Fires and climate change polluted California’s air. Has coronavirus shutdown helped?
California and Sacramento again had some of the poorest air quality in the nation, its skies made worse by the effects of climate change and years of catastrophic wildfires, with worrying implications for those most at risk of developing COVID-19, officials say.
The American Lung Association’s sobering State of the Air report released Tuesday examined data for 2016 through 2018. The report showed air pollution continued to spare little of the Golden State from Los Angeles and the agricultural hubs of Bakersfield and Fresno – cities that have long led the association’s most-polluted list – to Sacramento, the city with the nation’s fifth-worst ozone or smog pollution, according to the report, now in its 20th year, and released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the federal Clean Air Act.
“Too many Californians on too many days face pollution,” said Will Barrett, an American Lung Association director based in Sacramento, during a conference call Monday. “Now is not the time to slow down, but to ramp up our pollution controls.”
The twin threats of ozone smog and particle pollution to the state’s poor and most medically vulnerable residents worried association experts in the report and raises new red flags amid the global viral contagion preying on those same susceptible groups.
Nearly all Californians – 98 percent, according to the report – live in counties the association graded F for air quality. Extreme heat from climate change and long, destructive fire seasons drove the results. Sacramento, El Dorado and Placer counties received failing grades. Yolo County got a D.
The effects were felt in every corner of the state during the years charted in the study. Stifling heat sent smog levels soaring. Millions of Californians breathed in the soot of forest fires that consumed hundreds of thousands of acres up and down the state.
“Nearly every Californian lives in an area with unhealthy ozone. As a physician, this is unacceptable, but it needs to be unacceptable to everyone,” Dr. John Balmes, a California Air Resources Board member and a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, said Monday. He called air pollution “a major health challenge in California.”
How air quality can affect health
Particle pollution increases the risks of heart and lung disease, and asthma attacks, working its way deep into the lungs and even into the bloodstream, Balmes said, potentially causing heart attacks and stroke. Much of the burden falls on the most disadvantaged and poorest communities, groups often closest to pollution sources and with less access to health care.
“COVID-19 presents multiple threats to the lungs all at once. It’s critical that we respond to COVID by strengthening public health,” said Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research.
One strategy she said can help is a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
“We’ve known for awhile how pollution impacts low-income and minority populations and it is the same with COVID,” Prunicki said.
Amid the gloomy report, the clean air experts who introduced the findings Monday said they were taking encouragement and lessons from the statewide shelter-in-place order.
The pandemic has forced changes in the way many people work, which could lead to lasting environmental change.
“There’s a lot of interest in how COVID fits into all of this,” Barrett said in a later interview Monday. “Ultimately, because people are following the shelter-in-place orders and staying home to stem the pandemic, we’re seeing an impact on traffic and roads.”
“We should be doing a lot less commuting, a lot more working remotely – it’s fine to work remotely,” Prunicki said in another interview. “Face-to-face meetings aren’t worth what we’re doing to our environment and our health. I hope this is some kind of a wake-up call to institutions and businesses.”
In Sacramento, the extended shelter-in-place is having an marked effect on air quality: no spare-the-air days reported in the Sacramento area so far this year, according to the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District.
Barrett said communities can add to the impact by adding and converting their motor fleets to zero-emission vehicles and encouraging more bicycles, walking and safe transit. Even before the statewide coronavirus lockdown, Barrett said Sacramento has seen clean air successes from moves that include reducing residential wood smoke and installing neighborhood vehicle charging stations.
“There are a lot of lessons we could be learning here,” Barrett said. “Nearly every Californian lives in a county impacted by unhealthy air. When you think of kids with asthma, that’s ozone. Heart and lung disease? That’s particle pollution.”
Air quality has markedly improved. Fewer cars are on the roads, bringing a glimpse of a future with cleaner air, said Wayne Nastri, executive officer of Southern California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District.
In South Coast’s service area, Nastri said a third fewer cars are on the road and 20 percent fewer trucks. Unusually unstable weather in the Southland has also helped to scrub the air of pollutants, he said.
“The air quality looks great,” Nastri told reporters. “It’s transitory, not permanent. We’re getting warmer weather conditions and it’s too early to tell whether the air quality will be permanent, but it shows what it could be. We can enjoy air quality benefits for a long time to come.”
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