Troubling trend of ozone alerts

06:52 PM CDT on Tuesday, June 28, 2005

By Dan Lauck / 11 News

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There is a growing health concern about Houston's pollution problem sparked by the city's high heat.

Air-11 got a bird's eye view of the haze that appeared so thick Tuesday you could cut it with a knife.

Current ozone levels have reached level "orange" on the west side of Houston, which means the air out there can be unhealthy for children, the elderly or people with respiratory problems.

Some people most at risk from high ozone levels may have been exposed, despite a system to keep them safe.

It's only June and already the ozone days are mounting. Another day, another ozone watch.

At the House of Tiny Treasures that means no kids' bottoms polishing the slide. The toy car is parked and the cat is safe and all is quiet.

The daycare kids came outside for an hour first thing Tuesday morning then went back inside. "They don’t come back out except to load on the vans," said Mitzi Bartlett, House of Tiny Treasures.

Already this year, Houston has exceeded the federal ozone standards on 26 days, far ahead of any other year as of this date.

"Usually we don't see this until later in the summer, until August or September. If these conditions continue, in August and September we could have a landmark year here," said Jane Laping, Mothers for Clean Air.

There is another problem. The state environmental agency watches the ozone levels, hour by hour, and tries to send out warnings when the air quality is going to reach the unhealthy -- or orange stage.

The formula the state is using has missed four of the past eight days. Once they predicted the ozone would only go orange at one monitoring station. It proved to be 12. Another time they predicted three monitoring sites, but it was 16.

"This is serious stuff for people with respiratory problems," Laping said. "The State of Texas is not protecting the health of its citizens."

They have learned how to protect tiny treasures. They take them inside.

Weather conditions have been ideal for the development of ozone, meaning little wind, hot and dry. But Brian Lambeth, who makes the ozone forecasts for the state, said Houston is much more difficult to predict than, say, Dallas because of all the petrochemical plants.

He said in Dallas they're 75 percent accurate, but in Houston just 60 and 65 percent.