Smog problem serious in Quinte, says lung association

By Cameron Ginn

Periodically, Quinte West has been known to suffer the worst smog episodes in Ontario, says Brian Stocks, air quality manager for the Ontario Lung Association.
Centrally located in the Windsor-Quebec City Corridor, the most industrialized region in Canada, Quinte West is occasionally affected by a significant amount of transportation exhaust, industrial toxics from the GTA and trans-boundary smog from the U.S., which, according to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, accounts for 50 per cent of all air pollution in Ontario.
“In the Belleville area, you’re getting trans-boundary smog across the lake, but also a good portion of what’s generated downwind in the Windsor-Quebec corridor,” says Stocks, who works in Windsor, Ont., and has been providing information about smog and respiratory diseases to the public for 27 years.
“All the transportation sources and the industrial sources in the southwest also move with wind, and I’ve seen on occasions when Quinte West had some of the higher readings than any other place in the province.”
On a given day, urban smog can waft hundreds of kilometres away, to be left idling above rural areas as winds diminish, said Stocks.
“It’s a function of how much pollution is in the air and what the temperature is. If there’s a weather inversion and winds die down and the pollution isn’t moving out, it can become stagnant and hang over the city.”
North America’s vast freshwater lakes facilitate the transfer of smog into Ontario’s southeastern regions, something known as fumigation on the lake, says David Yap, senior science advisor of air quality and meteorology for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment in Toronto.
“When heavily polluted air is coming in from the U.S., it’s very stable, and doesn’t disburse much, partly because the temperature of the lake is constant. When it comes ashore, it tends to keep slightly higher in elevation, but the temperature of the land lowers it rapidly to ground level,” says Yap.
“Because Belleville is located close to the north shore of Lake Ontario, it’s one of the areas getting all the flow coming up from the U.S., where a large contribution of the precursors for smog is coming from.”
Smog season typically occurs in Ontario during peak summer months, when heat and sunlight spark a chemical reaction at the earth’s surface between nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOC) – comprised of emissions from motor vehicles, electrical utilities, gasoline vapors, chemical solvents and factory emissions – that generates a harmful air pollutant called ground-level ozone, the main component of smog, alongside particulate matter, said Yap.
“They’re far away, but when you look upwind of Belleville, there are hundreds of power plants covering the American Midwest, and during summer, that’s a large contributor to all the smog and chemical conversions that we see producing ground-level ozone in Ontario,” says Yap.
“Our understanding is that it takes a lot of reductions of those sources in the U.S. to get significant benefits in Ontario.”
Reducing trans-boundary air pollution begins at home, says Yap, where the Ontario government has pledged to abolish coal-burning power plants by 2014, and it implemented Drive Clean, a mandatory emissions test for all road vehicles in Ontario.
“That’s where we’re impacting some of the big emission factors in Ontario. Not to say trans-boundary smog isn’t important, because it’s causing a lot of health problems here, but at the same time, we know our own sources of pollution, and we are addressing those sources in Ontario, so we can’t ask people in the U.S. to cut back if we’re not doing our own homework as well,” says Yap.
The Illness Costs of Air Pollution, a 2005 report conducted by the Ontario Medical Association, which studied the health and economic consequences of air pollution in Ontario over the next 25 years, estimates that smog is responsible for the premature deaths of 5,8oo people annually.
“These aren’t people who die of an illness called smog, these are people with illnesses that are impacted by smog,” explains John Wellner, director of health promotion for the OMA.
“And because of population changes in the demographic of Ontario, it would have been slightly greater for 2006, 2007, 2008, and so on. What this shows is that there is an increase in the vulnerability of the population, partially because the population is aging.”
While repeated exposure to high levels of smog often aggravates existing respiratory illness, it can also play a leading role in the development of cardiac disease.
“What we’re learning more and more is that it’s not all respiratory, that there are many heart condition impacts as well. In fact, of the 5,800 deaths, about two third’s are estimated to be cardiac conditions, rather than what we would originally think of as just asthmatics,” says Wellner.
Susan Lewis, a resident living in the shadow of some industrial smokestacks, is fairly oblivious to the daunting realities of air pollution in eastern Ontario.
“I know we get bad cases of smog some years, and it’s crossed my mind that I might be breathing in certain things, but the local sources are what I think of, not smog coming up from the U.S.,” says Lewis.
“To think I could have respiratory disease and not know about it until later in life, that’s the scariest part. I could be one of those 5,800. And to know I could have been doing something about it. It makes me wonder why I should have to worry about what I’m breathing in the first place?”