Report Gives Central Ohio Flunking Grade for Air Quality

Central Ohio's air quality is getting failing grades from one of the biggest names ion breathing: the American Lung Association.  In its annual State of the Air Report, several counties, including Franklin, were given Fs and many others received Ds.

Asthma sufferers like Barbara DeVille aren't surprised.

"I'm having a flare-up right now!" she told NBC 4's Marshall McPeek Tuesday afternoon. "I have to take an inhaler with me everywhere I go."

She says the air quality has been really difficult lately because of the pollen and the pollution.  Attacks make her feel fatigued, as if she's walking around in a daze.  She says it's difficult to recover even with a rescue inhaler.

"You just can't breathe.  You feel like you're breathing through water," she says.

DeVille is a Registered Nurse who helps treat people with asthma and allergies. And she says she knows the air quality is bad long before any alerts are issued.  She believes the local air quality has gotten much worse in the past ten years.

"You feel absolutely hopeless because you feel like nothing is going to change," she says.  "You just know that you're in for a rotten summer."

The ALA's State of the Air Report says Franklin County had 48 "Orange Days" last year. That's when the air quality is poor enough because of ozone or particulates to require warnings for people who are sensitive to pollution. 

The Lung Association estimates that Columbus' air quality is putting nearly 30-thousand residents at risk for pediatric asthma, 80-thousand for adult asthma, another 12-thousand for emphysema and more than 282-thousand at risk for cardiovascular disease (that's nearly one-quarter of the county's population).

Potential Effects of Air Pollution on Franklin County Residents

27,265 at risk for Pediatric Asthma

80,146 at risk for Adult Asthma

12,386 at risk for Emphysema

282,692 at risk for Cardiovascular Disease

The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission also tracks local air quality and says it's actually improving.

"If you look at the actual ozone and particulate numbers, we've actually gotten better. But the standard has gotten higher," says Chester Jourdan, Executive Director of the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission.  "The standard is much more stringent than it used to be. It's more focused on the health implications. And so as we do better, we have to run harder and faster to make a little bit of difference."

One of the problems for Central Ohio's atmosphere is that poor-quality, polluted air moves into our area from other regions, especially from the industrial Cincinnati area. It's called "transport."

"Air flows. Water flows.  So, we can't just put a wall up just because we drew a line on a map and called it Franklin County," Jourdan says.  "What we have to do is work with our communities across the state and with the Ohio EPA to make sure we're looking at it regionally."

Jourdan says it's an ongoing process and it can present economic development challenges.  But he says improvements are being made.

"It's a great quality of life here. We're doing great things here. We're proving every day, our quality is improving every day and we are making a difference," he says.

Barbara agrees that any solution has to be regional and even national.  In the meantime, she's keeping her inhaler nearby.  And so are her patients.

"They all say, 'All I have to do is stay in the house. I'm okay if I stay in the house.' That's no way to live."

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