Air quality officials are advising San Joaquin Valley residents that local conditions are cold, dry and stagnant, causing PM2.5 emissions (particulate matter pollution) to accumulate, resulting in higher pollution concentrations throughout the Valley air basin. The air basin includes the counties of San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, Madera, Fresno, Kings, Tulare and the Valley portion of Kern. The Valley Air District has issued an air quality advisory due to strong nighttime inversions and minimal winds are trapping pollutants on the Valley floor. The District strongly urges the public to take health-protective actions to stay safe when high PM2.5 levels affect the Valley, including followingair-quality recommendationswhen making decisions about outdoor activities.
Additional health protective actions include:
- Staying indoors
- Using portable air cleaners or high-efficiency filters to remove fine particles from the air
- Planning ahead and creating aclean air room
- Visiting aClean Air Center. Similar to the Valley’s cooling centers, the District’s Clean Air Centers provide relief when air quality deteriorates.
To help minimize air quality impacts over the coming days, the Valley Air District recommends that residents, businesses, public agencies, and others continue to prioritize clean air actions, including closely watching residential curtailment notifications, avoiding to use of fireplaces and other indoor and outdoor wood-burning devices, using electric landscape maintenance equipment or limiting activities, avoiding outdoor cooking with charcoal or wood, minimizing activities that create dust (e.g. construction and agricultural conservation management practices), ensuring industrial equipment is properly maintained and in good operating order, tuning-up your vehicle, and other clean air actions.
“Stable conditions like those we are currently experiencing are one of the main challenges the San Joaquin Valley faces during the winter months,” said Jon Klassen, Director of Air Quality Science. “This causes pollution to be trapped at ground level and build up quickly over a relatively short period of time, impacting the health of you and your neighbors,” he added.
The public can check the local air quality atwww.valleyair.org/myraanorwww.airnow.gov. In addition, anyone can follow air quality conditions by downloading the free “Valley Air” app on their mobile device or downloading EPA’s “AirNow” app.
The Residential Wood Smoke Reduction program runs from November 1through the end of February and provides daily declarations, by county, indicating if wood burning is allowed in the county that day. Daily burn status is available by visitingvalleyair.org/burnstatus, by calling 1-800-SMOG INFO (766-4463), or by downloading the free “Valley Air” app. Valley residents are encouraged to eliminate wood burning altogether by applying for the Fireplace & Woodstove Change-Out program to receive as much as $5,000 to upgrade from older, higher-polluting wood stoves and open-hearth fireplaces to natural gas inserts and free-standing stoves. More details are available atvalleyair.org/change-out.
For more information, visitwww.valleyair.orgor call a District office in Fresno (559-230-6000), Modesto (209-557-6400) or Bakersfield (661-392-5500).