How’s the air out there?
The American Lung Association says it’s good on the Coast, most of the time.
All three Coast counties got an A for particle pollution. For ozone pollution, not so good.
Hancock County got a B. But Jackson and Harrison counties got Cs, because they had four and five orange warning days respectively last year. Those are days when the air is unhealthy for the young, the old, people with COPD and asthma and those who exercise outside regularly.
The organization based the marks on a three-year average of state monitoring statistics and released its annual report this week.
The Department of Environmental Quality has a monitoring station in each Coast county, and in about a half-dozen other counties in the state that have industry or heavy traffic.
Ground-level ozone, or smog, is created when heat meets emissions. It irritates the lungs and can trigger asthma attacks. Particle pollution is usually industrial and has tiny particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream.
Coast levels for both are well within the national air quality standard, said Jennifer Cofer, interim CEO for the Lung Association’s Gulf-Plains Region.
“You can see that for particle pollution, the Gulf Coast is doing really well,” Cofer said and gave a nod to efforts by industry. “It’s ozone that we can work on.”
The standards are set, she said, to make sure the air is breathable. Allowable levels are established “because we have to have industry, we have to drive cars and mow our lawns.”
The DEQ said the Coast is improving slightly. The three-year averages ending in 2012 beat the ones ending last year for ozone. Gulf Regional Planning’s David Taylor said efforts to reduce traffic and enforce new environmental regulations have helped, but so has Mother Nature with cooler weather during ozone season — April to September.
As for particle pollution, the Coast hasn’t had a warning day since all the burning after Hurricane Katrina in 2006.
Even with the praise, environmentalists question how the state’s most industrial county, Jackson, can get such good marks for particle pollution. They pointed out that the state’s monitoring device is located in the heart of Pascagoula where predominant winds come straight off the Gulf, not in the downwind path of major industry.