Weather cooks up dangerous recipe for smog
STAMFORD — Sheila Barney put two and two together and came up with 25. And it made sense.
First, she got caught in traffic so heavy during a recent afternoon rush hour that it took 50 minutes to drive from Stamford Hospital to her South End home, a distance of less than 2 miles.
“There was gridlock on every corner,” Barney said.
Second, she watched on another recent afternoon as a neighbor rushed her 6-yearold son inside.
“His face was swelling so fast. She had to give him Benadryl right away,” Barney said.
It was asthma – a particular concern on her side of town, especially this time of year, when sunlight lingers longest, temperatures climb and humidity builds.
They are the ingredients of smog, which Barney, a longtime South End resident and community activist, said has increased with the traffic in her neighborhood, site of a massive redevelopment.
Still, she was surprised when she came across information on the internet based on the American Lung Association’s “State of the Air
2018” report, which lists the 25 smoggiest metropolitan areas in the nation.
“Stamford made the list,” Barney said. “Twenty-fifth in the whole country.”
According to the report, the Stamford-Norwalk-Bridgeport metropolitan area has 24 days a year with high levels of ozone, an irritating gas that is a major air pollutant in the lower atmosphere.
To make things worse, Stamford is sandwiched between two other high-smog areas – Hartford, which ranks 24th on the list with 27 high-ozone days a year – and New York, ranked No. 6 with 94 days.
The area with the worst air pollution in the United States is Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., with 267 high-ozone days a year, the report found.
But the Stamford area is no stranger to the top 25, said Ruth Canovi, director of advocacy for the American Lung Association’s Connecticut chapter.
“The area has a lot of its own traffic, a lot of traffic from the New York City metropolitan area, and a lot of pollutants from power plants in other parts of the country that weather brings in,” Canovi said.
It all gets worse this time of year, she said. It begins with volatile organic compounds that are emitted into the air from cars, power plants, factories and other sources.
“Heat and sunlight cook up the molecules and make it bad for us to breathe,” Canovi said. “This latest report included data from 2016, which was one of the hottest years on record. With more heat, you get more ozone pollution.”
Things are worse in areas with a lot of traffic, especially traffic that stalls, Canovi said.
“Idling vehicles just pump pollution into the air,” she said.
Barney said she has known that asthma has been a serious concern in her neighborhood, which borders Interstate 95 on one of its busiest stretches, since 2004, when she became vice president of the South End Neighborhood Revitalization Zone.
“Programs were put in place back then to help people with respiratory problems,” Barney said. “But with all the added cars coming into the South End now, asthma rates are probably going to go up higher. You see so many people going to the hospital.”
The South End is the site of a redevelopment that has added hundreds of apartments, with more to come.
More than 100 million Americans live in the 25 most-polluted metropolitan areas, and 8.5 million have asthma, about a quarter of them children, according to the report.
The Stamford-Norwalk-Bridgeport area has a population of 944,200, and 100,600 people have asthma, it found.
Canovi said it’s important to note that air quality has improved from 40 years ago, though there’s a caveat.
“Overall, we’re doing better,” she said. “But with the hotter conditions of the last few years, we are concerned we will reverse some of that.”
Air pollution has the biggest effect from May to September, when sunlight is more intense and has enough energy to drive the chemical reactions that produce ground-level ozone, according to The Weather Network. High humidity, especially when there is little wind, exacerbates the effect.
Ozone can irritate the lungs, resulting in shortness of breath; coughing; increased susceptibility to infection; and reduced ability to fend off microbes, dust, smoke and other harmful particles, The Weather Network reports.
Barney said she wonders whether people understand that Stamford is in the bull’s eye.
“Like me, they might be surprised to find out we’re No. 25,” she said.