saying the ozone standard set in 1997 is no longer sufficient to protect children, older adults, people with respiratory ailments and people who work outside.

To resolve that case, the EPA agreed to review the standard in light of new research that indicates that ozone concentrations can be well below the health-based standard and still trigger asthma attacks and inflame the conditions of those suffering from a host of other respiratory ailments.

What’s next

The EPA will hold a series of public hearings across the country beginning in August to discuss the proposal. The only public hearing in Texas will be Sept. 5 in Houston, which has the state’s most severe ozone problem.

By June 2009, Texas and other states will recommend to the EPA which areas cannot meet the new standard.
The new standard would take effect by June 2010.

Source: Environmental Protection Agency Ground-level ozone

The federal government regulates ozone levels as a health concern.

At high concentrations, ozone can trigger asthma attacks, stunt lung development in children and aggravate bronchitis, emphysema and other respiratory problems.

There are nine counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth nonattainment area: Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Johnson, Kaufman, Parker, Rockwall and Tarrant.

Ozone, the main ingredient in smog, needs lots of sunlight and heat to form. For that reason, ozone season in Dallas-Fort Worth runs from May through October.

Ozone is produced when nitrogen oxides mix with volatile organic compounds. Those come mostly from automobile exhaust and industry smokestacks. Trees also produce the organic compounds as part of photosynthesis.

Source: Environmental Protection Agency
http://www.star-telegram.com/traffic/story/144519.html

Benefits of smog plan aren't so clear

State agency's higher ozone levels make 2006 goal more elusive
By RANDY LEE LOFTIS - The Dallas Morning News - Saturday, June 9, 2007

Sometime between mid-December and late May, the most important environmental effort in North Texas took a turn. As a result, achieving an elusive clean-air goal by late 2009 for a region that is home to 5 million people might be harder.
Changes that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality made to the region's new smog plan from its proposed to its final versions eased pressure on oil and gas companies, electric utilities and cement makers to cut their emissions. Changes to the way local vehicle emissions plans are counted also affected the final version.
Under either version of the plan, local pollution levels still would be significantly lower in 2009 than they are now, since each version orders cuts in the emissions that form lung-scarring ozone, or smog, in the air.
However, the final version, which two of the state agency's three commissioners voted to approve May 23, allows higher ozone levels than the earlier version, triggering concerns among health groups and federal officials. That's because the final plan doesn't require the same deep pollution cuts throughout North and East Texas as the draft – 70 tons per day of reductions in the draft plan, 49 tons per day in the approved version.
In just the nine-county Dallas-Fort Worth area, where emissions have the biggest impact, the local cuts went from 33 tons per day in the draft to 27 tons per day in the final version.
The biggest loss to the plan came when a group of local traffic control measures didn't make their way into the final version. Timing and accounting problems led to that shortfall.
Emissions reduction requirements shrank for engines that run pipeline compressors across East Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth area power plants and Ellis County cement plants. The cement plants, North Texas' biggest industrial polluters, had faced 11 tons per day in reductions under the draft. That reduction dropped to 10.4 tons per day in the final version.
Environmental groups had sought twice as much reduction from cement plants.
In each case, the reduced requirements for cuts by industries came after the affected companies complained that the initially proposed cuts were too expensive or impractical.
The higher emissions translate to higher ozone levels under the final version than under the draft. The draft would have left two of the nine local monitoring stations with higher ozone levels in 2009 than the federal standard, 85 parts per billion. In the final version, that number increases to four.
...However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which must determine whether the plan meets federal requirements, already has signaled concern over the changes. EPA Regional Administrator Richard Greene wrote to the TCEQ on May 23 to say the agency might not be able to approve the revised plan.
The lingering smog problem in Texas has some Dallas-Fort Worth business leaders worried about air pollution's effects on people's health and the region's economy.
"We still need more help," said Garrett Boone, chairman of the Coppell-based the Container Store company and co-founder of Texas Business for Clean Air. "We're really concerned about North Texas. Austin and Waco are probably right on the edge; Austin's probably, I guess, barely in attainment. There's a whole bunch of things that need to be done."
...The average ozone level in North Texas has dropped since the mid-1990s, but it is still too high to meet the federal health standard. In the plan's baseline period, 1999-2001, all nine local monitors were over the federal limit of 85 parts per billion. To meet the federal standard, all monitors must be below the limit.
The worst ozone was in Denton, with a three-year reading of 101.5 parts per billion. Next was Frisco, with 100.3.
Ozone tends to be highest north and northwest of Dallas County because prevailing winds carry the region's emissions in those directions. By midafternoon, when temperatures rise, the sun cooks the emissions into ozone.
Neither the draft nor the final state plan achieves the federal goal outright. Under the draft, the highest ozone level predicted for 2009 is 87.7 ppb in both Denton and Frisco. Under the final plan, the highest levels would be 88.7 ppb in Frisco and 88.6 in Denton.
The final plan also would have two additional monitors higher than the federal limit. ... The EPA's outside science advisors unanimously endorsed a much tougher standard, as low as 70 ppb, citing what they called compelling medical evidence that the current standard doesn't protect people.

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EPA, State Officials Plan Meeting on Clean-Air Plan

By Scott Streater, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas - Saturday, 26 May 2007

May 26--The federal Environmental Protection Agency continues to press the state over last-minute changes that appear to weaken an ozone clean-up for Dallas-Fort Worth.

Top administrators with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality are set to meet next week in Dallas with federal Environmental Protection Agency officials to try and resolve the EPA's concerns that the plan will not bring the Dallas-Fort Worth region into compliance with the ozone standards.

The tension between the two sides is unusual because the state commission and the EPA worked together closely to develop the State Implementation Plan, which outlines exact steps the region must take to meet federal ozone standards by a 2010 deadline.

The state formally approved the plan Wednesday with reduced requirements. Before the vote, EPA Regional Administrator Richard Greene warned state leaders in a memo that the revisions to the plan would make it difficult to win federal approval; the EPA has the ultimate say-so as to whether it is approved.

He said later that he and his staff were "surprised" and "puzzled" by the changes, which were made without informing the EPA.

"They didn't contact us," Greene said. "They just posted it on their Web site and one of our staff members discovered it just a very few days ago."

But Andy Saenz, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in Austin, said state officials did inform the EPA of the changes before they were made.

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