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Air District Officials Seek Clean Status for Valley

Posted on: Friday, 17 February 2006, 18:00 CST

By Mark Grossi, The Fresno Bee, Calif.

Feb. 17--Local air authorities on Thursday said the San Joaquin Valley is approaching a historic moment when the air has been cleared of unhealthy dust and soot levels.

The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District soon will ask for federal officials to designate this area as a clean-air basin for such particle pollution.

But the Valley's first major air milestone in a decade won't happen without a challenge. Environmentalists claim officials are requesting clean-air status while sidestepping possible violations over the last three years.

An Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund lawyer said he is prepared to argue against the district's campaign to be considered in attainment of the particle pollution standard.

"They're claiming attainment while ignoring readings from other monitors around the Valley," said lawyer Paul Cort. "We will challenge them."

Cort commented during a discussion of particle pollution Thursday at the district's governing board meeting.

Board members, meanwhile, applauded the approaching milestone and the improvements the district has made.

New rules, industry cleanup efforts and good weather have resulted in fewer bad-air days over the last three years, district officials say. Although this area remains one of the country's worst air basins for smog, for instance, violations dropped dramatically last summer.

The Valley also is one of the worst places for the tiniest particle pollution, called PM-2.5, or particulate matter 2.5 microns wide and smaller. PM-2.5 is about one-thirtieth the width of a human hair, and it can easily lodge deep in the lungs.

The success story has been the cleanup of PM-10, which generally refers to dust and other particles that are about one-seventh the width of a human hair. Such particles can trigger lung and heart problems.

The Valley has gone three years without a PM-10 violation, officials reported. The district sent its monitoring data to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for confirmation.

Within weeks, officials will ask the EPA to declare the Valley clean in regard to PM-10. If the request is granted, the Valley would not face PM-10 cleanup deadlines or penalties, such as the withholding of federal road-building funds. But the area still would have to avoid future violations.

Cort said the district still might not have reached attainment because several air monitors showed violations in November.

District officials said Cort is referring to secondary monitors that are intended to show short-term trends, not measure for federal violations. The district operates nine monitors that make the official measurements, said planning director Scott Nester.

"They're called federal reference method monitors, and they have big filters that are shipped to the state for weighing to determine how much particulate matter there is," he said. "We don't think the other monitors are the same. We don't think EPA will consider them."

The secondary monitors rely on energy pulses to detect pollution continuously. During a dry time in November, particulate matter climbed to violation levels on four different days.

Earthjustice studied further data and found four other violation days in 2003. To be considered clean, the Valley could only have one violation per year over a three-year period.

Said Cort, "EPA does consider this data, and we think they should in this case."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Fresno Bee, Calif.

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Source: The Fresno Bee

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