American Dream

Our air really not all that bad

By J.J. Ebro
07/26/2005

Quotes:

Hot summer days trigger such concerns about the air we breathe that air-quality forecasts are as much an ingredient in weather reports as Doppler radar images.

In the Loudoun County government building lobby, a traffic light-type device indicates how safe outside air is to breathe. Green is good, yellow is moderate, orange is unhealthy for sensitive groups and red is unhealthy.

On Tuesday, when the high temperature in Leesburg was 102 degrees at 4 p.m., the air-quality map was green, meaning the air was hot but good.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic for most of the day sent ozone spewing into the atmosphere. Compounding that is an invasion of
industrial pollutants riding the wind from areas to our west.

Ground level ozone occurs when strong sunlight creates
chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds.

But there's a flip side: Our air is getting less bad.

Loudoun is making an effort to further reduce pollution.

But there's not a whole lot Loudoun can do about the "other" dirty air culprit: industrial pollution.

Northern Virginia doesn’t have much heavy industry. But, Salkovitz said, the wind carries in "industrial pollution from hundreds of miles away from areas like the Ohio River Valley, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania over to our area.” He said, research is ongoing to determine “how to break down what is coming over as opposed to what we are generating.”

The EPA’s time-lapse map of the mid-Atlantic region backs Salkovitz. It starts the day out showing all green zones, denoting healthy air and low ozone concentrations. As the day progresses, yellow areas begin to appear in the areas the meteorologist identified, as well as along the Delaware-Maryland corridor. By mid- to late-afternoon, orange spots start growing in the yellow areas and begin to enlarge. As evening and nightfall set in, everything reverts to green.