Sunday, Jun. 29, 2008

A breath of fresh air is all we ask

Don't breathe the air. Don't exercise outdoors. Don't eat tomatoes, unless they're declared safe by the same folks who can't figure out where the contaminated ones came from.

Get ready — gasoline could soon hit a wallet-draining $4 a gallon. Did I say $4 a gallon? Oops, I meant to say $5. Or $6.

Oh, and by the way, a panel of experts suggested last week that we are completely unprepared to handle a nuclear attack. You think? Just how do you prepare for a 10-kiloton nuke that explodes a block away?

Each day, it seems, there's yet a new peril and an obligatory warning. Some, we can work around. Not when it's the air, though. The bad air is worse than the cost of gas, which you can absorb simply by not buying salmonella-laden tomatoes, or vice versa. But you've got to breathe. Really, there's no alternative.

Even before electrical storms June 21 started hundreds of wildfires in Northern California, the valley's air quality was pretty bad. Now, it's horrible, with a thick blanket of eye-irritating, lung-clogging smoke stretching from this side of the Coast Range to the Sierra, and we're caught in the middle.

We haven't had a totally "green" day, meaning healthy air, in the valley since June 16. It's the longest stretch of bad air ratings on record since they began charting the particulate levels in 1999.

The smoke has left Northern California resembling, well, Southern California.

It's so bad that the air quality experts are telling us not to be outdoors any more than necessary. It's so bad that folks are being cautioned against riding their bikes to work, which they'd normally do for health reasons and to do their part to — you guessed it — reduce air pollution.

"I rode my bike to work Wednesday and I felt it in my lungs," said Shawn Ferreria, senior air quality specialist with the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District in Fresno. "Thursday, I decided to try it one more time, using protective equipment, and if I felt bad, I'd stop."

A painter's mask enabled him to ride, but he said he still felt the effects of the nasty air.

The air is bad for those who have respiratory conditions and it also can cause heart problems.

A backdrop painted brown

It's so bad that while driving home one day this week, I saw a farmer tilling his field and churning up what appeared to be a huge plume of brown dust. Upon closer inspection, I decided maybe the plume wasn't so huge after all. Against an equally brown backdrop, it was difficult to tell where the cloud ended and the sky began.

A few miles closer to home, I noticed a car bearing the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District logo parked along Albers Road.

When I called the district to find out if the inspector used high-tech portable air-sniffing gadgets, I was told "no." Inspectors just look to determine — and here's a new word — the opacity.

"That's the thickness of smoke and dust in the air," said Anthony Presto, public information representative for the district's Modesto office. "It's measured by how much light can be seen through the smoke or dust."

The air inspectors must be retested every six months to determine their ability to determine opacity, Presto said.

Our bad-air days won't cease anytime soon, Ferreria said. The winds over the past week have come out of the north and northwest, carrying smoke our way from the fires in Mendocino and other Northern California counties. Now, he said, the winds are expected to change. They'll be coming out of the south.

So what does this mean? We caught the smoke going south. Now we'll catch it heading back north. We get to itch and gag on the same stuff all over again.

"Recirculation," Ferreria calls it.

"What people want to know is, 'When will this end?' " he said. "Continue keeping an eye on the air quality (listings with the daily weather reports). We'll let you know when it's changed."

For now, though, don't hold your breath. Or better yet, do.

Because if the trend holds, a new peril and warning should surface soon to distract us from these most unfriendly skies.

Jeff Jardine's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in Local News. He can be reached at jjardine@modbee.com or 578-2383.