When Wendy Smith and her family moved to Dallas from Surrey, England, in 2001, respiratory issues weren’t on their radar. Yet Smith, her husband and her son sniffled and snorted their way through thick, seasonal mucous their first few years stateside. It was probably allergens, Smith surmises — that and poor air quality.
“We live in a very dense area,” says the North Dallas mom. “The air quality with the heat is thick.”
For the Smiths, the change brought challenges for lungs that were used to the bracing British country air. During the years just before the family moved here, Dallas-Fort Worth experienced some of the ugliest ozone levels in the nation. Fortunately, levels have been ticking downward since then, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The most worrisome air-quality culprit is ground-level ozone, formed when pollutants bake under the North Texas sun. Cars and traffic are the major cause of North Texas ozone woes, says Whitney Vandiver of Air North Texas at the Arlington-based North Central Texas Council of Governments. Exposure to high ozone levels, especially during exertion with deep breathing, can cause shortness of breath, chest tightness, coughing, wheezing, phlegm, headaches, nausea, and eye and throat irritation. People with lung or heart disease are especially at risk.
Experts say the best way to avoid health problems is to steer clear of outdoor activity on high ozone days. Follow the color-coded Air Quality Index, which tells you how polluted the air is and how likely it is to affect you and your family. For Smith’s 12-year-old daughter, a volleyball enthusiast, bad ozone days mean no outdoor recess or activities at her school, which is located on a major cross street near a highway with a constant stream of heavy traffic. The Smiths follow advisories for high ozone days at home, too: “We stay in; we don’t even walk the dog,” Smith reveals.
Area schools follow varying policies about outdoor activity when heat and ozone levels are high. The Dallas Independent School District advises parents that high-level ozone days could pose problems for students with allergies, asthma, diabetes and cardiovascular problems; outdoor activities should therefore be limited. Other school districts, such as Denton Independent School District and Burleson Independent School District, call for different activity guidelines for at-risk children and healthy children based on ozone alert levels.
Dr. Rebecca Gruchalla, director of the division of allergy and immunology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, urges parents to follow the lead of their child’s school for outdoor activity on bad ozone days. She calls overcautious activity restrictions a “psychological downer” and urges the parents of sensitive children to consult their doctors and take precautions, such as premedication, whenever possible to keep kids happy and active.
But families can do more than merely hide indoors from poor air quality until it passes. “The things that we encourage people to do through Air North Texas are anything where you’re reducing driving alone in a traditional vehicle: carpooling, taking public transit, biking or walking on your short trips,” Vandiver says. Easier said than done in sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth. If trading in the family SUV for a bus pass isn’t in the cards for your brood, there are still ways you can reduce your carbon footprint and make a difference in the fight against pollution.
Published April 2015
