Spokane’s clean air agency is celebrating the progress made in improving the region’s air over the last few decades.
The agency announced this week that Spokane County has reached a milestone. For the last 20 years, it has provided data to the federal government showing that the Spokane airshed routinely meets federal clean air standards. Now, that reporting obligation has ended.
“Newcomers talk about how awful our air quality is and we do get the wildfire smoke days. But we did have really awful air quality in the ‘70s, ‘80s and into the mid-‘90s,” said Clean Air Agency spokeswoman Lisa Woodard.
In 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency determined Spokane’s air was occasionally unhealthy, so it designed Spokane as a moderate “non-attainment” area for carbon monoxide and PM10, the particulates derived from wood smoke and dust. Local leaders sprung into action.
“We had a county commissioner that really took the charge, the late and great Pat Mummey, who really worked together with the business community to put together what we called back then the Clear the Air Spokane campaign,” Woodard said.
She credits a variety of factors. One of the most important was automobile technology, “the advent of catalytic converters and fuel injection systems and oxygen sensors. That really helped.” Oxygenated fuel that was mandated during the winter.
To lower the particulate count, the state and county encouraged homeowners to swap out their old wood stoves and replace them with newer, more efficient models. The clean air agency suspended burn privileges during air inversions and pushed for less sand and more chemical de-icers to be distributed on icy roads.
The Clear the Air campaign eventually reached its goal, in 2005, when EPA declared Spokane to be in compliance with federal air quality standards.
That wasn’t the end of the government oversight. Spokane was required to go through a 20-year maintenance period. That ended in August.
“Today, about 95 to 98% of our year, we're in the healthy air quality zone,” Woodard said.
Now the main concern is the small particulates emitted in wildfire smoke.
“I’ve read some documentation that shows some modeling of our wildfires. And I can't recall actually if it was for the Western US or the entire US, but they showed modeling out that we would be facing wildfire smoke likely until at least 2050. So it's not something that's going to go away,” she said.
Woodard says the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency will continue its community education efforts about air pollution. It will also continue its program that provides financial incentives for homeowners to change to cleaner-burning stoves.
