How's the air out there?

NBC's Rory O'Neill reports that Columbus is ok when it comes to air quality, but Cleveland was really bad. Air quality for Ohio in general could be better

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Six forty five, Thursday Morning, Mike Elliott, Columbus's Morning News.
Let's talk about the air you breathe. It's something you
don't really think about too much, but this time of
year you start seeing stories about smog and particulate contamination
and ozone and all of that. Here with more on
the Legacy Retirement Group dot com phone line. It is
NBC News Radios. Rory O'Neil. How is the air we're

(00:22):
breathing in Columbus?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Rory, Well, it's better than other parts of Ohio, in fact,
better than the data that we got out of Cleveland today.
Columbus is ranked one hundred and thirty worse for high
ozone days, rank forty six for those twenty four hour
particulate pollution days. That's probably the worst number on this
annual report from the American Lung Association. So what am

(00:45):
I talking about? Well, when we talk about ozone days,
we essentially mean smog, not really a problem for you
where you are. But particulate matter is what will develop,
say from a wildfire or coal burning, and that is
more or upper problem in Well, it's most on the
West coast thanks to automobiles, but it's also been an

(01:05):
issue around the rust Belt, and actually Cleveland ranked in
the top ten when it came to the most polluted
cities with year round particle pollution. Columbus did not make
that top ten list, So that was encouraging to see
from the Lung Association.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, I was going to say, this is a Lung
Association study and they graded the air quality in some
two hundred metropolitan areas and columbuses and not great it's been.
There's certainly better places, and you know, a couple of
years ago, it was largely due to the Canadian wildfires.
I mean we had weeks on end where you could
actually smell it. You could see, it smelled like you

(01:40):
were you know, there was a forest fire right down
the street.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well, and that's the fascinating thing with the data out
this year. It shows that actually the bigger concern is
what's being developed because of wildfire's drought, extreme heat that's
causing more people across the nation to breathe poor air,
even as man made pollution is actually really falling. Now.
Some of this data does come back from twenty twenty three,

(02:03):
when you have that bad Canada wildfire situation that did
send a lot of those particulates into the air here
in Middle America. So I think that is a lot
of the reason why these numbers are a bit skewed.
That's because of the Canadian wildfire.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Sure, and then you get to you days like today
where you've got eighty four degrees and not a lot
of wind, and you start hearing about people who have
certain sensitivities having a difficulty and being you know, it's
been suggested you stay inside, you take it easy, and
that'll only get worse throughout the summer.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Well, look in the Columbus area, the Lung Association says
you've got a quarter million Americans or in Columbus who
have asthma as adults, forty thousand pediatric asthma cases as well,
and about one hundred and fifty thousand with COPD just
in the Columbus area. So you can see that this
data about air quality can really have impact real life