- Title: Are stay-home orders clearing Los Angeles' infamous smog?
- Date: 4th April 2020
- Summary: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF HEAVY TRAFFIC ON FREEWAY IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES TAILPIPE WITH EXHAUST FUMES TRAFFIC ON ROAD
- Embargoed: 18th April 2020 21:21
- Keywords: 'safer at home' COVID-19 California Los Angeles coronavirus emissions lockdown smog traffic
- Location: LOS ANGELES, BEVERLY HILLS, MANHATTAN BEACH AND SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- City: LOS ANGELES, BEVERLY HILLS, MANHATTAN BEACH AND SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- Country: USA
- Topics: Health/Medicine
- Reuters ID: LVA004C87QREV
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Residents of Los Angeles, the city with the worst smog in the United States, are enjoying a third straight week of clean air, leading some to wonder if reduced traffic from the city's coronavirus 'stay at home' orders are playing a part.
Data provided by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), an air quality agency that oversees the Los Angeles area, shows low levels of both fine particulate matter, such as dust and soot, and ozone, a key component of smog. The American Lung Association's 2019 national air quality report card found Los Angeles to be the country's most polluted city for ozone.
Philip Fine, a deputy executive officer at the South Coast AQMD, said its scientists are looking at the data they collect to see if there is a correlation between emptier freeways and better air, but cautioned that the area's recent cool, wet weather is having an impact on air quality.
"Human activities that cause emissions have been diminished, and we've been looking at that. But at the same time, over those two weeks, we've had some very stormy weather in southern California. It has rained every other day or every third day. And under those conditions, those are the days where we typically see very good air quality days. So it's been very hard to tease out the different impacts of perhaps the reduced emissions that we expect to see under these conditions and the weather, the impact of the weather," Fine said.
The advocacy group Coalition for Clean Air also collects air pollution data from a network of air quality monitors in people's homes around California. They, too, are seeing lower levels of pollutants, but policy director Bill Magavern says the reduction in tailpipe emissions since March 19, when Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered the city's residents to stay at home and businesses to close, is a major factor.
"The vast majority of California's air pollution comes from transportation, from the movement of goods and people. And while the AQMD has been reluctant, a number of other experts have noticed that there clearly is a correlation, and we think a causation, between the drop-off in traffic and the improvement in air quality. The tailpipes that are usually burning gasoline and diesel and emitting pollutants out of those tailpipes, they're not really on our roads very much right now and that definitely makes the air cleaner," Magavern said.
Fine said data shows car traffic is down by a third and the truck traffic is down by about 20 percent since the coronavirus lockdown began. He said an anticipated return next week to more typical April weather conditions will allow scientists to compare forecasts, which do not take into account any reduced emissions because they look at historical data, with actual data from monitoring stations.
"If our forecasts match what we're actually seeing on the ground with our monitoring stations… then we would say that we probably aren't seeing the effect of the reduced emissions. But if we start seeing a difference, then that would that difference would likely be due to the reduced emissions," he said.
For Magavern, the cleaner air represents a shred of good news in the midst of crisis and he hopes people might continue to work from home and choose to take fewer trips even after the stay-at-home order is lifted.
"It's not the way that we want to make the air cleaner," he said. "It shouldn't take a pandemic to show us that it's possible to clean up our air."
(Production: Jane Ross, Alan Devall, Lucy Nicholson) - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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