Sonoma County, for 5th straight year, gets top marks for clean air

The American Lung Association’s report says Sonoma County air was free of smog and soot, but the Bay Area fared poorly.|

Sonoma County earned a perfect score for the fifth straight year in the American Lung Association’s latest statewide air quality report card, but it doesn’t include the foul air that blanketed the region and prompted public health warnings during last year’s wildfires.

The report did cite climate change as a factor statewide for rising levels of ozone pollution that stems from vehicle emissions.

The lung association’s “State of the Air 2018” report, released Wednesday, gave Sonoma County a pair of A’s without a single day of ozone or particle pollution exceeding federal standards.

Only two other California counties - Humboldt and San Francisco - earned the same grades, but the report covered the three years ending in 2016 and did not include the impact of the October wildfires, the most deadly and destructive in California history.

The conflagration will drag down grades in next year’s report, officials said.

“A lot of smoke blew into the Sacramento Valley,” Ryan Endean, a spokesman for the lung association said, predicting worse scores for particle pollution in much of Northern California.

Sonoma County owes its consistently clean air to ocean winds that blow pollution east, contributing to poor grades in other counties.

As the October wildfires raged, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District reported conditions comparable to Beijing, China and called it the worst air quality ever recorded in some parts of the Bay Area.

A study based on emergency room visits during California’s 2015 fire season found smoky air was associated with a 42 percent higher risk of heart attack compared to smoke-free air and a 22 percent higher relative risk of emergency visits for coronary artery disease.

The study was published last week by the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Compounding the air pollution outlook in California, the lung association pointed to “significant increases” in ozone pollution from warmer weather attributed to climate change.

“2016 was the second warmest year on record in the United States, highlighting that climate change impacts are happening now,” the report said.

Ozone, also known as smog, is “cooked in the air” as sunlight interacts with tailpipe emissions and increases with higher temperatures, said Bonnie Holmes-Gen, a lung association spokeswoman.

“We need to move away from fossil fuel combustion in transportation and energy production,” she said.

Particle pollution, known as soot, comes from diesel engines, wood-burning stoves and fireplaces, and is exacerbated by wildfires.

Particle pollution measured in the report was lower in many parts of the state as a result of the lessening due to a letdown due to a letdown of the drought, Holmes-Gen said. In the Bay Area and the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, soot pollution was concentrated near the ground because of due to stagnant air and weather conditions during the dry years, she said.

In the air quality report card, the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Joaquin County, ranked 13th nationally for ozone pollution, sixth worst for short-term particle pollution and tied for 10th for year-round particle pollution.

Los Angeles, the state’s most populous metropolitan area, led the nation in ozone pollution, while Bakersfield, at the south end of the Central Valley, was No. 1 nationally for particle pollution.

More than 35 million Californians, 90 percent of the population, live in counties affected by unhealthy air during certain parts of the year, the report said.

Air pollution can cause asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and other health impacts that send people to hospitals and contribute to thousands of premature deaths each year in California, the lung association said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.

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