Charlotte’s smog rank improves (Charlotte Observer)
But the city’s levels remain among the nation’s highest, according to the American Lung Association’s list.
Metro Charlotte improved two notches but still ranks among the nation’s handful of smoggiest cities, the American Lung Association said Tuesday in its annual rankings.
The group’s 2010 “State of the Air” report ranks the Charlotte-Gastonia-Salisbury metropolitan area 10th-highest among most ozone-polluted cities. Charlotte ranked eighth last year.
This year’s rankings are based on federally reported pollution data for 2006-08.
The area’s slight improvement reflects cleaner air in the East and Midwest as anti-pollution rules have taken effect over the past decade, the lung association says.
North Carolina’s smog levels reached the lowest point on record last year, the N.C. Division of Air Quality has reported. Electric utilities, prompted by a 2002 state law, have dramatically reduced emissions of smog-forming nitrogen oxides.
Improved rankings by 14 of the 25 smoggiest cities, including Charlotte, “prove with hard data that cleaning up air pollution produces healthier air,” Mary Partridge, the lung association’s national board chair, said in a statement. “However, more needs to be done.”
Despite cleaner power plants and diesel engines, the report said, more than 175 million Americans live where the air is often dangerous to breathe.
Among them, it said, are 56,000 asthmatic children in the Charlotte metropolitan area, which is also home to 75,000 people with chronic bronchitis and 27,000 with emphysema. All three conditions can be aggravated by smog. The estimates are based on federal disease rates and census data.
The report lists Rowan County, downwind of neighboring Charlotte, as the nation’s 17th smoggiest county. Mecklenburg is 22nd. Swain County, on the Tennessee border in the N.C. mountains, is among the most smog-free places, it says.
The Environmental Protection Agency proposed a stricter smog standard in January, just two years after the previous revision. Mecklenburg County is still trying to meet a standard set in 1997.
More than half of North Carolina’s 100 counties, including all of those in the Charlotte region, could fail EPA’s new standard, state officials estimate. Mandatory controls on use of vehicles might be needed to quell Charlotte’s heavy traffic, the city’s major contributor to smog, those officials have said.
The lung association advocates a smog standard of 60 parts per billion, compared with the 75 parts per billion set by the federal government in 2008.
A tougher standard will also make it harder for the Charlotte region to attract new businesses, said David Franchina, a Charlotte lawyer who is chairman of the Regional Air Quality Board. The board collaborates with local governments on a business-oriented smog initiative, Clean Air Works! This year’s campaign began this week.
The program, which involves more than 100 companies in the region, has in the past urged workers to carpool to work and walk to lunch on smoggy days. This year it’s putting new emphasis on workplace changes, such as reduced idling by fleet vehicles, to avoid smog-forming emissions.
Smog rankings “emphasize that the business community needs to be at the table to help fix this,” Franchina said. “All these rankings show that a lot of work remains to be done. Because (regulations are) only going to get worse as time goes by.”
By Bruce Henderson
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Posted: Wednesday, Apr. 28, 2010
