A Bumper Crop of Bad Air in San Joaquin Valley

FRESNO —  The sun is setting on California’s great valley, but the brilliant light no longer shines as it used to. The mountains to the east and west are gone too, blotted from the horizon by a sky the color of mud.

When the first settlers arrived here in the early 1800s, it was the wildflowers of the San Joaquin Valley and the divine view of the Sierra that set them to poetry. Today, this 300-mile-long stretch of factory farms and sprawling suburbs is the worst place in America for smog and one of the worst for haze.

The state’s big middle -- by the measure of smog throughout the day -- has now overtaken Los Angeles as the nation’s capital of bad air.

During the last 22 months, the San Joaquin Valley, boasting 3.4 million people and 2.4 million cars and pickups, has violated the federal eight-hour ozone standard 226 days. The Los Angeles region, with four times as many people and cars, has violated the same ozone standard 201 days.

This year the valley failed to achieve a single day of clean air in June, July, August and October. During the last 12 months, the “good air” standard has been reached only 53 days -- an average of once a week.

But a sky full of colorless ozone, the main ingredient in smog that can sear and scar the lungs, is only half of what plagues this region.

Dust and soot, the same hazy particles that erase the Sierra and alter the light, contribute to the deaths of an estimated 1,300 valley residents each year -- especially children, the elderly, the poor and people already suffering from respiratory disease. That’s more deaths than from car accidents, murder and AIDS combined, according to a 2002 study of state health figures by the Environmental Working Group, an independent watchdog based in Washington, D.C.

Even as people continue to move into the valley, some local residents, fearing the health effects on their children, are packing their bags.

“I spent a year in the valley and decided it wasn’t for me,” said Paul Kim, a radiologist who quit his job at a Fresno hospital this summer and moved his wife and baby to Orange County.

“It didn’t take long to figure out that the valley is run by farmers and developers,” he said. “The whole place is consumed with building cheap tracts farther and farther out of town. When it comes to the air, there’s a collective complacency.”

The valley’s lingering bad air stands in sharp contrast to what has happened in other parts of the country. While Los Angeles, San Diego and Denver have posted substantial gains in the campaign for less polluted air, the flatland between Bakersfield and Stockton has amassed the worst cleanup record in the West.

The local air district and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have missed every federal deadline to improve the valley sky since the district’s formation in 1991. During that time, the smog-forming emissions from cars, trucks, farms and oil refineries have been cut by one-fourth. This modest improvement is far below the requirements of the U.S. Clean Air Act and far short of what Los Angeles and other regions have accomplished.

The fight against haze has fared even worse. Over the last three years, the amount of tiny particles in the sky has risen 17%, adding more haze to a region that already ranks near the top on the EPA’s list of particulate pollution. The haze is a piercing mix of dust, smoke and other airborne matter from farms, vehicles, home construction and wood-burning stoves and fireplaces. The particles are small enough to lodge deep in the lungs and can cause cancer, asthma and heart disease.

The year-round assault from smog and haze also includes a considerable punch from pollen and pesticides.

As a matter of topography, it would be hard for nature to design a more perfect smog factory than this place, the nation’s longest valley, pinched by the Sierra and the Coast Range. An inversion layer traps emissions beneath a broiling sun in summer and a stagnant fog in winter.

So adverse are the climate and terrain that it takes half as many emissions in the valley to produce about the same levels of smog found in the Los Angeles Basin.

Poet Philip Levine, the only Fresnan other than William Saroyan to win a Pulitzer Prize, now spends part of his year in Brooklyn to get a dose of fresher air. “This past summer was the worst I’ve experienced. I really had trouble breathing. As crazy as it sounds, New York is a whole lot better for my lungs.”

At a graduation ceremony in June, the sixth-graders at Malloch Elementary School in affluent northwest Fresno were asked who among them used asthma inhalers. Parents and grandparents, who had gathered in the cafeteria to celebrate, gasped when 30 of the 59 students raised their hands. “I had no idea it was that high,” Principal Ellen Hedman said.

More than 16% of the children in Fresno County have been diagnosed with asthma. That is the highest rate in California and twice the rate in Los Angeles County, according to a survey by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Indeed, every place in this region -- San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties -- has a rate higher than Los Angeles.

Krissy Riley, 13, who attends a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, no longer hides her asthma inhaler from classmates. “Embarrassed? Heaven’s no,” said her mother, Kathy Riley. “The inhaler is a fact of life here. It’s almost cool to have one. It’s right up there with a cell phone.”

No one needs to tell Tony Souza that his dairy in Kingsburg is harsh on the lungs and bad public relations. Each late summer evening as the sun sets, a curtain of dust drifts from the dairy to nearby Highway 99. Passing drivers try turning off the flow of their air conditioners, but there’s no escape. What’s floating in the air isn’t only dirt but dung. The manure cloud, kicked up by the hooves of 2,000 Holsteins, bakes in the hot sun.

“We want to be good neighbors, but it’s not that easy,” said Souza, manager of Jensen Dairy. “We’d have to redesign our entire dairy to cut down on the dust and gases. You’re talking about $3 [million] or $4 million to fix it.”

If the rest of California has emerged as a world leader in the fight for clean air, a laboratory for innovative solutions and tough regulations, then smack in its middle lie eight counties and 24,000 square miles where the clean-air campaign is sadly broken.

Not only does the valley lack a plan to achieve healthful air, it has failed to cast the cleanup net as far and wide as Los Angeles has. In Southern California, for instance, there are regulations on idling big rigs and vehicle fleets, whereas the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District has none.

Cars, pickups, sport utility vehicles and big rigs remain this region’s biggest polluters. Over the last decade, new freeways and suburbs to accommodate a growing population have increased the daily miles traveled from 63 million to 83 million. On-road vehicles now account for 40% of the smog here, state figures show.

Agriculture, meanwhile, stands as the valley’s biggest industrial polluter and the biggest source of haze. Farming operations, which include tilling and harvesting of cotton, grapes, tree fruit, almonds and pistachios, account for 62% of particles in the air and 20% of the smog.

Emissions from dairies and feedlots -- the gases and dust that help form smog and haze -- are growing 5% a year, state figures show.

The fight to clean up the air has now fallen so far behind schedule that the rest of the decade promises no real change.

“I can’t tell you of a single political leader here who has taken on air quality as an issue,” said Cliff Garoupa, a Fresno City College professor who serves on a committee to reduce vehicle trips to and from campus. “They don’t want to upset the building industry and agriculture or mess with the sanctity of the automobile.

“Here we are, the worst place in the nation, and the only solution our politicians and air district can come up with is a pathetic list of voluntary programs. ‘Spare the Air’ days, they call them. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.”

In October, for example, the county Board of Supervisors in Madera voted to push forward a “new town” that will plant 6,500 houses on farm fields 15 miles outside the city. At no time during the debate did the supervisors delve into the project’s impact on air quality.

Supervisor Ronn Dominici, who cast the swing vote, regrets not bringing up the issue. “I probably should have raised more questions,” said Dominici, who is also vice chairman of the valley air district. “Enough attention isn’t being directed at our bad air by boards of supervisors and city councils.”

Elected officials point to the valley’s deep poverty and 15% unemployment as rationale for not imposing regulations that might drive away industry. Farming throughout California, for instance, has been largely exempt from state air pollution laws since 1947 and has never had to answer to the U.S. Clean Air Act.

The local air district has never challenged this exemption or asked the EPA to regulate agriculture’s biggest polluters. Nor has the EPA stepped in to do it on its own.

“You can’t go to the San Joaquin Valley and not be impacted by the conditions there,” said Wayne Nastri, administrator for the EPA’s Pacific Southwest office. “We have a long way to go, and there hasn’t been much progress.”

By law, the valley should be cutting its daily emissions by a third, or 300 tons. But even as the air district has reduced some smog-forming emissions, new suburbs and freeways emit almost as many new pollutants into the air.

In the face of such growth, the daily discharge of noxious substances is being reduced by a mere 23 tons.

David Crow, the local air district’s top administrator, said the region has made progress, but not fast enough.

“Our [air quality] has been improving over the past decade despite a population increase of 500,000 people,” he said. “The improvements just aren’t enough to meet the federal standards.”

Doctors on the front line of the asthma and allergy wars are surprised to find patients who don’t make the connection between what ails them and the bad air. It got so frustrating that Fresno doctor Malik Baz decided to do something bold when he built his 9,000-square-foot medical complex along Freeway 41 north of town:

He equipped it with a tall tower that flashes each day’s air quality to commuters.

All summer long, as the big electronic red letters shouted “UNHEALTHY,” the Baz Allergy and Asthma Center filled with people wheezing and coughing and clutching steroid inhalers that had run dry.

“I had patients this summer who took their vacations on the coast and told the same story,” he said. “As soon as they got out of town, their sinuses and lungs cleared up and they stopped taking their medications. Then, as soon as they headed back and hit the valley floor, they had to pull out their inhalers again.”

This summer, the San Joaquin Valley -- touted as the area that will have more to say about the state’s future than any other because of wide open land and affordable housing -- became the first region in the nation to seek the designation of “extreme noncompliance” with federal law.

By moving to the worst category, the valley would accept a stigma in return for a reprieve: Federal officials will grant seven more years for the valley to reach air-quality standards without forfeiting $2.2 billion in highway funds and exposing the region to $30 million in industry cleanup costs.

The delay, some fear, will only play into the valley’s impulse to put off yet again making tough decisions.

Dan McCorquodale, the retired state senator from San Jose who wrote the law that established the valley air district in 1991, said he feels like “a disappointed parent who’s watched his child grow up to accomplish nothing.”

“My worst fears have been realized,” he said. “The air district has sat on its hands, and the people haven’t gotten their money’s worth.”

McCorquodale recalled that the counties had to be dragged “kicking and screaming” to form one big air district back in 1991. Oilmen in Bakersfield, farmers in Tulare, builders in Stockton, chamber of commerce heads in Fresno -- no one wanted a regional agency that took away local control.

Lawmakers ended up passing the measure but on one condition: The air district’s board would be made up of only county supervisors and city council members. Unlike in other regions of the state, the valley’s air board would have no voice from the fields of health, education or science.

“Our bill got pretty watered down at the end,” McCorquodale said. “By filling up the board with only elected officials, the cause of clean air was lost right there. It guaranteed that the only voices heard were those of industry and business.”

In 1991-92, shortly after the formation of the regional air district, local neighborhood groups concerned about sprawling suburban development urged the agency to impose a fee on new construction.

The idea behind the so-called “indirect source rule” was to make sprawl offset its own impacts. By assessing a fee of $5,000 per house, the air district could raise tens of millions of dollars to clean the air. The money could fund everything from mass transit to farmers converting their diesel irrigation pumps to cleaner-burning fuel.

But as soon as the idea was floated, records show, the letters of protest poured in from state and local building groups. The head of the Fresno-area Building Industry Assn. told residents they were wasting their time supporting the measure. The fee would be killed, he said, and it was.

With few brakes on growth, the state’s midsection has sprouted new suburbs in every direction.

In Fresno, Mike and Lisa Biskup have watched the city march north all the way to the San Joaquin River, filling an area once reserved as a greenbelt with 2,500 houses. The small farm where they raise lambs, chickens, llamas and vegetables can now feel the breath of suburbia.

Their two sons, ages 4 and 2, have grown up hearing the sound of heavy equipment tearing out nearby orchards and vineyards. Eli, their oldest, knows the different functions of a backhoe, grader, roller and trencher.

But the Sierra outside his front door is a mystery veiled in brown.

“We’ve got a perfect view of the mountains, but we haven’t seen them all summer,” Mike Biskup said. “For the past five years, my wife and I have been looking at the sky and saying, ‘My gosh, we breathe this stuff. This is so sick!’ ”

Biskup, who works for an irrigation district, began wheezing at night, and his cough lingered for months. His doctor diagnosed asthma. His wife, Lisa, a schoolteacher, loves their little rural patch, but the bad air has them looking elsewhere to raise their boys.

“It’s a geographic fact that the valley can’t sustain the development they’re talking about without destroying the air,” she said. “But they just want to keep doing what they’re doing.”

Builders say that they aren’t indifferent to the problem of air pollution but that slowing growth is the wrong approach. The mantra here should be “smart growth,” said Jeff Harris, head of the Building Industry Assn. of the San Joaquin Valley.

“As long as people continue to be born, we have a moral and ethical obligation to put a roof over their heads,” he said. “Now, how you do that is the key. It doesn’t mean drawing a line around our cities with permanent greenbelts. It means higher densities and building out in increments.”

It’s not just people and their cars moving over the mountains and settling into new tracts and befouling the air that are the problem. More than 500,000 cows -- many of them refugees from Southern California, where the dairy farm has given way to gated communities -- have joined them in the past decade. That’s one cow for every new resident. The valley now boasts 2.8 million dairy and feedlot cows -- more than all the vehicles on its roads.

Most dairymen have needed only to fill out a simple application with the county to start up. The regulatory process was so lax that in 1999 the state attorney general sued Tulare County, the nation’s No. 1 milk producer, and imposed a basic environmental review requirement.

The industrial dairies of the San Joaquin Valley bear little resemblance to the bucolic California farms in TV ads, extolling “Great Cheese Comes From Happy Cows.” Thousands of cows squeeze in and out of tight concrete stalls, kicking up dust on manure-laden running paths.

Emissions from dairies and feedlots will become the largest source of smog-forming gases in the next three years, according to air district projections. The California Air Resources Board estimates that dairies also account for 44% of valley air’s ammonia, which contributes to particle pollution.

“There is ammonia coming off these diaries, and it’s probably a significant amount,” said J.P. Cativiela, a spokesman for dairy industry groups. “[But] the 44% figure comes from a study of just one dairy over a few days.

“We’re willing to do our part, but we need more research before they start imposing new regulations.”

This same argument can be heard from fruit, nut and vegetable farmers, as well as cotton and grain growers, who form the backbone of California’s $27-billion-a-year agriculture industry.

They don’t dispute that pesticides and fertilizers release more hydrocarbons than the valley’s petroleum industry. Or that thousands of acres of almond trees, the valley’s new boom crop, create great dust clouds during harvest. They even concede a link between the fall spraying of cotton fields and what people here refer to as “defoliant colds.”

But many of the farmers say that they are barely hanging on in the face of global competition and that any clean air measures adding to their costs could drive them out of business. Like dairymen, cotton and grape growers believe that more studies are needed to identify agriculture’s exact role in air pollution and what solutions should be undertaken. A $30-million particulate study backed by farm groups has been gathering data since 1993.

“We’ve had some problems with some of the more recent samples, and we’re still working to complete the study,” said Manual Cunha of the Nisei Farmers League. “We know farming is part of the problem, but without that science we can only do so much.”

A state program that pays farmers to convert their diesel irrigation pumps to cleaner fuel has slashed emissions from farm equipment by nearly a third. But farmers have resisted proposals to do more.

Last March, the California air board announced a statewide cleanup plan that outlined new restrictions on livestock waste and irrigation pumps and raised the possibility of “no spray” pesticide days. Farm groups reacted so negatively that Gov. Gray Davis’ staff moved quickly to scuttle the plan. Winston Hickox, head of the state EPA, said the no-spray idea was “dead on arrival.” The rest of the plan was also shelved.

Kevin Hall, a local Sierra Club member, is no stranger to the farmer’s viewpoint or power. Before becoming a clean air activist, Hall spent 13 years editing California farm journals and organizing farm equipment shows.

“It’s been the same song for 12 years. ‘We need better science. We need more money to fund more studies.’ It’s one delay tactic after another,” Hall said. “Their end game is pretty simple. Avoid federal regulations at all costs.”

Hall brought in EarthJustice, the San Francisco-based environmental defense fund, to file a series of lawsuits. Citing a pattern of neglect and inaction, EarthJustice challenged, among other things, the state’s exemption on agriculture and the failure of the federal EPA and air district to oppose this free pass. In May, the EPA settled one of the lawsuits by agreeing to seek an end to the farm exemption, though it’s likely to be years before farms will be required to change their practices.

Chuck Sant’Agata, executive director of the American Lung Assn. in Fresno, senses a shift in public awareness. The air district, for instance, may soon ban winter fireplace use on bad air days, and it has pledged to reconsider the idea of a fee on builders.

“Public sentiment is changing,” Sant’Agata said. “People are starting to open their eyes. Now we have to get the politicians aboard.”

That may not be such an easy thing.

In April, a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California ranked air pollution as the No. 1 concern of valley residents, with sprawl not far behind. Yet two prominent state legislators -- Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) and Assemblywoman Sarah Reyes (D-Fresno) -- have never made cleaning up the air an issue.

“We have not touched on that issue yet,” said Reyes’ press secretary, Karen Clifton.

Last year, state Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), then an assemblyman, did take a stand when the Bakersfield Californian interviewed him for an in-depth report on air quality. He told the newspaper he was too busy dealing with other state issues to concern himself with improving the air.

This September, even as local schools canceled Friday football games for the first time because of bad air, local officials took the following actions:

* The Tulare County Board of Supervisors approved a new dairy with 14,000 Holsteins.

* The Council of Fresno County Governments urged voters to pass a tax to fund $1.3 billion in new highways.

* The air district allowed farmers to conduct open-field burning of more than 6 million tons of paper and plastic trays used to make raisins.

* The city councils in Fresno, Clovis, Visalia and Tulare pushed ahead plans for more housing tracts and more strip malls -- without studying impacts on traffic and air.

“There’s such a pressure to expedite these projects that no one in the planning departments is asking hard questions about traffic congestion and how it impacts air quality,” said Moses Stites, an assistant planner for the California Department of Transportation in Fresno. “It’s business as usual.”

At the Biskup farm on the northern edge of the city, a “For Sale” sign now marks the frontyard. As soon as their third child is born in January, Mike and Lisa Biskup, lifelong Fresnans, are moving -- to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

“I love my job, and I love this farm,” he said. “But I can’t put my kids in harm’s way anymore. We’re 10 years away from breathing even marginally better air.”

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Arax is a state enterprise reporter based in Fresno; Polakovic is an environment reporter based in Los Angeles.