Air, air everywhere and not a
good patch to breathe.
And water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink?
Well, take both, air and water, and you have the two
most important basics of life. A person can live about
one month without food, but only about a week without
water. You can live only seconds without air. So, you
get the picture: air and water are major necessities.
Unfortunately, both are endangered today.
With that in mind, Dr. Greg Reed, an environmental
engineer at the University of Tennessee, has more than a
scientific interest in the toxic soup we are breathing.
He discovered a couple of years ago that his lungs
are sensitive to ozone. He was having a hard time
breathing, his chest felt heavy. His lungs, he said,
felt as if they were turning to mush.
After a battery of tests, his personal doctor finally
told him he was sensitive to outside air because of the
ozone, which reacts with everything on the planet, even
air and water.
Today, Reed has to take a monthly shot to keep his
lungs working properly. And he doesn't go outside as
much any longer, even though he studies the air we
breathe and the water we drink.
As head of UT's civil and environmental engineering
department, he is more than passively interested in a
study that began Monday at Newfound Gap in the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park to find out how ozone is
affecting hikers. The scientific equipment, which looks
like a gizmo from a space movie, will be located at the
trailhead to Charlies Bunion. Students and faculty will
also set up a spirometer to measure lung function in a
van in the parking lot across from the trail.
The study is part of a $750,000 grant from the
Environmental Protection Agency involving a group of
researchers from UT, Emory University and Western
Carolina University.
The survey will measure air pollution in the national
park, how vehicular traffic in and around the park
contributes to pollution, and how the pollution affects
hikers.
Volunteer hikers will puff into the spirometer to
measure their wind capacity before hiking up the trail
to Charlies Bunion. They will be tested again when they
return to find out how their lungs were affected by
ozone and particulate matter in the higher elevations in
the park.
Reed and Dr. Wayne Davis, professor and coordinator
of the Environmental Engineering program in UT's
department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, are
heading up the program along with Dr. Susan M. Smith,
assistant professor in the health sciences program, and
Holly Kelly, who is the study program project manager.
The scientific analysis of air quality and lung
function is similar to one conducted by the Harvard
School of Public Health and researchers at Brigham and
Women's Hospital in 1998.
In that two-year survey of adult hikers on Mount
Washington in the White Mountains of northern New
Hampshire, researchers found that ozone levels common to
non-urban parts of the United States were associated
with decreases in lung function in adult hikers. The
declines in lung capacity were more pronounced in hikers
with a history of asthma or wheezing.
Environmentalists say there is overwhelming evidence
that contaminants in the environment may be making us
sick. New environmental health risks are reported almost
daily. Some of that information is often contradictory,
which leads to public confusion, leaving the open
question: "Are the risks real or imaginary?"
Other questions focus on at what level is any
contaminant considered safe in air and water? Who is the
most at risk? How do we contain the contamination in the
most efficient and economical manner?
Reed says that some of the information the research
institutions hope to find in the UT study could help
answer some of those questions.
"We are going to learn if the estimates of the
Harvard study is similar to what we find. But we, in
fact, think it is higher than what they found."
Part of the problem in this region, he says, is that
we have higher humidity here and we are in a valley,
which tends to trap stagnant air during summer months.
Still, with new EPA air quality standards on the way
in the next few years, the UT study, which will run from
now until October and pick up again next May and
continue through July, should shed some light on how
ozone and particulates in the air are affecting hikers.
The information will also help scientists determine
whether current EPA air quality regulations are
sufficient to keep people healthy, Reed and Davis say.
Other equipment at the trailhead will monitor ozone
and particulate matter in the air, Reed says. Ozone is
so highly reactive even though it dissipates in the
valley at nighttime, it remains fairly constant in the
higher elevations.
Part of the problem is that ozone and particulates
are in the prevailing winds that blow in on smokestack
pollution from large coal-burning power generation
plants.
Those plants in the Midwest and the Tennessee Valley
scatter pollution hundreds of miles before blanketing
the Northeast and the Appalachians as acid deposition,
mercury and fine particulate matter. It is known that
fossil-fuel powered power plant pollution creates smog
that degrades mountain vistas and is now considered
harmful to human beings in that it may trigger
respiratory diseases such as asthma. Some physicians are
going so far as to say that this bad air can also
trigger heart disease.
Sulfate and nitrate aerosols cause the haze seen from
the Smokies, which is also associated with human health
problems. Ambient ozone levels may have some effect even
on healthy hikers, the two researchers say.
Because they're so small, the particles can bypass
the body's normal defensive system and drive deeply into
air sacs in the lungs. This can trigger an inflammatory
response, researchers say.
Although large cities are haze habitats, not all bad
air is found in the big cities. Big winds from Atlanta
often send the stagnant air over that city to the
Smokies. Air pollution and wind velocity vary
dramatically from day to day.
"So, this is not just a local area problem," says
Davis. "The park can't solve its own problem. Even if
automobiles are banned from the park, that won't solve
the problem," he says.
"This will have to be a cooperative effort between
states. We are a long way from solving this problem," he
says.
The new EPA air quality standards being phased in
over the next three to four years will probably start
showing some results in a decade or longer, he says.
Part of the air quality problems stem from the
nation's consumers who demand more and more power as the
population increases. Plants that were built prior to
the 1970 Clean Air Act were grandfathered in, meaning
those facilities were allowed to operate without meeting
emission standards required for modern plants.
Another problem, Reed says, is that current studies
show that it takes about 26 years for a particular model
of an automobile to pass out of the fleet. In other
words, some automobiles are still on the highways that
have little or no pollution control devices on board.
After the tests on the air and the hikers, Reed says
the results will be passed on to the decisionmakers at
the local, state and national levels.
The analysis can be used in future air quality
modeling, he says, to find out how certain events will
affect the environment.
"This is a powerful tool for the decisionmakers. We
were not able to do this a few years ago. One of the
things we want to do with this analysis is to provide
the information to the decisionmakers."
Davis says, for example, a reading of 65 to 68 parts
per billion of ozone in the atmosphere is below the new
standards of 80 parts per billion over an eight-hour
period. But is that good enough for human health?
While ozone levels may drop in Knoxville at dusk,
that bowl of toxic soup is uniformly the same in the
higher elevations, Davis says, which means the mountains
in summer are never able to free themselves of the high
ozone concentration.
"That soup is pretty much across the Southeast," he
says.
Europe, Reed says, has lowered its ozone level
standards to 45 to 50 parts per billion over an
eight-hour period. European researchers found that
incidences of asthma and other respiratory diseases
dropped when the standards were set at those levels,
Reed says.
"They did this about 15 years ago. I think we should
go that low, too," he says, "because I don't think we
should have adverse health effects (from current air
quality standards)."
Reed says projects such as the one at UT are not a
stand-alone studies, but are coordinated with a larger
research agenda to determine how much it will cost to
clean up the air, and who pays for it.
Another study on the economics of environmental
cleanup will kick off next spring, he says.
Fred Brown can be reached at 342-6427 or
brownf@knews.com
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