Articles

Area's Air Is Better, But That's Not All Good

Stacy Shelton, AJC Staff
April 13, 2004

For the first time since federal regulators began rating the country's smoggiest regions 13 years ago, metro Atlanta's air quality will show improvement when a new list is released Thursday.

Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's tougher standard, metro Atlanta is expected to be rated as only marginally bad. In the past, the feds have designated the region's air as seriously Ñ and more recently, severely Ñ polluted. The region still doesn't meet federal Clean Air Act standards.

While the improved rating should be welcome news, the state's air protection chief said Georgia may ask EPA to kick metro Atlanta down a rung on the air-quality ladder. A "moderate" rating would give the region more time to ensure smog controls do the job, even if the weather isn't as favorable as it has been in the past three years. Scientists and environmentalists largely attribute the improved air quality to recent cooler-than-normal summers.

"We're in this funny situation where the air quality has gotten better, but the [new standard] in this 20-county area is going to be tough to meet," said Ron Methier, air protection branch chief for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. "That last little bit to make the standard is going to be hard, and I'm not sure we can do it within that short amount of time."

If, as expected, the EPA designates metro Atlanta in the marginal category of areas not meeting the healthy standard for ground-level ozone, the region would have a 2007 deadline to clean the air by reducing emissions from cars, power plants, factories and other polluters. If the region is put in the moderate category, the deadline would be 2010.

"If we're marginal, we'll have to sit down and decide: Can we do it by 2007? That'd be great, and we really ought to shoot for that, but we need to look at what it's really going to take in Atlanta to meet the standard as expeditiously as possible," Methier said.

Ground-level ozone is an ingredient of smog that forms on hot days and can singe even healthy lungs. Asthmatics, children and the elderly are particularly at risk for ozone-related respiratory problems.

The EPA's new, tougher standard, designed to better protect human health, measures ground-level ozone over an eight-hour period. The older standard measures peak exposures in one-hour increments. Last summer, metro Atlanta exceeded the one-hour standard on one day, and the eight-hour standard on 13 days.

David Farren, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is in an ongoing legal fight aimed at getting EPA to better enforce Clean Air rules, said metro Atlanta's improved air quality rating is misleading. Ground-level ozone is still a serious problem, he said.

If metro Atlanta does get placed in the "moderate" category, it only would allow more cars on the road, he said. Violating air quality requirements could cause metro Atlanta to lose federal road-building money, as it did in the late 1990s.

Thirteen metro Atlanta counties have never had healthy air since the one-hour ozone measurements began in the 1970s. Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, Coweta, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry, Paulding and Rockdale counties have been designated with serious air pollution problems since 1991. This year, as a result of a lawsuit brought by environmental groups, the EPA bumped up the 13 counties to "severe." The designation, which incorporates old data, is forcing the state to impose air-cleaning regulations on a wider range of businesses.

Those 13 counties still will have to meet the one-hour standard by the feds' 2005 deadline. Now they also will have to meet the tougher eight-hour standard along with seven other counties: Barrow, Bartow, Carroll, Hall, Newton, Spalding and Walton.

Staff writer Charles Seabrook contributed to this article.

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