The Baton Rouge area may get a small and surprising benefit from last year’s wildfires in the Northwest, which were so severe they impacted places as far away as Louisiana.
Thanks to a finding by the state Department of Environmental Quality, Baton Rouge’s poor ozone levels are potentially not as bad as they measured last fall—when they were just shy of meeting new tougher requirements—due to the wildfires across the country.
In a feature from the new quarterly issue of 10/12 Industry Report, DEQ Secretary Chuck Carr Brown says he thinks the blame can be put squarely on the fires.
“Our modelers and folks that we use as consultants correlated a day in late October 2017 with the wildfires in the Northwest,” he says. “We think that the jet stream and weather conditions in Louisiana at the time caused issues that would contribute to ozone factors at ground level. You can actually see from Lake Charles all the way to Baton Rouge that the fires impacted our ozone numbers.”
DEQ submitted the information to the Environmental Protection Agency in January for review and expects the agency to issue a determination before the end of the year. Brown hopes that the five-parish area will be declared in compliance with the NAAQS, based upon three years of compliance data. In the interim, though, he is pushing for an “unclassifiable” designation from the agency, which would mean they just present new information.
Still, even if the current issue of NAAQS compliance works out thanks to the discovery about the wildfires, the threat of failing to pass again looms over the region. Read the full feature, check out the complete second quarter issue and sign up for a free subscription to 10/12 Industry Report.
