Officials: Pollution poll foggy

Pittsburgh’s “Most Livable” rating recently suffered the addition of a black smudge.

Aside… Pittsburgh’s “Most Livable” rating recently suffered the addition of a black smudge.

Aside from livability, the city also topped the list for smoggiest this year when it was named the worst U.S. city for particle pollution by the American Lung Association.

To clean up its image Pittsburgh is at work to improve its air quality. But according to the Allegheny County Health Department, things aren’t as bad as they seem.

“We don’t disagree with the fact that the air quality in the Liberty-Clairton region does not meet Environmental Protection Agency standards, but the report isn’t a fair representation of the air quality in the Pittsburgh region as a whole,” said department spokesman Guillermo Cole.

The May 2008 “State of the Air” report, an annual publication by the association, polls cities in three key areas: ozone, year-round and short-term particle pollution. The report found Pittsburgh to have the worst short-term particle pollution in the country and the second worst – trailing Los Angeles – in year-round particle pollution.

Some officials have criticized the report for what they say is an apparent flaw: Pittsburgh pollution data was gathered from only one monitoring site, the Liberty-Clairton site. That site is in the vicinity of one of the largest polluters in the region, Clairton Coke Works.

The poll did use, however, the highest-recorded monitoring site in all cities across the country, according to the association.

In the wake of the association’s report, Pittsburgh has submitted a plan to the EPA to ensure all monitoring sites in the county reach federal standards for particle pollution.

“Most of the monitoring sites are meeting air pollution standards. And we have a plan to bring the rest of Allegheny County into standards of fine particle pollution by 2010,” said Cole.

“We have Liberty-Clairton by 2015 because U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works is in the process of replacing their coke-oven batteries,” he said.

According to the report, particle pollution “refers to a mix of very tiny solid and liquid particles that are in the air we breathe.” These small particles can penetrate human lung tissues and cause health problems.

In hard numbers, the air pollution problem in Pittsburgh seems to be confined to certain areas.

The air that Lawrenceville and Oakland folks breathe is cleaner than the air Liberty-Clairton folks breathe.

From 2005 to 2007, the Lawrenceville monitoring site has annually been within 0.1 grams per cubic meter of a federal PM2.5 standard of 15.0 grams per cubic meter, whereas the Liberty-Clairton monitoring site has been off by approximately 4.08 grams per cubic meter for that same time period.

With the projected coke-oven battery replacements in U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works plant, Cole said he expects fine particle pollution to decrease. This was the case when an LTV coke plant in Oakland closed a few years ago, improving the air quality in the neighborhood, said Cole.

Deborah Brown, vice president of community outreach and advocacy for the ALA’s Mid-Atlantic branch, said that the city’s particular rank is not as important as the fact that a problem exists.

“Even if you took away that particular monitoring site [in Liberty-Clairton], Pittsburgh’s air would still be 15th or 16th worst in the country,” she said. “So either way you look at it, there is a pollution problem in that area. The ALA isn’t trying to penalize anyone, but we want to be sure that we’re educating people about the issue.”