COLUMBUS, Ohio – The air in central Ohio is getting cleaner, but the region still has work to do, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
Every urban county in Ohio, and many of its suburban ones, too, got low marks for unhealthy smog levels.
Franklin County received an F for its level of ozone pollution and a B for particle pollution, such as exhaust fumes. The grades have improved in the past decade: The report shows the county recorded 18 fewer days with dangerously high levels of ozone than in 1996 and 18.5 fewer days with high levels of particle pollution since 2000.
Other large cities, including Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix and New York, have significantly higher levels of smog than central Ohio, according to the report, which was released yesterday. The Los Angeles-Long Beach region was the smoggiest in the nation over the three years evaluated in the report. The other top five areas all are in California, too.
The lowest-ranked city in Ohio was the Cincinnati area at No. 23 in the United States, according to the report.
The Lung Association’s report looks at air quality from 2011 to 2013. (It should be noted that there were no smog alerts in central Ohio in 2014, for the first time in 20 years.)
The association examined 220 metropolitan areas using data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality System.
In all, the Lung Association report says that nearly 44 percent of Americans — almost 138.5 million people — live in counties with unhealthy air.