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Appendix, statements submitted for the record-Continued

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CLEAN AIR ACT AMENDMENTS OF 1977

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1977

U.S. SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS,
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met at 10:08 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 4200, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Gary W. Hart presiding. Present: Senators Muskie, Hart, and Stafford.

Senator HART. This is the third day of hearings by the Subcommittee on Environmental Pollution. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will come to order.

We have been hearing witnesses for the last 2 days and we will be hearing witnesses today on the subject of air quality, with a view toward deliberation of amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act.

We have heard from representatives of the automobile industry, of environmental organizations, of the utility industries, and a number of other witnesses of a variety.

This morning our first two witnesses are Dr. Arend Bouhuys and Mr. Verlyn Marth. Dr. Bouhuys is the director of the Lung Research Center, Yale University, and Verlyn Marth is from Costa Mesa, Calif. STATEMENTS OF AREND BOUHUYS, DIRECTOR, LUNG RESEARCH CENTER, YALE UNIVERSITY, AND VERLYN MARTH, COSTA MESA, CALIF.

Dr. BOUHUYS. Senator Hart and members of the subcommittee, my comments deal with the harmful effects of air pollutants on the lungs since these effects are included. And among lung diseases, illness from asthma, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema is thought by many to be, if not caused, then at least aggravated by outdoor air pollution.

Over the course of the last 4 years, my coworkers and I have interviewed about 7,000 children and adults, men and women, blacks and whites, in three communities in Connecticut and South Carolina.

We have also carefully monitored outdoor air at different sites throughout the year in these towns, and we measured pollutants in the homes, schools and work places of small groups of residents in

these towns.

In addition, we measured lung function in all of these children and adults with a carefully standardized test, the flow-volume curve. In many other studies this test has helped us to detect the effects of cigarette smoking and various occupational exposures.

For instance, the test often shows decreases of lung function in people who have smoked one or two cigarettes. With this same test we

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did not detect differences in lung function between men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon, Conn., a rural area, and men, women and children who had always lived in an urban center.

What differences we found were between nonsmokers and smokers, whether they lived in rural Lebanon or in urban Ansonia, Conn. In spite of the fact that air pollution levels-SO2, NO2, total particulates and ozone—were nearly always (with exception of 1 out of 41 ozone samples) below the primary air quality standards in Lebanon, about 5 percent of all lifetime nonsmoking men and women complained of frequent wheezing or tightness in the chest, many had had bronchitis or pneumonia, and 7 percent of the men said they had asthma.

Among smokers several of these percentages were much higher. I believe it is important to know that asthma, bronchitis and similar lung diseases which meet the chronic disease criteria are common in people who live in a town without factories, limited traffic, and live relatively free of manmade pollutants.

In urban Ansonia, Conn., and in Winnsboro, S.C., a semi-rural town, our findings on respiratory illness and lung function were similar to those in Lebanon. In Winnsboro, ozone levels exceeded the primary AQS in 11 percent of our samples; in Ansonia, NO, levels ranged up to about 160 μg/m3, and total particulates were close to the annual mean primary standard of 75 μg/m3."

We found no evidence that exposures at these levels affect people's lungs in a way we could measure. From comparison of our results with those of other investigators, the same appears to be true for people who live in areas where sulfur dioxide levels range from 20 to about 100 micrograms per cubic meter.

With respect to sulfates, we were struck by the fact they were only high during the summer in Connecticut at a time when SO2 levels were minimal. We found the highest sulfate levels on days when the wind blew from the direction of the sea. We believe the sources which may well include ocean spray as sources of that sulfate should be carefully investigated.

We were struck by the high indoor pollutant levels in particular for particulates and NO, that we measured in some homes, including homes in rural Lebanon. But we have so far not been able to relate these higher levels indoors to risks of lung disease.

People who lived in homes with high pollutant levels caused by smoking, gas stoves, fireplaces and other indoor sources, were just as likely to have disease as those who lived in homes with cleaner air.

Only in a few instances did we find abnormalities in lung function which may be related to indoor air pollution. But the indoor environment is a serious concern for those with emphysema and who may be very sensitive to pollutants and spend more time indoors.

Polluted air outdoors is bad for our well-being and for the wellbeing of plants and buildings. Either air pollution needs to be controlled and that limits need to be set. But I do not believe that. But I do believe that chronic lung disease at present offers pressing grounds for air pollution controls in our present conditions in the Eastern United States.

I hope that we shall achieve clean air everywhere. But asthma, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema will even then remain important causes of ill health among our citizens. It seems unlikely to me that

objective studies would be able to detect-5, 10 or 20 years from nowmajor improvements in the respiratory health of our people which could be attributed to improved air quality outdoors.

Thank you very much.

[Dr. Bouhuys prepared statement and attachments appear at the end of today's proceedings, p. 39.]

Senator HART. Thank you, Dr. Bouhuys.

I think, unless Senator Muskie has questions, we will wait and hear from Mr. Marth and then direct questions to both of you if we may. Mr. Marth.

STATEMENT OF VERLYN MARTH, COSTA MESA, CALIF.

Mr. MARTH. Verlyn Marth, Costa Mesa, Calif.

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, air pollution in the United States today is a disaster and it is getting worse. I was sick in Orange County in the Los Angeles basin 200 days every year because of air pollution. We are in the second generation of this filthy, dirty air in the Los Angeles basin, with, I believe, hundreds of thousands of people sick from it in the Los Angeles basin. The word we are getting out West is that Congress is committed to emasculating even the existing inadequate air pollution laws. I am sick enough in the Los Angeles basin to be forced to get out in the summer. I go back to the farm in Minnesota, the cleanest air spot we have. When we left last spring we were driving for 3 or 4 hours in this polluted air. It merged with the coal plants in the desert where they are put on top of unknowing, unsuspecting Indian tribes and filling the whole desert with polluted air.

I get back to Minnesota on a farm 150 miles from Minneapolis-St. Paul. Three times last summer I was adversely affected by oxidants blowing in there. There is getting to be no escape from this over the whole country. On the way back we went through Denver, Colo. All the clean air sweeping out of the Rockies, and they had an air pollution alert. Through Rock Springs, Wyo., the whole Rocky Mountain basin is filled up with air pollution. I came in here and listened yesterday to a man coming in and saying air pollution standards should be cut in half. They are far too critical.

My experience is just the opposite. I would like to share that experience with you. I am sick from air pollution. For 4 or 5 years I have tracked my air pollution sickness against quantitative levels of air pollution from the Los Angeles basin. I am about a mile or a mile and a half from the recording station. I logged my sickness intensities, and a year later when the numbers came out finally corrected from the resources board, I compared it to those quantitative numbers. Two things are extremely shocking about that. I get sick primarily from oxidant ozone, but I start to get sick at 0.06 parts per million when your standard is 0.08 parts per million. In other words, you have not only no margin of safety, but you have a negative margin of safety on that factor.

But you are pretty close on ozone. What you are just not doing is enforcing the ozone standard. That standard is exceeded 150 days a year in the Los Angeles basin. You are not doing anything about it. You are letting them build more freeways, put in more houses, put in

gasification plants. That is a madness. But the second element I really want to impress upon you, in the fall when the temperature is down and the ozones aren't made from the sunlight in the atmosphere, I am really ill from NO2. That is the primary thing that makes me sick. You know what the number is that I get it at, start getting it? 0.08 parts per million on an hourly average basis. The Federal standard of 0.05 on a yearly basis is almost meaningless.

My adverse time constant reaction is about a couple hours to air pollution. You say how do you know you get sick from air pollution? How come it isn't an allergy or something? It is such a simple answer. I have quantitative levels of air pollution, I get well, go up to the desert. I come back into this mess in Los Angeles, I am ill within 2 hours; the winds blow the smog out, the quantitative levels go down, I am well. Smog comes in and it constantly fills a 100 mile square basin up in a matter of 1 day and I am sick again.

Yet I hear some clown in here yesterday come in and say your standards are set way to low. NO, is a tragically inadequate standard today. NO is probably the real complement. You must be coming up, based on when people get sick, with a rational NO, standard. My number is 0.08. The air pollution level in the State of California for comparison is 0.25, I believe. That number, which everybody thinks is too tight, is 300 percent of where I start to get sick. I can't see people come in here, these vultures come in, their kids are sick, too, from this stuff, and say, "We should ease up on these standards, particularly in the automobile field." We have been talking about automobile pollution for a whole generation. I have been exposed to it for 20 years now. It never stops getting worse.

Out there today, that makes me ill, that level of air pollution; not seriously ill, but I start to feel it, at that level. It is happening all over the country. It is not getting better. It is getting worse and worse. It is extending from one city to the other, and merging into one air mass of deadly air pollution.

I really object to the automobile people coming in here and saying it is a sick approach, that they are not concerned enough about even their own kids to do anything about it. They would sooner spend their money with high-paid public relations men and lawyers telling you people everything is all right. It is not. We are sick from this stuff.

The Volvo Co. and the Honda Co. have come up with numbers that are good numbers on cars. You can't tell me our science and technology and industrial capacity of General Motors can't match that performance. The second area that is so irritating to me, and I think it is a tragedy for a nation is the utility plants going out into the clear air areas and filling it up. We must hold to this nondegradation policy. I have seen a result of it out in North Dakota, an absolutely clean air place. The whole Missouri Valley is filled from flue gas from lignite coal. There are yellow poisonous streamers across this blue, favored land for 200 miles, one pollutant streamer after another.

The way they are doing it is they are going out on top of a people who have not been exposed to it, farm people, ranchers, and offering them a bone of a few pitiful jobs and saying, "We are going to destroy so basic a resource as your air in exchange for this." Since the people don't know any better, since they have no political power, they get

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