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The American Lung Association has released its 27th State of the Air report on air pollution Wednesday and awarded grades for metro areas across the country. West Virginia isn’t perfect, but it is surprisingly good. No one in the state lives in a county with a failing grade. The Charleston-Huntington metro area got all As.
Key takeaways — as well as the full report — can be found at the bottom of this story.
News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Kevin Stewart, director of Environmental Health for the American Lung Association, about the report and what it all means.
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: The report talks about ground level ozone versus particle pollution, and then year-round particle pollution. Explain what the distinctions are.
Stewart: There’s two kinds of air pollution, and then there’s one that we have two measures for. Ozone-smog. Ozone is a type of oxygen. It has three atoms in a molecule, instead of the regular two. Ozone up high in the stratosphere is a good thing. It protects us from the ultraviolet light from the sun. So “good up high,” but it’s a powerful respiratory irritant. So we also say “bad nearby.” We don’t want to be breathing this stuff. It causes inflammation in the lungs that some have likened to a sunburn to the lungs. Ozone is not produced directly from smokestacks and tailpipes. There are chemicals that go into the air, nitrogen oxide, which is a compound that is formed from burning things, fossil fuels. Uncontrolled burning will create nitrogen oxides, and then also volatile organic compounds, which are a whole raft of different chemicals that are emitted that contain carbon, but they also are chemicals that with the nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere, will react to change some of the oxygen in the air into ozone.
We have a good report for Charleston. All the counties in the metro area that have any measurements for ozone smog did not find any bad air days during the three years that we look at in this year’s report.
The other measure that we’re talking about is fine particle pollution. Now it’s not a single chemical like ozone, it’s a complex mixture. It’s sometimes called soot pollution, because soot from burning things incompletely is part of it, but it can also include other things, material from agricultural operations, even ammonia from agriculture, can react in the atmosphere to make some salts that are part of the fine particles; metal fumes.
We’re mostly concerned about the types that are very, very small, that are smaller than two-and-a-half microns. And that means, if you take a human hair and you line 30 particles up, you can cross the diameter of a human hair. That’s the largest particle that we’re concerned about. The smallest ones are even tinier. They can get into the deepest parts of the lungs, cross into the bloodstream. And where we’re concerned about that is [these are] really bad for people with heart disease. It can cause heart attacks and strokes and things like that.
Fine particles are measured two ways. One of them is a 24-hour average. And there’s a standard in place, the National Ambient Air Quality Standard. We know that the worst county in the Charleston metro area got a D grade, and so that’s not something that we want to see.
And then the other measure is year-round particle pollution. So we’ll look at the year-round average, and there’s another standard that EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency] has for that, and then we’ll see whether we are above the standard or whether we’re meeting it.
Douglas: You rated the Charleston-Huntington metro area, then you also looked at the Morgantown and Wheeling areas.
Stewart: West Virginia is all these different places, so you’ve got your different metro areas. Washington, Pittsburgh, and you do have counties in those areas. In general, the West Virginia counties are not the big hot spots for air pollution, but at the same time, we wanted people who live in the state to see what they’re getting in these other places where West Virginians do live and sometimes do work and do travel.
You can have a place like Morgantown, where the air quality is really quite good, you’re getting B grades and passing grades for the year-round measure. That’s a reasonably good report card. At the same time, we know that even one bad air day can be one bad air day too many for a person who’s in one of the high risk, or at risk groups. At the same time, if it’s only an odd day out of a three-year period, that’s pretty good performance, and we’re glad to report that. Wheeling got C grades again and passing for the year-round measure.
If you take a look at trends in the past, you can certainly see that there’s been definitely improvement there as well, especially a place that has an industrial history, used to have worse air pollution than it does now. The Pittsburgh metro area gets straight F grades, for example.
Douglas: It sounds like overall, West Virginia’s got a pretty good grade when taken as a whole. There are some areas that aren’t perfect, but overall, we’re doing fairly well. What can the state do, though, to improve on that?
Stewart: This does come down a little bit to understanding what is actually causing the air pollution problems that you’re observing and that means going on a day-by-day basis.
There were so many bad air days in a certain county and a certain three-year period. When did those days occur? What was going on at that time? Smoke from the wildfires in Canada. There’s not a whole lot you can do other than pay attention, make sure that you’re protecting your family. Not using that time to be exercising heavily, strenuously outside when the air pollution is obviously in the air, but at the same time, recognize there are things that happen locally. To whatever extent there are industrial sources, or there are vehicles that create more pollution than others.
When you’re detecting an odor, there’s a good chance what you’re breathing in a volatile organic compound that also helps to create ozone. Or when you see smoke, you’re creating fine particle pollution, and the question then is to what extent can some of those sources do better to be better neighbors? What kind of incentives can be put in place to do this at the same time?
Everyone’s job is to prevent forest fires, and that’s certainly an obvious danger to human life and property and the forest itself, but it also helps reduce air pollution when you are taking proper precautions that you’re not throwing away a cigarette butt into dry tinder, or you’re not doing open burning that gets out of hand. Even simple activities such as maintaining your engines, tuning up cars, making sure your lawnmower isn’t a smoky thing. Watching your thermostat so that you’re not unnecessarily heating or cooling your house.
We encourage local governments to encourage good activities that will help reward people for their activities. You don’t always have to, in some areas, be driving your car a couple blocks to go on an errand. You can walk, you can bike, you can use mass transit in some areas.
Small changes can make a difference. When people realize that there is some value in collective work, it also helps establish a community attitude that we can control air pollution and everyone has their own responsibility.
Douglas: The report mentions EPA rollbacks. Put those in context for me. Give me an example of the EPA rollbacks that affect what we’re talking about.
Stewart: There recently was a strengthening of the year-round particle pollution standard from 12 micrograms to nine micrograms per cubic meter. And lots of places, including many places in West Virginia, do meet that standard already. It’s not an unattainable standard. There is a concern that the EPA is ignoring the implementation deadlines for the current particle pollution standard, even though the law says at a certain point in time after the standard is put in place. By ignoring implementation deadlines, it’s sending a message that this isn’t important.
The fact is that we do know that fine particle pollution levels exceeding nine micrograms per cubic meter does cause people to experience adverse health outcomes. It can cause people to have problems breathing. It can cause people to have heart attacks and go to hospitals and die even so.
It may not be something that you’re going to obviously see. It’s not like there’s going to be a big, dark cloud of smoke and a bunch of people having problems breathing or having heart attacks under it that you can point to, but the problem is that the populations at risk are about half the population, so people with asthma or children and senior citizens will experience a lower quality of life.
This is a fragile achievement to have straight As in all the counties in the Charleston-Huntington metro area. That didn’t always happen, and we know that just because it’s happened in this year’s report, that’s not a guarantee it’s going to continue.
Find out more, and share your story, on the ALA website.
Key Findings Across the State:
Morgantown, WV Metro Area
- Ozone smog: Ranked 169th worst in the nation, earning a B grade; measure unchanged from last year but rank improved from 165th worst.
- Ranked 173rd worst in the nation, for short-term particle pollution, based on the area’s worst county average number of unhealthy days (0.5), earning a B grade, in Monongalia County, WV. Though the measure was unchanged from last year, the area’s rank was slightly better than last year’s 172nd worst.
- Year-round particle pollution: ranked 157th worst in the nation, earning a passing grade, an improvement compared to last year’s ranking.
Wheeling, WV–OH Metro Area
- Ozone smog: Ranked 135th worst in the nation, earning a C grade, the ranking was based on the area’s worst county’s average number of unhealthy days—1 day per year, a C grade, in Ohio County, WV. The metro area’s ranking improved from 130th worst last year, also a C grade.
- Short-term particle pollution: Ranked 110th worst in the nation, based on the area’s worst county’s average number of unhealthy days—1.5 days per year, a C grade, in Marshall County, West Virginia—better than last year’s 104th worst, also a C grade.
- Year-round particle pollution: Ranked 88th worst in the nation, based on the area’s worst county, Marshall, WV, earning a passing grade. This marks an improvement over last year at 77th worst.
Washington–Baltimore–Arlington, DC–MD–VA–WV–PA Metro Area (includes 3 West Virginia counties)
- Short-term particle pollution: Ranked 60th worst in the nation, based on the area’s worst county averaging 3.2 unhealthy days per year, earning a D grade in Frederick County, VA, and the District of Columbia. This represents an improvement from last year’s 53rd worst ranking, with 3.7 unhealthy days per year and an F grade.
- Year-round particle pollution: The area’s worst county, Berkeley County, WV, improved to a passing grade for pollution levels below the federal standard. However, the metro area’s rank remained unchanged from last year at 66th worst.
Pittsburgh–Weirton–Steubenville, PA–OH–WV Metro Area
- Graded straight F’s for all three measures of air quality.
- Ozone smog worsens from D to F, rank drops from 90th to 63rd worst in nation.
- Short-term particle pollution: Improves but still fails and rank worsens from 16th to 11th worst.
- Year-round particle pollution: Improves to best-ever, but still fails, rank changing from 12th to 16th worst.
The Lung Association is calling on everyone to urge EPA to value the health of America’s kids. Historically, EPA has played an essential role in protecting people’s health from air pollution. The current EPA has retreated from its public health foundation by rolling back clean air protections. This EPA has also taken the recent step of eliminating health-related information from its economic analyses, meaning that the costs of pollution to kids, families and communities will not be counted as policies are undone. EPA must not devalue kids’ health.