3rd DFW Ozone Monitor Officially Trips the 1997 Standard

What were we saying about smog problems marching east with the gas drilling?

Yesterday's dirty air left the Dallas North site – south, and downwind of LBJ's mess – with its fourth exceedance of the 1997 85 parts per billion (ppb) ozone standard. That means it's an official violation of that standard since every monitor gets three strikes before being called out. It joins the Grapevine and Dallas Hinton Street monitors in violating a 15-year old standard that has been declared unprotective of human health and replaced with a tougher standard of 75 ppb. 16 of 20 DFW ozone monitors have already violated that new standard this year, but those don't start counting against us until around 2015-16 when it takes full effect. At the same time, violations of the '97 standard it replaced don't count either. So DFW remains in a kind of smoggy purgatory. This wil be the 21st year we won't be in compliance with the federal clean air smog standard.

Last Wednesday, fracking proponents on the Dallas City Council kept refering to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality as if it was some kind of immutable final word on all things environmental. Alas, the TCEQ is not infallible. With DFW air quality, it's never even been right. TCEQ's 2012 clean air plan for DFW was supposed to give us historically clean air with NO VIOLATIONS of the 1997 ozone standard. Now we've had three with another two months of ozone season left.

For the record, in 2010 we had one monitor with four violations of the '97 standard. That was as close as we've come to complying with it. Last year we had seven. This year we have three and still counting. Despite all of these violations contradicting the state's predictions, TCEQ still insists in calling this air quality progress. It's not. It's continued non-compliance with an old standard that most of the rest of the country already meets.