LV makes top 10 tourist cities plagued by bad air

A new national survey shows the top 10 U.S. vacation cities, including Las Vegas, all had major smog problems this summer.

"It may have been safer in the casinos," said the Clean Air Trust, a non-profit watchdog agency based in Washington, D.C., of the 11 unhealthful air days recorded in Las Vegas this summer.

Los Angeles ranked as the city with the worst air recording 53 bad air days. San Diego came in second with 23 unhealthful days. Other cities were San Francisco, Orlando, New York, Seattle, Boston, Phoenix and Washington, D.C. All cities attributed their poor air quality to high ozone levels.

Ozone is created by carbon-based fuels not fully burned such as gasoline and coal. When mixed with the sunlight, it forms a type of smog soup.

The Las Vegas Valley already breaks the clean air rules for dust and carbon monoxide, meaning it exceeds allowable federal levels in those categories. Despite the numbers, local health officials say the air quality has improved over the past 10 years.

Ozone has not always been a problem in Southern Nevada which sees high carbon monoxide levels in winter and dust year round.

However this year the federal Environmental Protection Agency changed the yardstick for measuring ozone, said Michael Naylor, director of the Clark County Health District's Air Pollution Control Division.

The federal standard last summer was 100 parts per billion of ozone contained in the amount of air that would fit inside a typical television packing box. This year the standard was lowered to 80 parts per billion inside the same size box.

If the new standards had been in effect last summer, nine unhealthy days of ozone would have been chalked up against Clark County, Naylor said.

Naylor said ozone and its particulates lead to higher rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

As Las Vegas approaches the population of Phoenix, currently at 2.4 million people, the ozone problem will only get worse. Las Vegas is expected to be home to more than 2 million people by 2015.

Phoenix already exceeds the federal air quality levels and has not identified sufficient measures to bring the ozone down. Consequently Phoenix could lose federal transportation funding because of its ozone levels.

Clark County officials are working to reduce the carbon monoxide from 800,000 cars in the valley driving 18 million miles a day and the dust raised on 18,000 acres under construction in the last year.

To reduce the ozone levels, the Health District proposed adopting California reformulated gasoline in summer months starting in 1999.

But environmentalists, gasoline dealers and the American Lung Association protested the use of MTBE -- methyl tertiary butyl ether -- a synthetic chemical used as a blending agent in fuel to reduce smog. MTBE has been found in water supplies in California and even at Lake Tahoe.

MTBE has been detected in Las Vegas and Reno ground water samples not used for drinking. The chemical's health effects are unknown in humans, but MTBE has been reported to damage livers and kidneys in animals. Alaska and Montana have banned the chemical from gasoline there.

The District Board of Health has asked the Nevada Environmental Commission to give direction on the type of reformulated fuel to be used to clean the air after the year 2000.

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