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Hello.

Thanks for joining us for sustaining us here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.

Los Angeles and air pollution.

This can be a confusing situation these days.

L.A., according to a recent study, says some of the most polluted air in the entire U.S.. Makes sense.

Los Angeles has the most cars on the road, the most landfills, the most industry, the most plants and facilities of any California city.

And yet it's kind of baffling.

The skies hovering over the City of Angels have in recent years been the most smog free in the clearest they've ever been.

How can that be?

We're going to find out exactly why later in the broadcast.

First, though, we introduce you to a Southern California woman who is an expert on air pollution as she leads the way in her fight to clean the air in the Southlan 20, 25 years ago, if you were to fly into L.A.X., you could not see but five feet in front of you, you landed.

And it was just this dog hazy, yellowish cloud hovering over Los Angeles.

A quarter century ago in Los Angeles, California, the downtown skyline was nowhere to be found.

Neither were the century city skyline nor the tall towers lining Wilshire Boulevard.

Formidable.

Sure to the city's West Side, the Hollywood sign and surrounding hills were hit in the Santa monica and San Gabriel Mountains were a dark, shadowy haze.

Much of L.A. was lost in the plumes of soot and smoke that filled the air.

Pollution had infested the skies above Southern California and beyond Cars, school busses, trucks, industrial plants and facilities.

They were all emitting toxic levels of exhausted over the years had camouflage.

The once blue skies with thick smog.

Back then, it took a mass of rain in the Southland over a couple of days to clear out all the dirt.

A very temporary solution for Mother Nature.

That's when something had to be done for the health and safety of millions of Southern California residents.

The state of California political leaders, environmentalists, they banded together with the help of agencies like the EPA and AQ and today known as CHC HQ on the South Coast Air Quality Management District, they began a collaboration of sorts to rid the skies of the massive amounts of air pollution.

This effort in part involves things like implementing new air pollution rules and regulations, fining companies for polluting the air, and overseeing the massive cleanup of chemicals that were filtering into the air.

Today, Southern California has improved on many days.

There's a clear view from miles away of these iconic places just mentioned.

Some say the air pollution is a crisis of an all time high.

Others say it's being exaggerated.

The air pollution is not as bad as many scientists or meteorologists or engineers want to say it is.

How do you give some perspective on the air quality in the Southland and throughout the United States?

Los Angeles, all of California is in a much better position than it used to be, but we're really not there yet.

Does that mean it was good enough that we don't need to do anything?

No, But we need to stay conscientious of what else are we doing?

Do we have clean water to a point that we don't need to ever worry about our wastewater and clean water?

No.

This is a continuous process that has to really take place.

I really think all of this should be looked at carefully for the region.

We cannot afford to lose manufacturing capabilities in USA.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is we can't kill industry, but we need to do it so that we provide solutions all the time so they know that there are ways to do this properly, cleanly, environmentally conscious.

Anisha Askew John is helping provide that solution in an environmentally conscious way.

She's an expert in air pollution.

Anusha has a storied life.

She fled Iran as a teenager during the Iranian revolution of the late seventies, as her homeland was being devastated in a fanatical religious and political war that continues to destroy Iran and its people today.

Anusha, on her own, miraculously found her way to Denver and a few years later got a chemical engineering degree from the University of Colorado, then some MBA training, eventually achieving great success as both a business and environmental leader.

Today, I knew she is the CEO and president of Ship and Shore Environmental, located in Long Beach, California.

And these days she's winning her personal war against air pollution and helping companies all throughout the world become more environmentally friendly.

Ship and Shaw is a Southern California company that creates and implements industrial clean air solutions for air pollution abatement.

This is a complicated process, simply put, and you should help design, engineer and manufacture pollution control systems for any company that emits emissions.

And while she did not name names.

Client confidentiality.

In all, it's fair to say there's no shortage of companies she works with guilty of spewing pollution into the air.

For example, ports in metropolitan cities, companies throughout the U.S. that make everything from sunglasses, eyeglasses and skylights to building construction and installation materials, metal processing factories, asphalt and paint plants, meat processing plants, smokehouse facilities, plastics processors.

These companies and their chemical products often produce toxins that seep into the air and cause the smog and soot.

The particulate matter, the pollution.

Pollution control is every single potential possibility to abuse these emissions orders that may be coming off of a lot of industrial facilities that needs to be captured and controlled.

And all these harmful viruses cannot get through the atmosphere.

B or C stands for volatile organic compounds.

So any time anyone uses any type of chemicals in the process of building things, making things, processing things, they always have a tendency of giving off the emissions because they're lighter.

And it's just a ship and sure uses what's commonly known as combustion equipment to help rid the air of emissions.

For example, things like regenerative thermal oxidizer is catalytic oxidizer, boilers, burners, carbon and zeolite absorption.

In addition, a new process things like waste, heat recovery and energy consumption reduction are an integral part of each ship and shore engineered solution.

So let me let me see if I get this.

You are one giant, massive vacuum cleaner and you're just taking in all the pollution and you're getting rid of it, basically.

That would be a good way to put it.

It's a massive vacuum cleaner.

But what you vacuum is all you have to do something with it.

What do you do with it?

So we destroy it.

We destroy it in our own system.

How do you do that?

That is through the process of combustion.

We basically vacuum it all in.

It comes to our system.

And eventually one of the most important systems that we do that is utilized among a lot of different industries is called Artiole.

Regenerative.

So more oxidizer.

So through the process of combustion and thermal, we will destroy the fuel seeds because all of that is destructible at a higher temperature.

If you were to take a torch, direct fire to anything that is chemical, you could burn it all off, right?

So what we do is we take all that we conduct within a chamber that is pressure controlled temperature, controlled and environmentally controlled, and make sure that we take the temperature up to about 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and destroy and break down all of the chemicals that have been collected.

Well, this is what is called a regenerative thermal oxidizer.

This unit, by the time it's done, is about three times the size that you see here.

It will be going outside of a facility to become the gigantic vacuum cleaner that we were talking about.

To suck in all the air from this plant and make sure the facility has zero pollution that is coming off of it, is going to Dallas, Texas.

We assembled here, we put it all together, then eventually take it apart and ship it all the way to Texas.

This is like an apartment building.

I mean, it's like a three storey building.

How do you even transport this?

Well, by the time this is disassembled, it goes on multiple trucks and it is shipped all the way to Texas.

And then our team and crew will go there and put it back together again.

So we basically, literally the sheets of Nero that you saw that is coming into this side of the facility is all then rolled, welded, put together and designed such that it could remove the pollution from this plant that is going to.

In the simplest of terms, for someone who is not very technical like myself.

How exactly does this work?

It basically takes it all in through all the docks down here and takes it through the chambers here that you see up on top.

And another segment will go on top of it to close it totally off.

And inside of it, the air movement at a high temperature.

We get rid of everything that there is.

Ship and Shaw Environmental has about 50 employees here.

This includes all the engineers, the design team, the drafting experts, the research and development team, the manufacturing team, the sales and marketing folks and all the boots on the ground workers who keep this plant running, Anusha explains.

This is all part of her green energy industrial solution, a common sense approach to how the company she works with mitigate their air pollution problems.

All this while these same companies make money and create millions of jobs in the US, Anusha insists going green doesn't have to mean losing money on Russia.

As a staunch advocate of businesses and manufacturers through her active participation on several local and national boards and committees that encourage a business friendly environment, her fight is to save jobs and save the planet.

Anusha says companies can be good sustainability citizens and be profitable with some help from her.

We turn your emission into assets they could bring back to the planet.

Thank you so much, Anish.

Scurry on in all the good ship and shore environmental folks who allowed us to tour the facility there in Long Beach.

California's great story.

Now joining us to further this discussion is Wayne Mastery.

Wayne is the executive officer of the South Coast HQ, and before that he was with the US EPA and as a regional administrator for the Southwest region, which includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands.

Also joining the panel is Dr. Sarah Reese.

Dr. Reese is the deputy executive officer in the Planning Rural Development and Implementation Division with South Coast HMD.

She helps manage the development of state implementation plans and the air quality management plan for her division.

Things like strategies and rules for air pollution control, air quality evaluation and air toxin risk.

Thank you both so much for being here.

I pleasure you for inviting us.

Well, quite the resume.

That's why I have you here, beginning with you.

What actually is the state of air quality in Los Angeles and the Southland these days?

Well, thanks, David, for asking that question.

You know, like you, I grew up here in the Southland, and I can tell you that if you look at the air quality today, we are much, much better than we have been over the last several decades.

In fact, we're nearly 80% better than we were.

When you look at smog levels compared to the fifties.

And then if you look at particulate matter, which is also very important, we've seen more than a 50% reduction in particulate matter.

So even though we've had these tremendous reductions and improvements in our air quality, the sad fact is that unfortunately, we still have some of the worst air quality in the nation.

So we still have a big job to do, but we're working on our best to address those emission sources.

And for us at the South Coast HQ and our main authority lies with stationary sources and we have limited authority when it comes to mobile sources.

And that's where the state, the California Air Resources Board and the US government, the US Environmental Protection Agency, have a much stronger role.

And when we look at the mix of pollution within our region, it's the mobile sources that account for over 80% of the smog forming compounds right now.

So what we're doing right now is not only are we being aggressive on stationary sources, on refineries, on dry cleaning stations, gas stations, the like, but also trying to get the federal government, the state government, to be much more aggressive on those mobile sources, such as planes, trucks, ships and locomotives.

Those are going to be key to our success in meeting the air quality standards.

David And Dr. Reese, it is kind of confusing as Wayne talks about.

I mean, there's obviously so many reports that say L.A. has some of the worst air quality, the US, the worse, as Wayne was alluding to.

Yet in recent years, you're looking at the clearer skies we've had, right.

The least amount of smog and particulate matter in southern skies, or at least it seems that way.

Talk more about this sort of confusing dynamic, Sara.

Sure.

I mean, this is a great question.

And as Wayne mentioned, we have come a long way in terms of reducing air pollution over time, and we're much, much cleaner than we have been.

When you compare what our air quality looked like even several decades ago, but we are still the worst in the country for ozone, second or third worst for fine particulate matter, depending on the air.

A lot of times when you see the days that are very clear, it's often because we have weather conditions that could be very conducive to clean air.

So if those days where is rain for example, that washes out the pollution, if there's days where there's a lot of winds and what we call ventilation, it blows the pollution away.

So it doesn't have opportunity to form.

So sometimes we have years where we're pretty lucky in terms of the number of days that can clear out the air.

But overall, we still have a very daunting air quality challenge that we need to address that is still impacting the health of our residents.

Yeah.

Speaking of that challenge, Wayne, what specifically is South Coast HMD doing to try to keep the air pollution to a minimum?

Well, thanks, David.

You know, part of what we have just completed is a development of our 2022 air quality management plan.

And what that really is, is the blueprint, if you will, for rules that we're going to develop that are going to address emissions from various sources.

You know, as I said earlier, it's stationary sources.

And we've really regulated industry to a great extent.

And we're now really getting down to what are the things that are remaining that we can really address.

And in our latest air quality management plan, we like to call it a zero emissions plan.

And I'm sure you've heard a lot of talk about gas stoves and ranges and what are things that people can do in their homes, such as the use of heat pumps.

And when you think about it, one individual home may not make that much of a difference.

But when you have 11 million homes, all of that adds up.

So not only are we continuing to look at what industry and the regulated community can do, we're also looking to see what level can we get down to to make the emissions such that we can achieve those air quality standards.

But David, I want to point out another important point on how important it is that the federal government and the state government pitch in, and that is even if our emissions were at zero today, we still wouldn't be in attainment because of those federal sources, those planes, trains, trucks and ships.

So it's really important that we do everything that we can.

And you've seen industry move to zero emissions.

You're hearing so much about the electric grid, about infrastructure, your development and placement, about hydrogen utilization for fuel cells, for microgrids, all of these type of technologies.

We're investing heavily in.

We're working with other agencies and we're we're doing it in a way that really maximizes that effect and does it also in a way that accelerates the deployment of that technology and the infrastructure to support it.

Dr. Reese, listen, elaborate a little bit more on what Wayne is talking about, because obviously and correct me if I'm wrong, the state of the city of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, we have we have the most industrial plants, the most facilities and most companies.

There's a port of Los Angeles, all these places that are emitting so much smog into the air.

What do you suggest these folks do to maybe reduce some of the pollution that is being filtered into the sky?

Right.

So we do have a lot of industry and you mentioned the ports.

We have the largest port complex in the U.S. And in fact, when you look at the ports, two taken together, all of the equipment associated with them would be the top source of emissions in our region.

And so, you know, for our industry, we ask that you comply with our rules and regulations.

We have some of the most stringent regulations in the country.

So to comply with the requirements that we have in place for the ports, for other entities, we ask them continue.

They work with us to identify advanced technologies, to invest in incentive programs so that we have the funds to be able to turn over fleets to cleaner technologies and just to continue to work with us to explore all avenues by which we can get the clean technology in place and be able to get towards our move to zero emissions.

So talk more about that, Sara, because obviously you mentioned the rules, regulations.

Obviously, South Coast AT&T has been around for ever trying to fight back against air polluters, so to speak.

But what specifically do you do to keep them in check?

I mean, I know you fine them.

I know you monitor them.

There's oversight, there's accountability.

Talk more about that.

We do have a robust compliance and enforcement division.

And then our rules themselves when we go through and look at different technologies that are available to control emissions, we're always implementing the best available control technology.

We're always looking at the development of that technology and make sure our requirements are the most stringent and up to date.

But to get back to Wayne's point, it really is the mobile sources of pollution are the problem.

Over 80% of the smog forming emissions are coming from these mobile sources.

And when you think of the greater Los Angeles area, you think of cars.

But those are actually relatively clean.

It's the trucks, it's the ships, it's the locomotives, it's the aircraft.

And so figuring out ways in which we can get those cleaner, that's really the paramount concern for us.

Well, you talk more about that.

I'm I'm guessing that.

Yes, it's the cars, it's the trucks.

It's it's all that.

But I also and I've reported on many stories over the years where there are a lot of companies or a lot of industry that are out of compliance and not doing what you asked them to do.

Let's be honest here.

Yeah.

You know, David, that is a problem and it's one that we really work closely with many other agencies across the spectrum, whether they be at the local, state and federal level.

You know, I can tell you, we work with many cities.

We work with the counties, and we work with the state and federal agencies.

And oftentimes we may combine in a task force if we're going to look at a specific facility, if we have reason to believe there's widespread wrongdoing.

I think one of the things that really helps us address these type of issues, though, is transparency.

And when I say transparency, David, I'm really talking about the public's ability to look at data and understand what's going on.

And a specific example I'm thinking of that gets to what you're saying is that fenceline monitoring that we utilize around refineries and this is real time data or near real time data that people can look to online and can sign up for notifications if there's exceedances of certain values at the fenceline.

And so having access to that kind of information does a couple of things.

One is it allows the community to see and it allows the community to act as a notify, to notify us in the events of these kind of events happening.

We track much of that as well, but it's that availability of data and that near time availability of that data that makes a difference so people are able to report.

I think the other aspect when I talk about transparency is the ability or the ease in which people report.

It has to be easy.

So we have a one 800 cut smog.

And we also have a mobile app.

And if you haven't seen it, I hope you get a chance to look at it because it gives you a lot of useful air quality data.

But one of the other things that it does, it also allows you to file complaints online, and that information is then relayed to our enforcement and compliance team.

And I can tell you that they can respond very quickly.

You know, we have a standing rule that we try to respond within 2 hours to our complaints.

Sometimes when we're having literally hundreds of complaints, for instance, you may recall the Dominguez Channel event that happened a while back, and we literally had thousands of complaints working with the community.

But again, it was the ease in which people have to report concerns.

It's the ease in which people have to look at the data and again, have regulated industry, know that they're constantly being looked at.

And I think that helps to really ensure compliance, but it also helps to have a very strong enforcement and compliance team.

We have a number of inspectors, I want to say close to 100 inspectors who go out every day that are looking at facilities, ensuring that they're doing the right thing.

And then we also have people that are actually monitoring and analyzing data that's reported to us throughout the year.

All of those really give us a robust enforcement program that I like to believe is second to none, because of the partnerships and the experience that our group brings to the table.

You know, it's interesting because, Dr. Reese, I was out there on some of these, I guess you could say reports where folks, let's say in Orange County or similar Nino or Riverside or L.A., they'll say, oh my God, the air is terrible out here.

It smells horrible.

What are we going to do?

And then I'll I'll talk to folks at the HQ and they will send out an inspector.

But I was always curious, Dr. Reese, how do you exactly measure for that pollutants or the air pollution?

I mean, are there machines, are there gadgets, Are there what?

Pollution detectors, air monitors?

How the heck do you do all this?

Sure.

That's a great question.

I mean, we have a variety of ways in which we measure air quality.

So we have regular stations, a network of monitors throughout our region.

Those are the ones that are very sophisticated and those are the ones we rely on to show whether we comply with standards or not.

But there's also other kinds of monitoring devices that we have to.

For example, if we get complaints like what you say, where a facility is a citizen is calling a complaint on a facility, we can send out a mobile monitoring platform to give a snapshot of what the air quality looks like.

There's also monitors Lora, based in communities we call our Purple Air Network.

These aren't ones that we run, but they're folks in the community that have access to these monitors.

They're also out there on a network and provide some information on air quality.

So we have a whole host of ways in which we measure air quality.

We also do computer modeling to estimate what air levels are like.

And all of that information gets fed back into our app.

So folks can download that app, click where they live, and see a snapshot of what their air quality looks like.

When it's there.

I have a final question.

We have about a minute, a minute and a half left.

Whoever wants to answer it.

No worries.

But I've got to ask obviously, many scientists, researchers, climatologists, meteorologists, whatever the case may be.

You know, I talked to all the professors at the various universities are insisting air pollution is a massive crisis today.

It's terrible.

We've got to solve this problem.

Yet, as you know, there are many critics of you folks, critics of South Coast HMD, who say this theory is wrong.

You shouldn't tell people that the pollution is a crisis.

It's being overhyped.

You make too much out of it.

Talk a little bit about Wayne.

What is going on here, because that's confusing as well.

Yeah, you know, Dave, that's a really good question.

And I want to go back to why was the South Coast HMD formed south?

Because it was formed to address the air quality problems that we face and we were tasked with achieving the state and national standards.

So it's the US government, the US Environmental Protection Agency, that does the research, that establishes the values through a very lengthy process.

And then our responsibility is to develop a plan that addresses those standards.

And so to those many critics who talk about the data, our direction to them is you need to talk to EPA, you need to talk to the National Academy of Sciences, National Institutes of Health, and all these other organizations that have done the research, that have established the public health harm, the human health harm, the harm to the environment.

Our role is to develop the plans that meet the standards so that we reduce that harm that has been identified.

And to to those who don't agree with that, they're certainly entitled to their perspective.

But our responsibility and our task is very clear, and that's what we do through the development of our plans, through the development of our rules and through the enforcement of those rules.

And that's what we're going to continue to do when necessary.

And Dr. Sara Reese, thank you so much for a great interview.

I greatly appreciate it.

Thank you.

Now for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact us to send us your questions, your comments, your story ideas so we can hear from you or contact me at @DavidNazarNews on Twitter or just go to DavidNazarNews on YouTube.

Contact me there.

You know, I'll get back with you and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS app for All Things Sustainable.

Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Sustaining US here on KLCS PBS.

I'm David Nazar.