DATE: Sunday, June 22, 1997                 TAG: 9706200003

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: BY MARC WETHERHORN and THOMAS E. NATAN 

                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

VIRGINIA'S POLLUTED AIR WORSENS RESPIRATORY PROBLEMS

If you suffer from asthma or some other chronic respiratory illness, you may want to reconsider living in the Old Dominion. That's because our air is polluted, posing serious health problems for victims of asthma and respiratory illness. For the most unfortunate of these people bad air can mean shortened life expectancy and premature death. Of course, this is also a national problem: One in five Americans breathes air that doesn't meet minimum standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Estimates are that 15,000 people will die nationwide in 1997 from respiratory illnesses aggravated by air pollution.

Bad air and respiratory illness can be a deadly combination. Nationally, 14.6 million Americans suffer from asthma, including almost 5 million children. Adults and children alike suffer acute asthma attacks when they breathe dirty air contaminated by ozone and soot in amounts that exceed the current EPA standards. Asthma is the third largest cause of death for children in this country, after accidents and cancer, and the largest single cause of emergency-room admissions for them.

Here in Virginia, more than 312,000 people have asthma, slightly less than 5 percent of the population. Their illness can be more serious when air pollution from ozone and particles is high, in the worst cases leading to premature death. One seven-year study of more than half a million people nationally found that those living in cities with high air pollution faced a significantly higher risk of early death than residents in urban areas with the least pollution.

Air quality deteriorates on warm summer days when nitrogen oxides from fuel combustion interact with sunlight and volatile organic compounds released from various manufacturing processes. High levels of ozone can be caustic to lung tissue and even moderate amounts aggravate respiratory problems, triggering asthma and bronchitis attacks.

To prevent premature deaths and reduce the number of severe health problems from air pollution, EPA wants to reduce the amount of ozone and soot - another air pollutant adversely affecting health - emitted into the air by coal-burning utilities, petroleum refineries and transportation sources. The new standards are based on more than 270 scientific studies conducted during the past 10 years. The proposed safeguards could save as much as $120 billion per year in reduced health-care costs, days missed at school and absenteeism from work. In other words, every $1 invested in reducing pollution could produce a total savings of $17.

Polluting industries, however, want to derail EPA's initiative for tougher air standards. They are spending millions of dollars to divert attention from the real causes of air pollution by claiming that stricter regulation of ozone and particulate matter will prevent us from using gas mowers and barbecuing outdoors. But the overwhelming component of dirty air, mainly nitrogen oxide (NOX), comes from just one source: coal-burning power plants. Across the country, hundreds of high pollution power plants spew millions of tons of ozone-forming NOX and soot into the air we breathe. Many of these facilities were built in the 1950s and have undergone little, if any, modification since then to curtail their emissions. All of them were ``grandfathered'' under the 1970 Clean Air Act, exempting them from meeting even minimal standards for ozone and particulate matter.

In Virginia, 27 of the state's 33 power-plant boiler units are exempt from the Clean Air standards. Last year Virginia facilities emitted a total of almost 101,000 tons of NOX. To put this in perspective, that represents almost 40 pounds of nitrogen oxide for every man, woman and child in our state. But that's only one of a half-dozen polluting compounds emitted by electric utilities every hour of every day.

As long as Americans breathe air fouled by smog and soot, more people with asthma and respiratory illness will face serious health problems, even death. Regardless of the improvements to air quality over the past 20 years and despite the dire predictions special interests make about economic harm from stricter standards, our air still makes people sick, especially in the vicinity of coal-fired utilities. Without better safeguards against ozone and soot, Virginia may be the place for lovers but not for breathing clean air. MEMO: Mark Wetherhorn is Southern regional director of Citizen Action, a

grass-roots environmental and consumer watchdog organization with more

than 5,000 members in Virginia. Thomas E. Natan is a chemical engineer

and research director for the Environmental Information Center, a

nonprofit, nonpartisan group in Washington, D.C.

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