Another cost of the fires: Nasty toxins fill the air

Anybody breathing in the Los Angeles Basin during this month’s wildfires knows the air was bad. But it’s worse than you think.

Researchers analyzing air samples taken during the October 2007 wildfires in Southern California found some nasty stuff in the smoke that blanketed the region.

It was full of tiny particles -- 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair -- that can penetrate into the lower lung and migrate into the bloodstream. Their complex chemical composition makes them slightly more toxic than pollutants in a freeway corridor -- and they are spread over a much wider area.

The smoke particulates are adept at producing free radicals that can damage cells and lead to disease. Roughly half the matter sampled was organic carbon, which includes known carcinogens. Levels of metals such as copper emitted from burning buildings were also higher.

Staying behind closed windows in an old house without central air conditioning won’t help much, said Constantinos Sioutas, one of the authors of the study, which will be published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Better to head to an enclosed mall or a building with recirculated air.

“More aggressive measures to avoid smoke seem to deserve study, including distribution of masks and evacuation to air-conditioned environments,” said Sioutas, the Fred Champion professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC.

-- Bettina Boxall

Eco-burnishing the Queen’s stacks

The Queen Mary’s signature black-and-orange smoke stacks, which can be seen from 20 miles away on a clear day, stood out a little brighter this week after receiving a fresh coat of ultra-low-emission paint and a commendation from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

At a news conference on an upper deck near a work crew busily applying 123 gallons of the special water-based “Cunard red” paint to the three elliptical stacks, AQMD officials also unveiled a user-friendly website, www.aqmd.gov/prdas/Coatings/Coatings, for painters featuring a list of super-compliant, low-emission paint products, links to manufacturers and helpful tips.

The website aims to reduce the estimated 23 tons of smog-forming volatile organic compounds -- equal to the emissions of 1.7 million vehicles -- released into the air each day from business and residential paint jobs in Southern California, air quality officials said.

Tonia Reyes Uranga, a Long Beach city councilwoman and AQMD governing board member, credited Hostmark Hospitality Group, which bought the floating hotel about a year ago, for “setting an example for other businesses” in selecting the paint for its “stack beautification project.”

But the man of the hour was chemist Richard Hart, vice president of Chicago-based JFB Hart Coatings Inc. and inventor of the low-emissions paint.

In an interview, he said the product was so durable “you could pour gasoline on it and light it with a match. You could dance on it without putting a mark on it.”

Looking up at the painters who were using brushes attached to poles to spiff up the stacks with paint mixed to match a chip taken from another luxury liner built in the 1920s, Hart smiled and said, “I’m really proud of this job. After all, it’s the Queen Mary.”

As a token of his appreciation, Hart gave Jay Primavera, the Queen Mary’s general manager, a gleaming framed portrait of the Queen Mary plying the high seas in its heyday.

“My wife painted it,” he said, “with my patented formula.”

-- Louis Sahagun

Drip irrigation is found to be costly

It’s the opposite of conventional wisdom: When farmers use drip irrigation on their crops, they wind up consuming more water than if they used less efficient irrigation techniques. At least that’s what water resources professor Frank A. Ward concludes in a new study.

Ward, who is on the faculty of New Mexico State University, used computer models to analyze farm water use in the upper Rio Grande River basin.

Although drip irrigation can require half the water that flood irrigation does, plants absorb more water with drip, crop yield increases and more water is lost to evapotranspiration. Because drip is more efficient, there is also less overflow to seep back into aquifers or wash into nearby streams or rivers.

That means less water for downstream users and future generations dependent on the aquifers. “Higher consumption comes from someplace -- someone else’s use,” Ward said. Drip, he added, has its benefits. “It’s just not a water conserving thing.”

To get a true picture of water use and more equitably administer water rights, Ward suggests it should be measured according to how much is depleted from a basin, not by how much comes out of an irrigation pump.

The study, published last week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was co-written by Manuel Pulido-Velazquez of the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain.

-- Bettina Boxall