Public interest in air pollution control measures similar to those used for water pollution control in the last several years provided the momentum that resulted in the federal Clean Air Act of 1965. Within a year it was followed by a specific move in a critical urban area, New York City, when the City Council passed Local Law No. 14, in May 1966. A few months later came Mayor Lindsay's Five-Year Plan for cleaning up the city's air.
Local Law No. 14 is a stringent anti-pollution bill directed at air contaminants derived from burning refuse and fuel other than motor vehicle fuel. It represents a substantial step forward in articulating public concern, translating it into enforceable regulations, and emphasizing local responsibility. Basically, the law attempts to control air pollution by preventing or minimizing its formation and by removing the pollution from the gas stream before it is discharged into the air. Its tools are controls over equipment, operation, fuels, and operators.
These are its principal features: (1) Installation, alteration, and operation of fuel-burning or refuse-burning equipment will require permits. (2) Issuance of permits will hinge upon the provision of specific control devices. (3) Curbs on sulfur emissions from manufacturing processes are instituted. (4) Acceptance of sulfur-containing fuels will be dependent on decreasing sulfur concentration over the next several years. (5) Burning of bituminous coal will be permitted only if the user insures removal of at least 99 percent of all solid particulate matter that otherwise would be emitted during combustion. (6) Refuse disposal will be controlled through modification of existing private incinerators and, after a grace period, prohibition of new ones, and through incorporation in municipal incinerators of most recent advances in air pollution control technology. (7) A comprehensive data-gathering system will keep track of shipments and deliveries of coal and fuel oil in the city. (8) An educational program will be undertaken to improve the skill and understanding of operators of equipment; a course in pollution control techniques will be mandatory. (9) Violators will be penalized by fines and jail sentences, which rise in severity for recurrent violations.
All the above regulations carry careful time schedules for their enforcement, calculated to give enough time for necessary change-overs and adjustments. Time schedules in themselves, though, are likely to become centers of controversy. May 20, 1967, for example, has been set as the deadline for issuing operating permits for incinerators serving apartment houses at least six stories high. As the technical and financial burden of qualifying for permits becomes more apparent, initial protests against a rigid deadline will no doubt grow in strength.
In October, the program was strengthened by a number of policy and administrative moves, such as the reorganization of the city's Department of Air Pollution Control. An increase in the number of field inspectors from twenty-seven to ninety-four, a greatly improved monitoring system for daily reports on air conditions, a program of research into the nature and effects of air pollution, and the future setting of minimum standards for clean air, for the city. These regulations and policy pronouncements are complementary to the comprehensive Air Pollution Control Code of October 1, 1964, which placed emphasis on pollution from motor vehicles.
Before the six-month-old provisions of Local Law No. 14 could be tested adequately, New York City was enveloped by a smog during the latter part of Thanksgiving week. As temperatures hovered unseasonably in the lower sixties, the smog blanketed the metropolitan area. At the suggestion of the Interstate Sanitation Commission, the first stage of a three-stage air pollution emergency was proclaimed in the three-state metropolitan area. This stage involves only appeals for voluntary cooperation. Citizens were asked to forego the use of automobiles except where absolutely necessary, shutdown incinerators, and cut down on space heating. The city itself shut down its incinerators, and the utility companies switched from burning coal and oil to burning the less polluting natural gas.
As the smog was finally swept away by cooler air masses, the city's Hospital Commissioner announced that there was no present indication that the smog had significantly affected the health of New Yorkers, in contrast to a similar situation three years earlier when between 170 and 260 deaths in the city were attributed to heavily polluted air.
A number of favorable factors undoubtedly contributed to minimizing the damage. Above-normal temperatures made the cooler indoor temperatures less of a hardship, and the fact that the smog coincided with the holiday, resulting in generally lessened activity all around. The experience has probably further awakened the public to the hazards of air pollution and thus facilitated the educational program of the city's Department of Air Pollution Control.
The emergency also demonstrated the "bean bag" aspect of pollution control—poke the bag on one place and it pops out in another. As refuse burning was throttled down, the garbage back-up on the city's incinerators forced the Sanitation Commission to add almost 600 extra men to the weekend detail to get rid of the accumulations over the forty-eight-hour shutdown, raising the problem of adequate storage capacity. In this and other respects the Thanksgiving smog undoubtedly demonstrated to everybody that clean air was not to be had for the asking and certainly not without substantial cost. It will be a while before all the factors in this most recent experience have been identified, disentangled, and evaluated in their impact upon the city's anti-pollution plan as developed during 1966.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1967 issue of Resources magazine.
