11/7/2023 0 Comments Hot wheels burnin rubber guide(Maybe she shared what she heard with her husband and that started him down his research path.)įour years later, he was ready with his results. He began his smog research in 1948 - a year of wretched smog attacks, and the year his wife shared hostess duties when L.A.’s first smog czar addressed Caltech’s faculty women’s club. The bearer of the bad news was the Caltech chemist Ari Haagen-Smit. Later on in life it turns out that air pollution has a role to play in terms of thinking about Alzheimer’s and dementia and the rate of neurological decline.”Ī postcard from Patt Morrison’s collection shows a long-ago view of downtown Los Angeles, with the mountains beyond that lend drama to our landscapes and trap dirty air like a lid on a pot. It’s actually been connected with some neurological problems in terms of younger children being able to pay attention and learn in school. ![]() “So it’s not surprising that we see effects in the lungs, in the heart, in the metabolic system, in the brain. But it goes far beyond the lungs, because once it crosses the air-blood barrier in the lungs, it gets into the blood in the circulatory system and then essentially the contaminants could go anywhere in your body. “Certainly the lung is the primary organ for which there are effects, and we know a lot about it. Today, “we know a tremendous amount about the effects of air pollution, both short-term and long-term effects on people,” Avol told me in 2019. native whose school days were marked with all the times that kids were kept indoors during recess because of smog alerts, became a professor of clinical preventive medicine at USC’s Keck medical school and an expert in environmental health. And anyway, how could you separate out smog damage, from, say, the effects of smoking, when almost half of all American adults were nicotine freaks? “Research on the problem is extremely complex,” is all the state’s public health director could offer an Assembly committee in 1950.Įd Avol, an L.A. ![]() It took the medical experts a while to get up to speed, to organize any methodical surveys of what smog does to a human body. There are still more benefits derived from living in Southern California with smog than in living elsewhere without it.” smog will be a continuing problem and we may as well learn to live with it until we can know all sources that produce it. For 40 or 50 days each year, temperatures reached smog-critical levels, but even shutting down refineries during the worst smog days would be “a totally useless cost.” Angelenos, Krick argued, “can’t have their cake and eat it too. Krick came down squarely, and rather fatalistically, on the side of industry. The institutional response was that burdening businesses with smog regulations would be too costly.Īt one of many smog summits - this one convened by a county supervisor in 1949 - a weather forecaster named Irving P. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.Īnd so the conflict was set: newer industrial businesses versus the older agricultural business and human health.
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