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A resident who stayed in Foresthill, California despite an
evacuation order due to the Mosquito Fire, takes a picture of the
wildfire's plume on September 7, 2022. Photograph: Andrew
Nixon/CapRadio  October 16, 2023 
REVEALED: HOW A LITTLE-KNOWN POLLUTION RULE KEEPS THE AIR DIRTY FOR
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS
Written by Molly Peterson, Dillon Bergin, Emily Zentner and Andrew
Witherspoon 
Edited by Derek Kravitz and Adriene Hill 
A legal loophole has allowed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
to strike pollution from clean air tallies in more than 70 counties,
enabling local regulators to claim the air was cleaner than it really
was for more than 21 million Americans.
Regulators have exploited a little-known provision in the Clean Air
Act called the “exceptional events rule” to forgive pollution
caused by “natural” or “uncontrollable” events – including
wildfires – on records used by the EPA for regulatory decisions, a
new investigation from The California Newsroom, MuckRock and the
Guardian reveals. 
In addition to obscuring the true health risks of pollution and
swerving away from tighter control on local polluters, the rule
threatens the potency of the Clean Air Act, experts argue, at a time
when the climate crisis is posing an unprecedented challenge to the
health of millions of Americans.
Where the EPA — the U.S. department monitoring air quality — has
agreed to exclude bad air days from analysis, “we may have a sort of
stable, relatively rosy picture when it comes to our regulatory world
in terms of air-quality trends,” said Vijay Limaye, a climate and
health epidemiologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a
nonprofit advocacy group.
The truth is more complicated, and the air dirtier.
 Matt Cowdrey, Mark Paiz and Kyle Ortega get ready to paddle out and
surf Ocean Beach in San Francisco under an orange-red sky caused by
wildfires on September 9, 2020. Photograph: Beth LaBerge/KQED 
“The true conditions on the ground in terms of the air that people
are breathing in, day after day, week after week, year after year, is
increasingly an unhealthy situation,” Limaye said.
For the summer of 2023, more than 20 states so far, from Wyoming to
Wisconsin to North Carolina, have flagged air-quality readings that
were far higher than normal. Most of these days came in June, as skies
in the midwest and eastern US were blanketed with Canadian wildfire
smoke.
We pored over thousands of pages of regulatory documentation,
correspondence and contracts, and analyzed hard-to-find public data to
better understand how local regulators make use of the exceptional
events rule, as global heating sparks extreme wildfires more often.
We found that, since 2016, when the EPA last revised the guidance on
exceptional events:
Local regulators in 21 states filed requests with the agency to
forgive pollution and, in 20 of those states, had them approved.
In total, local regulators made note of almost 700 exceptional events.
The EPA agreed to adjust the data on 139 of them.
The adjustments came in more than 70 counties across 20 states. The
affected areas stretched from the forested Oregon coast to the Ohio
Rust Belt, from the craggy Rhode Island coastline down to the bayous
of Louisiana.
In more than half of the states where exceptional events were
forgiven, industry lobbyists and business interests pressed to make
that happen, sometimes as the only public voice in the regulatory
process. Also, to protect the status quo, some regulators spent
millions of taxpayer dollars doing research for and making exceptional
events requests, sometimes working hand in hand with industry
stakeholders.
Meeting air-quality standards matters a lot to industry and
politicians. Violations can add up to stricter, more costly and
potentially unpopular pollution controls.
Critics say the growing use of the exceptional events rule for
wildfires is of deep concern. “You need to level with the public
about the number of days when the air quality was unhealthy,” said
Eric Schaeffer, a former regulator who directs the Environmental
Integrity Project.
“We have saved more lives in this country because we cleaned up the
air than almost any other environmental policy,” said Michael Wara,
the director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford’s
Woods Institute for the Environment. “And that’s what’s being
undermined.”
“The world has changed,” he said. “We are living in a different
world when it comes to wildfire and all of its consequences, including
air pollution.”
In response to written questions, the EPA said it takes all air
pollution seriously.
 The Highway 49 Bridge over the South Yuba River in Nevada County,
California, is a popular area for hikers. Photograph: Andri
Tambunan/The Guardian 
“Wildland fire and smoke pose increasing challenges and human health
impacts in communities all around the country,” Khanya Brann, an EPA
spokesperson, wrote. “EPA works closely with other federal agencies,
state and local health departments, tribal nations, and other partners
to provide information, tools, and resources to support communities in
preparing for, responding to, and reducing health impacts from
wildland fire and smoke.”
The EPA also pointed to “mitigation plans”, in which air districts
that have experienced repeated exceptional events must create plans
for educating and notifying the public about the pollution risk, as
well as “steps to identify, study, and implement mitigating
measures” like limiting use of wood-burning stoves and wetting down
unpaved roads before dust storms.
MORE ‘TOXIC SOUP’ AND MORE PAPERWORK
In the U.S., clean-air policy long allowed local governments to write
off some wildfire smoke on a case-by-case-basis as “unrealistic to
control” or “impractical to fully control”. But in 2005, the
Republican senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has long denied the
climate crisis, won a years-long battle to amend the Clean Air Act.
The new rule gave local officials more opportunity to exclude
pollution from regulatory consideration for an array of events, from
fireworks displays and volcanic eruptions to wildfires and even
unusual traffic events. 
At first, the rule was used most successfully in a handful of
south-western communities where high winds created a recurring problem
of dust pollution. Over time, local regulators have turned to
exceptional events for wildfires more and more often to reach
air-quality goals.
Our analysis of local and EPA records found that in 2016, air agencies
flagged 19 wildfire events as potential exceptional events. In 2018
and 2021, 52 and 50 wildfire events were flagged. In 2020, 65 were.
“The uptick in exceptional events is absolutely consistent with what
we see in the air pollution data,” said Marshall Burke, an associate
professor of global environmental policy at the Stanford Doerr School
of Sustainability. Smoke is accounting for a higher proportion of
overall air pollution, and it’s going up quickly, Burke said — not
just in the western U.S., but nationwide.
 The Nevada County Consolidated Fire District office in Nevada City,
California, on October 4, 2023. Photograph: Andri Tambunan/The
Guardian 
No state is blamed more for smoke pollution than California, followed
by Oregon and Canadian provinces, according to our analysis. Western
states are more likely to point fingers at each other, while states in
the midwest and north-east place the blame on Canadian provinces like
Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Wildfire smoke is a dirty and complicated polluter. Limaye, of the
NRDC, called it a “toxic soup of air pollution.” It carries soot
and ash, regulated as particulate pollution, as well as hydrocarbons
and other gases that, cooked in sunlight, help form ground-level
ozone. It’s a growing concern for public health, both near the
source and thousands of miles away. Smoke, especially from a
long-burning fire, can travel long distances and linger at dangerous
levels for weeks at a time.
We analyzed data recorded at air monitors nationwide. For every U.S.
county, on a day where the EPA excluded any data, we counted that day.
Our analysis found that the total number of wildfire-related bad air
days erased from regulatory consideration in counties nationwide was
nearly double that of bad air days related to high winds: 236 compared
to 121. 
When wildfire caused air pollution, the rule was applied to more
monitor readings over multiple days, not just to exclude particulate
pollution but also smog or ozone.
“It is a lot of time,” said John Walke, a lawyer for the NRDC.
One or two violations at a single air monitor can flip an area from
meeting air standards to missing the mark, according to Walke. Three
or four violations over several years can prompt increasingly strict
local pollution controls. “So a lot is riding on one, or two, or
three violations,” he said.
A SMOKIER FUTURE
The recent experience of California’s Nevada County may offer a
glimpse of a smokier future. So far, the exceptional events rule has
removed 16 days from the record there in the last five years.
 Julie Hunter, the interim director of the Northern Sierra Air Quality
Management District, poses for a photo by a monitor in her district.
Photograph: Andri Tambunan/The Guardian 
Ozone levels are rising in the background in this foothill community,
according to Julie Hunter, the interim chief for the Northern Sierra
Air Quality Management dDstrict. She said more trucks and warmer
temperatures are to blame. More frequently now, she said, wildfire
smoke is like a “pancake,” settling flat across the rural valley,
stuck until conditions change.
During one fire in 2021, a thick plume of smoke covered the sun in the
town of Grass Valley. “We couldn’t see past down the driveway,”
said Dr. Alinea Stevens, the medical director at the Chapa-De Indian
Health clinic in town.
Stevens remembered doctors and nurses moving among patients under the
menacing amber skies, N95 masks snug on their faces to protect against
Covid-19 — and wildfire smoke. 
Over hours, the clinic’s security guards got lightheaded and
developed headaches. “We told them, you need to wear N95 masks,
too,” Stevens said. “That kind of prolonged exposure to those
things was very real.”
After fires in 2018 and 2020, the EPA wiped more than two weeks of
ozone pollution in the district from the record. That didn’t get
Nevada County all the way to a clean bill of health, but local
regulators avoided having to tighten rules on local emissions. Hunter,
the local regulator, said her district is likely to seek more
exceptional events there, including for fires in the last two years.
 Firefighters from Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach battle the Bond
Fire in Santiago Canyon on December 3, 2020. Photograph: Brian
Feinzimer/LAist 
“If we take out wildfire smoke as one of the things that we look at,
then we’re not going to be addressing problems that really affect
our community here,” said Stevens, who directs the health clinic.
The surge of asthma and other health problems from smoke can be
overlooked when it happens in a rural community, she said: “I think
it’s maybe a way that we don’t put enough attention into fixing
something that can be fixed.”
Officials at the California Air Resources Board stress that state law
works toward mitigating the effects of climate change, and state
policies are supposed to minimize the risk of catastrophic fire.
“We really are trying to pull out all the stops,” Michael
Benjamin, the chief of CARB’s air-quality planning and science
division, said. Practically, he added: “We and the air districts in
California will continue to take advantage of the exceptional events
provisions in the Clean Air Act to try to show attainment.”
When it comes to showing attainment, the stakes are high.
Scrubbing smoke from regulatory accounting allows local governments
and business to continue as usual, since the practice obscures the
toll wildfires take on public health.
It also ignores the ways that the climate crisis is altering how
people decide where to live across the U.S.
‘WE ARE ALL INHERITING THIS’
In 2017, Maitreyi Siruguri and her husband woke in the night to a sky
lit unnaturally orange. They left their Santa Rosa home with their
young children in the early hours of the morning; the fire that
eventually swirled through went on to kill 22 people and destroy more
than 5,600 structures.
 Alinea Stevens, the medical director at the Chapa-De Indian Health
clinic, on October 4, 2023 in Grass Valley, California. During a fire
in 2021, a thick plume of smoke covered the sun in Grass Valley.
Photograph: Andri Tambunan/The Guardian 
Afterward, “I was starting to sense the emotional drain, from
everyone having to go through this,” she said. She searched the
internet with worry about how smoke could harm her children, then
three and seven years old.
In 2021, they left for the suburbs of Chicago. They could afford to
buy a house; the family would be closer to friends and relatives —
and further, she hoped, from wildfire and smoke.
Growing up in India in the 1980s and 1990s, and working as a climate
educator, Siruguri knows very well that there is no escape hatch
leading away from environmental problems. “We are all inheriting
this, in every part of the world,” she said.
Wara, of Stanford’s Woods Institute, argues that such an inheritance
requires investment. Rather than trying to protect the status quo, he
said, governments could make a new cost-benefit analysis.
“It would not be unreasonable” to boost spending significantly to
manage public and private lands to minimize smoke, “something like
what we think is reasonable when it comes to coal-fired power plants,
which is billions of dollars per year”, he said. “Because the
harms that are being created by the smoke are large.”
This summer, as air quality worsened across Illinois from Canadian
fires, Siruguri worried anew in Naperville. On a late July day, when
smoke pollution had returned, she brought her child to soccer camp,
and asked the camp’s director whether the air was healthy.
 Downtown Nevada City on October 5, 2023. Photograph: Andri
Tambunan/The Guardian 
He didn’t have an answer. “He was like, well, we kind of wait till
somebody tells us what to do or you make the decision for your
child,” she said.
Siruguri believes the government must work to stop climate change,
including by switching energy sources away from fossil fuels. She
believes that when officials talk to the public, they should be honest
about how smoke is changing air over time.
“It’s hard for the general public to know. The next time I see bad
air quality, I will be looking for how that’s getting recorded,”
Siruguri said. “It is concerning that these decisions are made
behind the scenes, almost.”
Walke of the NRDC agreed: “The worst possible outcome is lying to
the American people about whether the air they breathe is safe or
unsafe.”
_Smoke, Screened: The Clean Air Act’s Dirty Secret is a
collaboration of The California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian.
Molly Peterson is a reporter for The California Newsroom. Dillon
Bergin is a data reporter for MuckRock. Emily Zentner is a data
reporter for The California Newsroom. Andrew Witherspoon is a data
reporter for the Guardian._