|
At around 11 AM on November 4, Germaine Patterson stepped outside of her Clairton, Pennsylvania, home to exercise in the backyard. Dirty air sent her quickly retreating back inside. "I started having heart palpitations," she told EHN. "I know it was due to the air quality." For seven straight days in early November, air pollution levels in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, exceeded limits set to protect public health. Unusually warm weather had triggered a hazardous temperature inversion: A low layer of cold air along with other airborne particles near the ground—vehicle exhaust, wood smoke, industrial releases—became trapped beneath a lid of warmer air. "It was very noticeable to me," said Patterson, who lives about 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. Her house is less than a mile from an industrial plant—Clairton Coke Works—that converts coal into coke to manufacture steel. On at least one of those early November days, she recalled waking up in the "wee hours of the morning" to a bad stench. Throat irritation plagued her nearly every day. Such air inversions, which are a natural weather phenomenon, are most common during winter months when the sun supplies less warmth to the Earth's surface. Valleys and basins are especially prone to inversions, as surrounding hills or mountains can act as walls to block the wind and further lock in cold air and pollutants. With the approaching winter and the lingering—in some cases, spiking—threat of COVID-19, susceptible regions such as Pennsylvania's Mon Valley, Utah's Salt Lake Valley and California's coast-to-mountains basin that includes Los Angeles, may face a double whammy: Studies suggest that poor air quality can worsen COVID-19's toll on the body as well as increase its ability to spread. "We're now talking about two pandemics," Thomas Muenzel, a cardiologist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, told EHN. "We have a pollution pandemic, and we have the COVID pandemic."
![air pollution pittsburgh pennsylvania]()
Germaine Patterson in her backyard on November 19, 2020. (Credit: Germaine Patterson)
|
