Ed E. Powell writes:
> San Diego county has an air quality problem also, and there is relatively
little industrial
>activity contributing to the problem.
Both LA and San Diego benefit from location and natural fog. Before white
men came to LA it was called the valley of smoke by the indigenous native
peoples. The natural flora (chapparal) of the area gives off a natural
ingredient which mixes with the coastal fog to produce smog. Cars merely
exacerbate the problem.
San Diego benefits from LA on days when the wind blows from the north and
east, rarely to be sure, but in 1992 when the EPA did their big one week smog
check, it was a howling Santa Ana and you could visibly see the smog flowing
down the coast off shore and coming up Mission Valley.
During our natural southwesterly onshore flows, most of the smog in San Diego
County is in Alpine a very small community in the foothills twenty miles east
of downtown. Most of this comes from Tijuana where there are no regulations
and there are three million people with inadequate sewage disposal, too.
Regulated cars in California actually are not pollution problems. LIke the
urban legend of the guy in the '95 Saab who tried to commit suicide by
running his car in the garage. He ran out a full tank of gas and still
couldn't kill himself. In fact on a smoggy day in LA running the same 95
Saab WILL CLEAN THE AIR. Fewer pollutants will exit the tail pipe than enter
the FI!
Fully half the gross polluters I see in San Diego have plates that read
"Front B.C.", Mexican plates from Frontier Baja California! Are they going
to crush those?
Steve Petty
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