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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News EPA: QC air OK except for those who breathe
Posted By John Grooms on Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 3:21 PM
The Environmental Protection Agency has news for Mecklenburg County residents. It's not the standard good news/bad news balance, this is more like pretty crummy news and even worse news. The EPA today released a report that assesses the cancer risk from breathing the air for every county in the nation — some of the reporting digs as deep as specific neighborhoods. There are apparently millions of Americans, living in around 600 neighborhoods, who are living in air that's so loaded with carcinogenic pollutants, just breathing it in can cause cancer. Luckily (at least for us), none of those neighborhoods are in this area. Consider that cold comfort, however, as the results for Mecklenburg County put us in only the third-safest level of counties (out of six levels), meaning that the concentration of airborne carcinogens here is in the 25-50 parts per million range. The national average is 36 parts per million, with 100 per million being where "a cause for concern" begins. It's no surprise that parts of Los Angeles were the worst in the country, registering 1200 per million. The worse news for Mecklenburg County is that we're in the next-to-worst category for airborne pollutants that cause respiratory problems. Get more information here.
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