AP: Texas

10/02/2004

By JUAN A. LOZANO  / Associated Press

An area environmental group on Friday contended that pollution monitors recorded violations of hourly and daily ozone standards that "beset the Houston region with the most widespread smog event in recent years."

But officials with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality downplayed the readings, saying while they were unusual for how widespread they were, they weren't the highest experienced this year.

Eight counties from the Houston-Galveston area are part of a cluster of counties around the state that have been deemed by the Environmental Protection Agency as violating federal air quality standards. The area has until 2007 to meet the acceptable standards of ground-level ozone, or smog.

Representatives with the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention said that 36 of the 39 air pollution monitors in the area recorded violations of the eight-hour ozone standard and 14 monitors recorded violations of the hourly standard on Thursday. One of these monitors was down that day.

Thirteen of the sites measured ozone levels that were either unhealthy or very unhealthy.

While the readings weren't completely unprecedented, what made them so usual was that such dangerous pollution affected the city's entire population, said John D. Wilson, the association's executive director, adding that the problem couldn't just be blamed on the hot weather this week

"The larger point we are trying to make is that we're three years from the deadline, and we're still suffering from enormous pollution episodes," he said. "By now we should be getting close to cleaning up the air. We have enough pollution for this to happen on any day of the year."

Bryan Lambeth, a meteorologist with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, did acknowledge that it was the highest number of monitors reporting problems with the one-hour standard since 1998. But he qualified that by saying the number of monitors has almost doubled since that year.

"It was a bad day," he said. "By most measures it will rank as one of the worst days of the year. But by peak readings, it's not the worst."

He also said there were actually 13 and not 14 monitors that exceeded the hourly standard.

Lambeth was careful to say the monitors didn't record violations but showed readings that exceeded ozone standards.

Determining whether Thursday's readings violated ozone standards won't take place until after the year ends and the data can be compared with that from the previous two years.

Lambeth said some of the air that came into the area already had high ozone levels, partly explaining why the problem was so widespread.

Wilson said Thursday was the 35th day of the year with violations of the hourly standard and the 50th day that violated the eight-hour standard, indicating that Houston by the end of the year could once again have the nation's worst ozone problem, an unwelcome distinction currently held by Los Angeles.

But Lambeth said it's not a good idea to use the 35th and 50th day figures because "it's a very poor statistic to use to look at trends or city by city comparisons."

Wilson said the figures do have validity.

"In terms of the public's experience of the problem its very relevant. It's a big deal," he said.