Indiana counties fail EPA standards

INDIANAPOLIS -- Twenty-four mostly urban Indiana counties do not meet new federal health standards for smog-causing ozone and have about five years to take steps to come into compliance, state environmental officials said Thursday.\nMostly clustered in nine metropolitan areas, the counties are among 474 nationwide identified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency Thursday as failing to meet the standards for ground-level ozone produced by industry and automobiles.\nSome of them might have to impose new controls on industrial plants, restrict transportation and require tougher vehicle inspection programs to clean up their air.\nIndiana's top environmental official said new controls on power plants beginning next month, combined with the growing availability of cleaner fuels and engines, will allow most of the 24 Indiana counties to meet the health standards.\n"In areas where these measures are not enough, we will fully support reasonable local actions to improve air quality and to further reduce the effects of unhealthy ozone," Lori F. Kaplan, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, said in a statement.\nShe said residents can help reduce pollution linked to ground-level ozone by carpooling, using mass transit and regularly servicing their automobiles and lawnmowers.\nThe full impact of the new standards will not be clear until August, when the EPA is expected to issue complete guidelines on which local compliance steps might be required, IDEM said.\nGround-level ozone, a precursor to smog, forms when emissions of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds interact with sunlight. It can cause respiratory illnesses and is especially damaging to the elderly, children and people with asthma.\nIndiana's 24 affected counties are mainly in or around the cities of Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, Evansville, Muncie, South Bend and Gary but include some near Cincinnati and Louisville, Ky.\nThe new health standards are based on average ozone levels during an eight-hour air sampling period and replace earlier standards based on a one-hour ozone sampling, said Janet McCabe, IDEM's assistant commissioner for the office of air quality.\n"The analogy is a child being out in the sun all day long at camp as opposed to waiting for a bus to pick him up," McCabe said. "The reasoning is that health studies have shown exposure to a lower level of ozone over a longer period of time was associated with more health effects than a very short time exposure to a somewhat higher level."\nMost Indiana counties designated as out of compliance must have plans in place by 2007 to reduce ozone emissions and must reach compliance with the health standards by 2009. Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties of northwestern Indiana have until 2010 to comply.\nOne of the 24 counties, Dearborn, was found in noncompliance only in one township, which includes Lawrenceburg and a coal-fired American Electric Power plant.\nNortheastern Indiana's Huntington County had been on a preliminary noncompliance list that included 25 Indiana counties but was dropped from the final list after the state persuaded the EPA it was not a significant pollution producer, McCabe said.\nThe designations do not necessarily mean a particular county will find it more difficult to attract new industries, although some development proposals will inevitably be scuttled, she said.\nMany industries will not be affected because they do not produce the types of pollutants that lead to ozone-formation.\n"We knew that this was coming and we looked at the pending applications in the counties, and there are hardly any that rise to the level of needing stricter permitting," McCabe said.