By Madeline Detelich
Texans associate a lot of things with our hot summers: swimming holes, trips to the coast, and warm nights spent outside with the fireflies to name a few. Unfortunately for Texans in urban areas, the unstoppable heat also harkens the arrival of ozone season making the outdoors a dangerous place.
Ground-level ozone, or smog, is a pollutant; it is created in the atmosphere when industrial facilities (such as coal plants) and automobile emissions mingle in the presence of sunlight and heat. When breathed in, ozone acts on your respiratory tract similarly to the way UV light acts on your skin—it burns it. Ozone is responsible for an increased frequency of asthma attacks and hospital visits during the summer in urban areas for those with asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases. For healthy individuals, breathing in ozone can lead to irritation, coughing, and decreased lung function.
During ozone season, TCEQ forecasts ozone levels and sends out alerts. Sierra Club also provides mobile air alerts. Ozone season is already off to a roaring start in parts of Texas, and, because smog production and heat are directly related, we can be sure that as temperatures continue to climb, so will ozone levels.
As of July 1, ozone monitors in the Houston area have detected ten separate days on which the average ozone level was 76 ppb or higher. Dallas has had seven of these high ozone days. These two cities are respectively ranked 6 and 8 on the list of cities with the worst ozone pollution in the United States in 2014 according to the American Lung Association. The San Antonio area has had three high ozone days, El Paso has had three, and Longview has had one.
(The technical details: Because ozone is measured in averages over an 8-hour period, peak hourly concentrations will always exceed the reported 8-hour average. There are likely many days that had dangerous peak concentrations that did not get reported as high ozone days. Furthermore, on days that are high ozone days, the peak concentrations are considerably higher than the threshold for adverse effects. You only need to breath the ozone in for a short period of time to feel its effects.)
As reported by the American Lung Association, there is a wide body of scientific evidence to show that ozone can cause harm at levels of 60 ppb and even lower, so these high ozone days are only a part of the pollution picture. Both Houston and Dallas each had 12 days in June that reached at least moderate levels, a range of 60-75 ppb on the air quality index. That means that people living in those areas were exposed to potentially dangerous levels of ozone for almost half of the month—and temperatures haven’t even reached 100 degrees yet!
The current George W. Bush-era ozone standard, put in place against the advice of scientists and experts, is not cutting it and will hopefully be changed later this year. The EPA, drawing from published scientific evidence on human health effects associated with the presence of ozone in the ambient air, is currently proposing to revise the standard to 65-70 ppb.
Ozone pollution is a very serious threat to the health and wellbeing of all Texans. Children, with their developing lung tissue, are especially vulnerable. An unfortunate aspect of the matter is that ozone pollution disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income communities. It is not fair to simply tell these communities to stay inside when the ozone is bad. We need to make sure that the EPA enforces the Clean Air Act and protects all of us from air pollution, and the anticipated new standards are a good step.