Air Pollution in Albuquerque

Joining us for an interview on air pollution in Albuquerque is Harry Davidson of the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department, the air manager there, Robert Martin, past president of New Mexico citizens, Reclean Air and Water, and an Albuquerque attorney, and George Quentin of the University of New Mexico's Chemical Engineering Department. I'm Lloyd Covins, and in this program we'll be taking a look at the many aspects of the pollution problem in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. First of all, how can we establish what the air pollution problem in Albuquerque is? What is its nature? How does it compare with other problems? Is it a critical matter or is it something that will be worked out? Hi, I'm going to start off with a few general comments, and that is that Albuquerque's air problem is somewhat parallel to other metropolitan cities, and that a concentration of people creates pollution of one kind or another. We're in a hole or a box, whichever you'd like to refer to it as, just like Los Angeles,

and all the pollution that is made here, can stay right here with us whenever the wind stops blowing to clear it out, and it can build up to concentrations that are dangerous. We had an alert last month based on carbon monoxide, and during our stagnation season from the months of October through March, we have periods where the wind doesn't blow, and this is our stagnation season, which we have to be very careful. Now, where Albuquerque differs from other major cities of equal population is that we do not have any major polluting industries. Other cities were built around coal mines, steel mills, something like this. Albuquerque's industry of itself is not a particularly industry oriented city. However, we have spread the city over a wide area. We have for all practical purposes no transportation system, and as a result, everybody drives

their own car, and the good life in Albuquerque consists of living as far away from your place of employment as possible, picking up with a camper that gets about eight miles to the gallon, and driving on a dirt road, and that's our lifestyle. You've pointed out some other things in the past, I thought were very interesting, and how we differ from Los Angeles quite often, the comparison is made, but I know you pointed out some differences that altitude makes in oxygen content, and screening, and things like that. Right, and in that respect, we've got all the handicaps at this altitude, every vehicle driving up and down the street, even if it were tuned to its best possible condition, will make one and a half times as much pollution as that same vehicle operating at sea level, because Detroit simply does not design vehicles to operate at 4,000 feet and above. So we have that handicap.

We also have the handicap that our air at this altitude is less rich in oxygen content, and every breath that you take in has less oxygen to help you fight off the effects of any pollution that might come in with it. And at this altitude, we also have more intense solar radiation than sea level, because we've got less atmosphere above us to screen it out, specifically in the ultraviolet range, and it sees ultraviolet rays that act as the triggering device for photochemical smog. And to the best of our estimates, the Albuquerque can make more photochemical smog with the same concentration Los Angeles can. And again, we're in a box, and all the pollution we have can stay right here with us. Maybe, well, Harry, to talk about some of the details that go into making up smog as it were, people have a tendency to think of smog as one type of monster as it were. And really, there are many chemicals involved, and we also speak of temperature inversion. Many people may not understand exactly what we mean by temperature inversion.

Perhaps with the balloon races here this week, it might be well to make a simple analogy that if you have a hot air balloon, the balloon will rise as long as the air inside is warmer and lighter than that outside. However, should it encounter a layer of warm air aloft, the balloon would then stop rising because the air would no longer be warmer inside the balloon and outside. This same thing is true whether you have the pollution inside a balloon or outside if the pollution cloud as it were, which arise until it reached a warm air layer, then it would stop rising. And this, in effect, is like placing a lid over our valley here in Albuquerque. The pollution would stay put in the valley as it were. It does this during the winter quite often on a daily basis. We have a natural basin and cold air from the mountains drains down into the valley. So we have cold air sliding under a warm air layer. This usually breaks up during the mid-morning, and the inversion has blown away. However, there's the incident that we had about a year ago, just prior to Christmas, where

we had only a different situation in which a very large meteorological air mass settled in over the entire southwest region. And this type of an occurrence can last for a week or two or more under the proper circumstances. On the matter of the chemical pollution involved, one has to be careful. People use the term photochemical smog rather loosely. Now photochemical smog refers to chemical reactions in the atmosphere, which take place under the action of sunlight. We also have other pollutants, which are directly emitted, and are pollutants as they are emitted, such as carbon monoxide from the tailpipe sub-automobiles. But we also have other materials, which come from the tailpipe sub-automobiles, such as the unburned gasoline, nitrogen oxides. And these two materials readily react in the atmosphere to form an entire series of chemical compounds, which are not directly emitted, but are formed secondarily.

Among these, for example, you've heard of ozone. What's the interaction with humidity? I know in California, they have fog and a higher humidity content that comes in. How does that help or hinder the photochemical smog or increase the pollutants? Well, the moisture and solid particles, for that matter, which are often found in the atmosphere, whether it's salt particles from the ocean or solid particles emitted from smoke stacks, form small reaction sites, really. So that the little liquid droplet in fog can be a spot where chemical reaction takes place. So for the oxide, for example, can very slowly in the atmosphere be turned into sulfuric acid. And in a large enough quantity, it can cause quite a bit of damage if you have a high sulfur dioxide content in the atmosphere. Another thing, I'm glad you brought that up, Bob.

It's very important. Many people think of a chemical as occurring by itself in the atmosphere. But when you consider that many chemicals are out there, and they react with one another to form all sorts of insidious compounds outside of the general categories, many of which occur in small enough quantities that we don't find them very readily, but they can still have damaging health effects. The air mass that you spoke of being able to stay for a week or two weeks is the same kind of phenomenon that so many places in Pennsylvania are Los Angeles fear for their large amounts of smoke. Precisely. Denora Pennsylvania is the one, everybody quotes, in the late 40s. There have been other incidents London in 1952, had a two-week inversion, the Muse Valley in Belgium in the 1930s, had a long siege of it, in the same situation. Los Angeles, I might point out, is an entirely different type of inversion. There's a curse daily, due to cool breezes coming in from the ocean daily and sliding under warm air.

So there you have a third type of inversion. Is the Albuquerque, I guess, one, or is the highest metropolitan area in the country? Whenever, I guess, we share a lot of the same types of problems with the pollution being almost in a box. The American Salt Lake and Phoenix Tucson area, even though it's in a lower altitude, all of us are ringed by mountains and have the tendency for cold air to settle. And then you throw on top of that the lack of air mass movement during one of these stagnation periods. And just like pouring dye into a bucket of water, the more you pour in, the darker the water gets. And until you get a fresh bucket of water, you're in trouble. So now if Denver is a comparison, Denver has much more industrial operations. And the earliest figures indicate that if every vehicle in Denver was magically made into a 1975, as proposed, as far as how much each one emits per mile, they would still have to reduce their total traffic flow by about 20% to maintain the ambient standards at the

federal government requires. And quite frankly, if we set that as our goal here, the conditions around Albuquerque would get so far below what we would like to keep that there's just no comparison. We'd have an average of 15 miles of visibility. Places like Los Angeles would love to have an average visibility around 15 miles. They could find out they have mountains behind them. But out here, that's totally unacceptable. Another thing is a distinction between point sorts emissions and a total standard that you're willing to have for an area. And if you consider each fireplace, each incinerator, each automobile is a point source. As the population increases, your problem is going to compound. So it's kind of a losing battle in many ways. A lot of people haven't been aware of that distinction. That's where we look at the idea that there is no such thing as a non-pluting industry. Levi Strauss could be given as a good example.

They don't have a big belching smoke stack. They only vent their whole building as just their natural gas room heaters. And yet that's a significant increase in pollution when a facility like that goes into operation because 200, 500, 2,000 people drive an average of 20 miles back and forth to work. And it doesn't make any difference what size a pipe it comes out of, whether it's a one and a half inch diameter tail pipe or 40-inch diameters factory smoke stack. You put it in the air and you get the same result. Are we well below the federal ambient standards? No, we're not. We have exceeded the carbon monoxide standards nine times in the last calendar year. We have exceeded the particulate standards four times, and we are also exceeding the accident standards. And we have to have improvements in order to meet federal standards. Again, this only happens on a less frequent basis than, say, other larger cities. But, busting it all is

what is used as the criteria of whether or not you're in trouble. And I'll occur to use in trouble. That's an important distinction, I think, that Bob brought out the difference between emissions and ambient air quality. Ambient air quality just refers to the air, which we breathe, the air, which is around us, a normal concentration. And emissions, of course, is the concentration at the smoke stack or at the source of the pollution, which often is quite high. And the federal standards are ambient air quality standards, which, well, in themselves, are not enforceable in a court. They are the basis for enforcement strategies. And then it is the responsibility of the state agencies and the local agencies then to set up emissions plans to ensure that we stay below the ambient air quality levels at the federal plan calls for. I should also point out that it is not a very simple thing to determine what the exact effects upon ambient air quality will be even knowing the concentrations

from a smoke stack. You can make certain calculations, but it's a very difficult thing. One can't predict, for example, an hour by hour basis exactly what the concentration from a smoke stack is going to be. It depends upon the weather, the wind, what you have an inversion. All sorts of things. Yeah, the tests of the standards just taken at random and throughout the county, can they really measure all of the possible reactions going on all of the... No, we have 19 stations in the county in which we measure particulate matter. This is the high volume sampler where you draw air through a filter media and you measure the filter before and after and you're looking for particulate matter. In our areas, predominantly dirt, whether in more industrialized areas, it will be products of combustion, carbon, acid, industrial byproducts. We have three operational carbon monoxide units. We have another one that was just approved last night at one of the City Commission meetings. We'll

be monitoring it continuously, all three of these and all four of them. And we have one in a trailer and we're moving it around to various places within the county in order to try and map areas, try and find hot spots. And we also measure other pollutants that are about five other stations at different time intervals throughout the month. We're all part of a national network to measure these other pollutants. But our primary concern right now is the carbon monoxide is a direct emission and the oxidant or byproducts of automobile emissions. On the automobile emissions, and I guess it's hard for a person every time they step into an automobile to go somewhere and to really believe that they're contributing to a problem. It might be at night and they can't even see their own smoke. But three quarters of the pollution problem, air pollution problem comes from automobiles. Is the nature of the cycles in the day around the rush hour, rush hours

or early mornings? If we have a normal daily cycle would be you would reach a high point within an hour after the start of the morning rush hour, sometimes between eight and nine o'clock. Now normally we'll either have some wind or enough heating of the ground to cause vertical mixing in the air. And the concentrations will fall off and will stay off till evening rush hour. And then as the cold air settles in and traps all the pollutants in it, we can see concentration starting to rise 7 to 12 p.m. And they will stay this way until the next morning. And then if the morning rush hour adds further addition to the pollution levels, why we can be in more trouble than we were before. What most people think of Albuquerque is a windy city. And yet we have an inversion 75% of

the nights of a year, summer and winter. And the only real big difference is what time it breaks up. And the summertime will break up about 9.30 in the winter time and may not break up at all. Yeah, I've had some visual checking on that. I spent it about three years in one of the taller buildings downtown. And you can divide Albuquerque into a couple of semi-circles and off toward West Mesa. There's almost no concentration. Oh, sometimes it's short truth. Sometimes it's a sort of a salmon-colored cloud. But you can see this all the way from the Corralis area, sweeping around to the yeast and down into the south valley. And if you get down to the office early in the morning, of course I can only speak in non-technical terms for the visible pollution that you can see. But sometimes you get down early in the morning. Six o'clock is pretty clear. There's still some cloud hanging there. But around about 9 or 10 o'clock it's pretty thick. Some mornings you can barely see the mountain. You certainly can't see that far peak. You can't see the face of it at any

rate that pokes up at the north end of the mountain up by Plesitas. Then it'll clear on a good day around 11 or noon and then it'll start building up again. And on a moon that night you can see this phenomena. So anytime you get in a building you can see this boiling up. There are a number of misconceptions I think about pollution. You've touched on a couple of them here. One is this idea that an inversion cannot exist when you have wind. Now if you look at the actual history you have moderate winds with inversions quite often. Another one is the point you brought out, Lloyd, that people seem to think that when their automobiles smoking they're polluting and when it's not smoking they're not polluting. But the normal operation of an automobile in good condition still has quite a high level of pollutants which are invisible. There is particulate matter in it also from the lead in the gasoline. But it's such fine particulate less than a half micron in size. Often you can't see it until it collects with the fumes from a number of automobiles and you see

a big cloud among the city then. One thing that I've been hearing recently is that people will complain about a smoking automobile going down one of the main streets and they'll say it wasn't terrible. Look at that polluted. But I understand that some of the new cars with high horsepower that don't seem to be putting out anything are worse than a car like that for the total problem. The thing that we found out we had a cleaner air week in 1971 and in 1972. And we had emission stations over town where you could go in and get a free check. And we took these measurements and found out that this year the 1972's tested in 1972 made more pollution than the 1971's tested in 1971 and even though they were manufactured to more stringent requirements by the EPA as how the engine was designed that saving is not being evident in the field. And there's been a lot of complaint about

the pollution control devices are ruining the gas mileage and causing I had a 1968 vehicle and I got 14 miles to the gallon and now I've got a 72 and it's only getting 8. Well there's three reasons for one is the pollution control equipment. It does reduce the gas mileage by about 7%. The other factor is that when you look at the total vehicle population air conditioning is becoming a much more prevalent accessory and this because of its horsepower demands is causing more pollution and gas mileage reduction. Also if you had a 1968 brand X model one with a certain size engine and then you bought a 73 brand X model one with the same size engine you think you've got the same deal but you don't. On the average the difference between the 68's and the 73's is about 1,400 pounds heavier one part of its air conditioning other it's chrome and bigger fenders and so forth same

size engine bigger weight to carry so between the penalty of weight the use of air conditioning and the emission control devices they all three gang together to make a higher gas consumption and then you add in the other factor putting it here at altitude and that really blows it. There's another misconception here built in too as long as we're touching on some of these many people feel as long as they drive a smaller car to the Volkswagen for example that they're not polluting as much as someone with a bigger car again remember let's take the example of a Cadillac however one must realize that although a Cadillac has 8 cylinders and the Volkswagen 4 that the Cadillac has much larger cylinders operate much more efficiently it burns it's gasoline more efficiently so even though the Cadillac may use more gallons of gasoline to achieve its power it burns them more efficiently and the net result is that a Cadillac and a Volkswagen do not differ that much in the actual amount of pollutants that they put out the tailpipe. That's as long as they're both properly tuned but put

either one out of tune and that those positions can just completely swap but bad Cadillac and do a lot more than a good Volkswagen or vice versa. That's right this is another feature of the internal combustion engine that rather disturbs me is the fact that it must be tuned to a very narrow operating range to operate efficiently and if anywhere outside that range it flutes drastically and I think the point that Harry was getting at is with our attempts at small control devices on these cars we've narrowed that range even more which increases the hazard that you're operating outside the proper range. That's correct the if you put take an engine has no control devices on at all say like a 1957 engine and it was tuned properly for operation at this altitude and was not worn out say it was a brand new engine. It would produce less pollution than a 1973 with all of the pollution control going full more and yet being out of tune so you have to have both the equipment and proper tuning in order to achieve any reductions or if you go out and rip the stuff off and

say well that's taken away my horse power I can't drive it with that gear on air while you're really making it a lot worse than it ever was before. The referendum that was posed in the back into the city of Albuquerque had a fairly comprehensive series of steps that I guess you were largely responsible for bringing before the voters and it was defeated in the election could you go over again the provisions within that referendum what it was calling for what it would have cost Burnley County and what you think now is another alternative. Well basically the plan was to establish a series of stations to give emission tests and require an annual vehicle exhaust emission test of every vehicle in the county of at least gasoline burning engines in the automobile and light truck category about 175,000 vehicles

is what we're talking about and that if you had a car that could not meet the standards for that age group that continued operation of it would result in a fine as a disincentive the issue was rather soundly defeated however I feel that there were four items on that referendum the other three were very unpopular and also at that time I think there was a very strong anti-government feeling in the voting constituency that if we'd put up a proposal to give everybody in town ten thousand dollars free they'd probably voted that down too between this and there were some strategic goose on our part that also hindered the situation but the point is is that it's not a matter of if such a system is going to be put into effect in the Albuquerque Burnley County area the only options available right now is

who's going to do it and how soon because if our ambient air conditions are not improved above the federal ambient standards by 1975 then the federal government is obligated to step in and take whatever steps are necessary to accomplish that and it's always a lot more efficient and it's always a lot cheaper to do it on a local level and it is to do it on the state or the federal level because of the other levels of bureaucracy involved and we already have these hang ups with the federal enforcement of standards because they're calibrated for sea level and we have different problems from that and we need to enforce our own program based upon our own needs and this would be very difficult to get a federal program calibrated for our specific needs so if people think that they are really getting away with something by voting against issues like this or so forth

they're only just putting off the inevitable because the vehicles are the biggest source of pollution and this is one of the things that has to be attacked now if every vehicle in town we're just magically tuned to their minimum emissions level and this is the goal of an enforcement program is to see to it that every vehicle runs at its best level if that were to happen just overnight and the program was 100% effective the total emission and reduction would be about 30% that's if everything went right so this isn't going to solve our whole problem it's only a first step and now we get into the business of what do you do after that because the way our population is growing at 10% per year we'd only have three years where we'd be right back in the same boat with the same total amount of pollution and the atmosphere works on total emissions so then what do you do three years later when you're right back in the same boat so now we get into the area of transportation controls

transportation planning land use planning and other areas of organizing the operation of a city so that it minimizes the pollution our basic problem is that regardless of how large our population base grows we must produce less pollution and we're producing right now the current state vehicle inspection program what does that call for how stringent is that well in the first place there's nothing on that inspection about emissions that's strictly a safety you know breaks lights windshield wipers and the sort of thing there is no emissions test and right now that is so poorly enforced that for all practical purposes it's ineffectual yeah and the two bills I understand house bill 126 house bill 240 house bill 214 for emissions control are in trouble I think 126 was withdrawn and 214 was given a do not pass from the first committee that it was in that's correct that was the 214 was

the redose of itch bill and in effect it's dead and the other house bill is not given a very good chance for passage at this time and it is the California plan and the biggest problem there is is that we don't feel it will bring about the results necessary in the time frame we have available because at best it could cause only about 30% of the vehicle population to be inspected in any one year it requires an inspection anytime you sell the vehicle the present turnover rate of titles is about 25% so at best you could get one third of the vehicles tested and if it was totally effective you might get a 10% reduction in emissions so it's I don't think it will work fast enough to do the job with a 1975-77 deadline as far as the incentives however for getting people to actually have to pay for maintaining their automobile

their vehicle at a level with the referendum you had this a fine type arrangement worked out with the other method of not allowing the car to be sold until it is up to a standard that is quite if that's legally there it's it's quite hard to get around isn't that just a little bit of one step ahead of effectiveness then the state police say blocking up traffic for a day it is a little easier to enforce but again it's just a matter of what portion of the population are you talking about the annual inspection sees every vehicle the other program sees at best 25 to 30% of the vehicles and for example you could buy a car new and drive it to five seven ten years until it went in the junkyard and unless you've just happened to be caught by

policeman and inspected you would never be subject to any regulation whatsoever yeah I believe that the the answer to the problem is going to be what Harry touched on earlier and that was that we've got to start thinking in terms of mass transit and land use and what we want this town to be and finding alternatives because it doesn't appear that the internal combustion engine is going to be taken off the market fast enough to to solve this problem we've got to start getting into figuring out how we're going to lay out our city how we're going to order our lives how much concentration we're going to have downtown what kind of system we're going to have for getting people there and then the city's got to start each citizen's going to start engaging himself in this planning process along with the professionals so that there will be enough impetus to make the changes that are necessary one of the difficulties appears to be locally a matter of public support I think people in New Mexico may because of our clean air consider pollution control still to be a bit of a luxury

because they don't see the drastic effects yet but I think it's also imperative that we begin to do some things now and not wait until it's too late to retrieve our good air before we lose it I think the state of California a couple of years ago formed a blue ribbon panel called the Environmental Quality Study Council and one of the important conclusions in that report was that they should determine carrying capacities for the various parts of the state of California that environmentally the land could stand only so much and this included water and air pollution that there's a certain limit to which you can put the environment and they suggested that we start to plan on what those carrying capacities would be I think this is what we're talking about here in Albuquerque that we cannot continue to build in an uncontrolled fashion I think we have to optimize as far as pollution is concerned I also feel quite strongly that people do not want to spend their tax money on pollution at this time because they're not convinced of the danger I

think that we will eventually find ourselves at a point where it will cost us much more if we delay doing something about it I think the case of the automobile is a very good one it's a very difficult situation we would always like to see Detroit come up with a what I call an idiot proof non-pluting automobile one where we did not have to worry about keeping it in tune we could drive it down the street regardless of the condition and we had zero pollution I think is Bob pointed out that's that is an idealistic viewpoint we probably will not have that automobile for some time to come the thing I guess that always gets touched on is this question and just kind of as a sideline technologically it's been assertive time time and time again that there is the ability to drastically cut emissions whether it takes if it involves the complete renovation of current internal combustion engines or replacements of those engines certain modifications that aren't being made because Detroit feels the consumer wants you know part X of his automobile and he's

not going to want to give that up just so he can have cleaner air do you foresee a time when the federal government or some agency will come out and say internal combustion engines are you know will be outlawed in year X or will it will the air pollution problem bring us to that I think they're hoping to do it implicitly leaving the free enterprise system to figure out which solution to the problem will work but the standards are so stringent for 1975 the Detroit is being backed into a corner about what they do it was brought out in hearings in the Senate U.S. Senate a couple years ago that there are two alternatives one is to modify the internal combustion engine and the others to develop a new engine I'm developing a new engine is going to cost the automobile industry quite a bit but there is the potential plummet at the end of the rain mode that we may have a near zero pollution automobile if they do their job right and the other solution that we're faced with is to put something on the tail end of our present internal combustion

automobile which will either trap or convert the materials which come out the tailpipe at present this looks like what we call a catalytic reactor requires some compound like a platinum compound which will be very expensive these devices are being requested to last for 50,000 miles but we all know how long devices which are supposed to last 50,000 miles last so it also is going to be an expensive alternative however Detroit continues to make the internal combustion engine which technology they have well in hand it's quite a replacement parts business to it now as far as you are I are concerned either alternative is probably going to look the same as far as the price of our automobile either a couple hundred dollars for a catalytic converter or a couple hundred dollars per year to pay for development costs on a new engine but I think one of the big expenses is going to be the type of inspection system that we ultimately wind up with and if we continue to use the internal combustion engine we're going to have to have a very

elaborate inspection system so I continue I continue to have my idealistic hopes for a near-zero pollution automobile one of the problems that people don't talk about too much is the the growing energy crisis and that may well solve the problem for us I I don't know but we're looking more and more to the mid east for oil and basic petroleum products our economy is well the chickens are starting to come home to roost in the economy the dollar has just been devalued again this time at an official percentage the balance of payments problem is going to continue to cause us problems especially if we're importing more and more resources from somewhere else even if we come up with what you would call a zero pollution car that overlooks the energy that it takes to make these expensive chariots to carry us around from place to place in one person

in a large vehicle and I think the thing that we must get back to is that we've got to stop using as much of our resources as we are using we've got to find alternative systems so that people can get around in a town without a great deal of inconvenience it's difficult to ride the bus in this town it's an act of love on the part of most of us who do and a real dedication and until we get to the point where we have mass transit systems that can zip us around like Boston in New York where you can live your entire life in that in that town without ever having an automobile I think that we're going to continue to have great deal of trouble in albuquerque we've got a specific handy cap in creating a transit system in the fact that we spread our population so thin lee around the countryside in transportation studies if you come up with a miles of system per person we would be laughed out of the place literally trying to even think of one most transportation

systems look at much higher density however this is the way the city's built this is our lifestyle this is obviously the way the people prefer it to being jammed into apartment houses 20 stories high and one right beside the other so with this then we're going to have to look at a transit system not as a break even operation not as a money making operation in the past up until just recently this has been the whole criteria for why there's a little or no bus service in albuquerque for the size of city we had better service in 1950 than we have now because the city's four times larger and we have half as many buses running around on the streets albuquerque has 58 buses for this entire area so most of those should have been replaced about 10 years ago well you're on the subject let me interrupt just quickly can you imagine this scream and the human cry if we started putting the streets in the freeways on a pay-as-you-go system

bigger it would be a bigger shriek than the garbage bags and people are not recognizing the economics involved if you sit down and figure out what a cost you're on a car in capital investment the operating costs the insurance etc just the money out of your pocket for transportation most people would be startled to find out it's somewhere between a third and a half of their income right we did sell what we had two cars we started writing the bus on earth a couple of years ago and my wife finally said why don't we sell the thing about we'd save a lot of money in budget or I think we have excuse me for right well now if you take that total cost to the community for transportation the way we're doing it right now all right now that generates jobs there's people selling gasoline there are people repairing automobiles or people buying and selling automobiles true however you take that cost and you put that much money into a transit system and you'd have a transit system around here that you wouldn't believe even still

allowing for the number of automobiles we would have to have for people that just couldn't use it even if it was an elaborate system so uh it's the total cost but everybody thanks first of gee if I have to pay 25 cents to ride a bus every day that's 50 cents each day and that's so many dollars without ever thinking just how many money how many dollars of their money is going out for their automobile they always see a bus fare as an extra cost and of course there's quite a few families in town have three four or five cars and we kind of think that it was this portion of the population that voted uh most heavily against our mission control because uh their first I was my gosh I've got four cars and it cost $60 to get them tuned up a piece why I can't afford that so they voted no and there's always the the portion of the population that they can barely afford a an old dog that can just barely limp down the street well even on that scale if you compare what they're actually paying for transportation and put

that money available in a transit system costing then they would still be ahead but they can get an old dog for a hundred dollars and pay a little a month and they think they're saving money but they wouldn't if they had a transit system used a transit system uh for example is not just an imagined uh decrease in pollution just stop and think for a moment if you have a bus with 30 or 40 passengers well in Albuquerque you often see one person per automobile so that means 30 or 40 automobiles potentially off the streets if 30 or 40 people are riding the bus and then again these are automobiles which would generally be uh driving in city traffic a lot of stop and go driving idling at traffic lights so these are not automobiles which are driving the highway this is the highest type of fluid that you can have is an idling automobile to stop light that you're replacing on mass transit have any programs been held in do seriously by the chamber of commerce or any Albuquerque organization well right now we are in the process of attempting to

buy six new buses and these are replacement buses for equipment that should have been replaced years ago this is not an additional six buses and this has taken almost two years to uh get through the paper mill and it still isn't accomplished uh there are proposals to do transportation studies and there have been studies that would provide the basic raw data necessary to do a transportation study however it hasn't been put together into any type of a usable and readily marketable plan the as an example of everybody going their own way if you have people who want to ride to a specific destination in the morning and the evening uh rush our uh traffic uh if you were to buy a bus and just run it two runs in the morning and two runs in the evening the cost of that bus and the driver and so forth are completely prohibitive however if that bus is used to move

school children during the day during non traffic hours an example of this is the high school system is now preparing these uh this concept of a career center where a high school student going to a basic high school gets a specialized courses at the career center if those students run back and forth between those two locations during the day in their own cars by allowing them to do it and by building big parking lots at both places that's going to be a lot of pollution if those students are moved between these two locations on school buses that's better than they're driving themselves however they're moved on school buses then this removes these people as part of a potential demand for buses that could be combined with the demand for buses for morning and evening rush hour work and the same thing applies here at the university university as people coming to the university all day long during non traffic rush hours and in the evening now if there were collection points in various parts of the community where a student could go there a short fairly

short distance from his residence catch a bus to the campus and the schedule was run to coincide with the class schedule then look at all the traffic that would run and we're talking about about a three to five mile run between these two points now the campus is addressed itself to a parking problem here on campus but it only solves a terminal problem that still doesn't solve how does the student get here now you put those three together and you may have enough to demand to justify a more bus system and it may be just a customized bus system for those three markets but yet look at the improvement this would make over everybody doing their own thing all day long and all night long it's quite a go ahead I know that the Mountain Valley Association and the Mexico Citizens for Clean Air and Water the Elb Cricket Chapter having the works transportation studies the results aren't in yet so we don't have any facts and figures to give to people but I know that citizens groups are working on it and that students are involved engineers physicists people in the community who do have some expertise that they can contribute and they are participating in these

things that I would expect in the next year or so that these results will be given to various governing groups and presentations will be made and that there will be public meetings on them and these facts and figures will be brought out and some proposals will be made I know some have been made already in response to freeways for the North Valley that mass transit minor real-type systems have been proposed for for up there there has been quite a bit of resistance on the part of our society to getting out of their automobile so I think it exists on an individual level as well as a larger group level metropolitan level one example is a program in San Francisco it's involved with a couple years ago which recommended incentives to get people to ride in carpools the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Francisco as a result of that program there was a suggestion that they provide a lane for carpools and buses and the Bay Area Bridge as I understand still continues to be clogged in the main lanes and if you do ride a

carpool or bus you can still get across the bridge quite quickly so while people are using that carpool lane it's not a case of the carpool lane being clogged yet so one has to question that and another is the point that we have established quite a highway building history in this country and we have the mechanistics worked out for building highways and tax money to support it we don't we haven't had that same support for mass transit and I think it's an important factor that we now begin to shift some of the monies away from that sector the highway sector into looking at ways in which we can incorporate mass transit into our large cities the question of the actual manufacturer of automobiles for our area is Detroit looking in any way to serving the Rocky Mountain cities that have this this problem with altitude with modified engines right now their first reaction is to point at the federal environmental improvement

agency and say we can't do it because the EPA will not certify vehicles except to sea level conditions when they run these test engines EPA has offered to change that position and the offers been immediately denied and right now Pontiac and some engines and Buick and some engines does sell at extra cost a modification kit that can be put on a carburetor right now the carburetors are manufactured they are flow controlled and set by a computer at the factory and their design ranges from sea level to a thousand feet and they are not designed to be modified either by changing the size of the jets or the acceleration spring or anything else about it it's a you know then affect a closed box that you're not supposed to tanker with and have only minor adjustment keepability and we're out of the adjustment range when you bring a vehicle to this altitude so

right now it's it's a standoff there's that we're only 10% of the total production of vehicles in Detroit is a sold in high altitude areas so we're getting that right I want to stop the assembly going just just for our specific right so as a as a result we're not getting our needs met by Detroit well GM did by the rights to the wonkel engine I understand you know we think about that thinking about putting in one of their small Chevy's I understand the Vega has there's a couple of Vega's running around the country with prototype engines and of course the Mazda is a rotary engine one of the more significant advantages to a rotary engine is the fact that it is so much simpler and has so many less parts and less things to adjust that once it is tuned it doesn't get out of adjustment as quickly as a piston engine and from that standpoint it's a great improvement

also it has recyclative devices built into it that help it operate when it was originally designed it was very wasteful would been a heavy emitter but that was just with making one pass through the engine with the gases now that every that's standard procedure to recycle your gases it just leapfrogs a piston engine as far as gas economy and low pollution output so that's one improvement that would help a lot and just make a simpler engine there's one thing I'd like to ask you about Harry yeah I know there is a downtown plan for downtown Albuquerque of course anybody who drives down there can see that there's massive reconstruction and renewal going on do you think that would perhaps provide the focus the concentration for a mass transit system? that is one very good point of focus I would envision that the first type of bus system that would become functional would be a specialized rapid transit service again where you catch a bus

at one or two points in the outlying areas of the community and then have an express run to area of concentration such as the downtown area now we have gone to major places of employment and suggested that it would be a good thing for people to form carpools we have also asked people to form carpools then we have one of our emergency situations starting to build up in the alert and the warning phase that people shift into the carpools and go to and from work and carpools and help reduce the pollution levels hopefully to stay out of the emergency condition and you can play computer games dating games if you wish on the level of a carpool or a bus route or what have you and can customize bus service from a collection point or points in the community to an area but again you've got to have some other use for these vehicles now if you then after the morning rush hour shift into a route system and then go back to a custom

system in the evening to get people home this may be the most viable system we can come up with but a network of vehicles the east west and the north south cross net system gets very expensive in the amount of rolling stock that you have to have to provide adequate coverage which obviously doesn't exist now one thing I completely overlooked earlier we have been talking in large detail about automobiles and they're being responsible for 75% of our pollution what is the other 25% made up 22% of its dust off unpaid roads and the other is heating fireplaces industry and miscellaneous we have a lot of miles somewhere excess of 700 miles of unpaid roads in the county in part of that city part of it's in the county we have built groups of houses outside the existing periphery of paved streets and even though the streets in a specific group might be paved there's always that easy way to cut across the back 40 there to get better shot at the traffic

on Wyoming or Montgomery or somewhere and they don't drive on the paved streets to get down to the main artery they cut across the the open field or the unpaid street and because of the mechanics of getting areas into paving districts it has been very difficult to require paving be done in the streets that it really needs to be taken care of so this is again one of our problems the even when you don't have anyone blowing the vehicles stir this dust up they powderize the soil into very small particles and this is what does the most damaged year lungs and it stays airborne in the air longer for you to breathe when we had our alert in January I had quite a few comments that gee well you know what are you screaming about it looks pretty good out and it was it the air was fairly clear visually and that was because we've had so much rain and snow this year that the ground was sopping wet and the dust was not being stirred up by vehicles whereas in December

of 71 there was no question of how bad things wanted if you were just using a visual reference because there was dirt in the air and yet carbon monoxide is invisible and everything that we're talking about that is actually causing imminent health damage you can't see it has no real relevance to whether or not the the air looks bad another pertinent fact here is that people believe that the southwest must always have a bad dust pollution problem but the desert surface and the undisturbed areas is actually a pretty hard surface and the dust is not easily kicked up the dust that we find here in the metropolitan areas is largely as Harry says from unpaved roads and from yards and areas which have been scraped clean and I think we all know there are subdivision flats around the city which have already been roads have already been scraped off and it's areas like this that contribute heavily to the dust pollution when the wind wind occurs so that we must consider paving our unpaved areas or planning them with some sort of cover lastly then I guess if we can review the plans and strategies that we need to look forward to in some

kind of alleviation or in maintaining what our current air pollution problem is of course the public awareness aspect what you just pointed out about what Harry just pointed out concerning the problem that being a visual one where it's often interpreted as being visual by the individual consumer this public awareness and I guess willingness to put out the money now because it's going to be put out later the land planning mass transit possibly the technological breakthroughs in automobiles what other strategies are alternatives do you see well I can foresee that generally a reduction in the use of the individual driving his own automobile whether this be by taxation of the automobile or gasoline whether this be by high parking fees whether this be by special traffic lanes that only carpools or buses use

certain traffic lanes during rush hours these are some of the mechanisms but the real means of addressing the problem is for the public as a whole to demand and use other than their own cars to get around and this means that you tell people that you want a transit system that works and you're willing to put up the tax dollars to provide it and then you once it's available you use it and this isn't something that comes overnight if tomorrow morning there was money magically laid on the table to buy a adequate transportation system for arbitrary it'd be five years before the thing would be operational whether you're talking about buses monorails or combinations and we haven't got five years to wait because when we had our first alert in December 71 we asked the question will just how much carbon monoxide can this metropolitan area absorb until we're in the alert condition which is nine parts per million and we had 1970

traffic data at that time and the answer came back that if we double the miles driven and therefore the amount of carbon monoxide produced between from the 1970 level that we could be in the alert condition up to 50 percent of the hours of a year and that doesn't count hot spots like freeways or holes in the ground and so forth. The alert is breaking briefly the alert from the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department says what to the person is dangerous to be outside or dangerous at this time you are endangering anyone who has a pre-existing lung condition infosima cancer hooping cough someone who just came out of an operation who might go into pneumonia predominantly those people and old people in general and infants in general so that's the alert level the warning level that we've come very close to twice now endangers approximately 50 percent of the general population in causing some imminent health damage and that may not drop

dead on the spot their lungs may get irritated and then opens the door to infection and you have a big flu epidemic or something and that may be fatal or have them out of work so the emergency level is when you have to take steps immediately in this case the state of emergency is declared and literally we have to close the town down and only emergency services and vehicles are allowed to drive everybody goes home and sits there until it clears. You do have those police powers. Yes the city and county manager can declare this condition if they should fail to take this action under these pollution conditions and the governor is required to do so and should he not do it the federal government has guaranteed they will and they have done this in Birmingham, Alabama's an example where the local agencies were not effective and the federal court moved in and shut down the industries and took care of the problem. One point I would like to caution on that we must consider the longer-range future problems that we have currently federal standards

for six major pollutants, quickly the carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, oxidants from photochemical reactions, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter and we are talking here predominantly about strategies which will accomplish reduction of these six pollutants across the country but I think it's also necessary to point out that there are other hazardous chemicals in the atmosphere for example asbestos we know that asbestos fibers when inhaled can cause cancer and if you stop to think a moment that not all the chemicals come out the tailpipe of your automobile because you have asbestos in your brake blindings so this is a material which the federal government has not established an air quality criteria for you now that the Clean Air Act specifies 19 additional pollutants including asbestos lead some probably nuclear aeromatics which are cancer-producing materials from automobile exhaust and there are as I said

a list of 19 compounds altogether and the National Academies of Science and Engineering have been asked to produce air quality criteria documents and so ultimately we will have to develop strategies for these additional 19 pollutants so I think it's important for us not to think that as soon as we conquer the six big ones the problem is going to be done and we can send Harry home to his wife and kids again. I think that for me at any rate my feeling is that the automobile is one of the largest problems that we have here I think we're going to need to have increasing exposure of the public consciousness to the problem. More newspaper articles, more radio programs, more television specials, somehow without pressure to gain the public's attention. I think the public is looking around for a boogie man and the old pogo quote is we have met the enemy and he is us and we've got to get people to start realizing that and if they don't realize it

informally then I think we're going to have to start putting the pressure down at the point source and that's on each person we're probably going to start rationing probably going to start requiring carpools and things of that nature and once we do that people are going to say well we don't want to live this way we'd rather ride on a nice bus or a monorail or some sort of system like that then I think that they will they will start to move but I think the ordering of public priorities being what it is you're going to have to get their attention and probably the best way to get it is economically and I don't like that alternative but I'm afraid that's going to be the wrath that we're going to see. Real good thank you very much for joining us today we've been talking to Harry Davidson the air manager of the Albuquerque Environmental Health Department George Quentin of the University of New Mexico's Chemical Engineering Department and Robert Martin a lawyer here in Albuquerque and past president of New Mexico's citizens for clean air and water. This program is another in a series of aspects of the environmental crisis in New Mexico produced by the Public Affairs Department of KUNM Daniel Saz technical director

Marigold Fine research and myself Lloyd Covins special acknowledgements to participants of this session and all of the other panels on the different environmental programs from the public affairs department of KUNM FM Albuquerque good evening