Breathing Easier

It’s taken even longer than you think to get rid of smog.

Officials who gathered Thursday in Los Angeles to celebrate what they described as the “50th anniversary” of the war on air pollution acknowledged that their party was--gasp--about 42 years late.

Officials had plenty to celebrate: Air quality has improved dramatically, particularly last year, when there were only seven first-stage smog alerts--half as many as a year earlier.

But Los Angeles’ fight for clean air actually started not in 1947 but in 1905.

That’s when the City Council enacted the first of several pioneering measures over a seven-year period to combat smoke and fumes which in 1903 had become so thick that residents mistook them for an eclipse of the sun.

That early crackdown on belching factory smokestacks apparently kept air pollution to a tolerable level for the next quarter-century or so, according to the region’s current smog-fighting agency, the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

It was district officials who threw Thursday’s anniversary bash to observe “50 years of progress toward clean air.”

So what happened 50 years ago that was so significant?

It turns out that legislation broadening local control over air pollution was signed into law in 1947 by Gov. Earl Warren. And a few months later the county Air Pollution Control District was formed.

But the historic timeline--much like the concept of clean air itself--seemed to be in the eye of the beholder.

A colorful 32-page history of “The Southland’s War on Smog” was distributed by officials who organized the celebration, held at the East Main Street site of downtown Los Angeles’ first smog monitoring station.

The report noted that air pollution in the fast-growing city intensified between 1939 and 1943, when smoke was so heavy it posed “a serious menace” to aviation and was causing residents’ eyes and throats to burn.

A Smoke and Fumes Commission was appointed by Los Angeles County Supervisors in 1943. The City Council followed by creating a Bureau of Smoke Control in 1945. At the same time, the term “smog” came into use by those who figured the air pollution was a mixture of smoke and coastal fog.

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In 1945 and 1946, local newspapers hired their own experts, who determined that smog was actually caused by a combination of smoke and other forms of pollution. The Times’ expert pointed out that air pollution officials “lacked the clout and legislative authority to effectively control smog,” according to the report.

The county Air Pollution Control District helped solve that problem.

That agency was swallowed up in 1977 by the South Coast Air Quality Management District after officials realized that smog was a regional problem spanning several counties.

So wasn’t Thursday’s celebration actually a 20th-birthday bash?

District board chairman Jon D. Mikels, who is a San Bernardino County supervisor, laughed at that question.

“If you go back to 1747 I’m sure you’ll find that efforts were made as far back as then to deal with smoke in this area,” he joked. “You can say 1947 was the start of the organized fight against air pollution.”

Others at the celebration had ideas of their own as to when the real war on air pollution began.

James M. Lents, executive officer of the South Coast district, pointed to 42 years ago. That’s when the predecessor to the East Main Street air quality monitoring station was set up at the old county Air Pollution Control District headquarters on nearby Santa Fe Street.

“We began monitoring here in 1955,” Lents told the crowd of mostly government officials. “Certainly that started our war on smog.”

The year 1967 was on the mind of California Air Resources Board Chairman John Dunlap. His agency was established that year and quickly helped fight tailpipe emissions by pressing for catalytic converters on all new cars in the state.

And 1971 had significance for Mary Nichols. She is assistant administrator for air and radiation for the federal Environmental Protection Agency--which adopted air quality standards that year.

But 1950 was the turning point for Peg Brunelle. She is a Studio City resident who, as chief chemist for the old county Air Pollution Control District, helped discover exactly what smog is.

In 1949 she worked with Caltech biochemistry professor Arie J. Haagen-Smit, using plants sealed in airtight containers to hunt for the oxidizing element in smog that was so irritating to eyes, lungs and local agriculture.

In 1950 the pair discovered that it was ozone.

Research on air samples gathered at local refineries and other locations led to the determination two years later that the ozone was the result of a photochemical reaction of sunlight, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons that came from petroleum products and cars’ tailpipes.

That caused an uproar in the business community and among civic leaders, Brunelle recalled.

Some in the industry argued that ozone came from the stratosphere, dropping to ocean level where it was blown inland by coastal breezes.

“We were on the frontier. We had to convince people that ozone came from here and not from up there,” Brunelle said.

Brunelle said she spent many evenings visiting community groups and civic organizations--”anybody who would listen”--to explain the air pollution problem. And plenty of people had solutions to offer.

“Some wanted to put in big fans to blow the smog out of Los Angeles,” she said. “They didn’t realize that would take more electricity than was being generated at the time.

“Another suggestion was to put rice in car exhaust pipes to absorb the hydrocarbons. But what happened was the rice swelled and plugged the pipe.”

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Other early ideas included connecting factories by sewer system-like ducts to pipe pollution to the mountains, where it could be released above the inversion layer, and seeding clouds to create rain that would wash smog out of the air. Another suggestion was to use jet turbines to blast smog upward through the inversion layer.

Brunelle, who retired in 1982, said progress made in cleaning the air in recent years has been “absolutely miraculous.”

The South Coast district’s Lents said the best is yet to come.

“There were only seven days last year” where ozone levels required officials to issue first-stage smog alerts, he told the crowd.

“That’s seven too many,” Lents said. “We’re predicting only five this year. And by the year 2000, we’re predicting there will be zero.”

And that would be cause for a real celebration.