When the LA Air Tastes Like Burning

You know the winded feeling you get after exerting yourself a bit too much for too long? For me, that feeling usually happens with running, mainly since it isn't my favorite form of exercise and I don't find myself sprinting down the street that often. I should like it since the long distance skill runs in my family -- my dad ran marathons for years and my brother just finished his first one in Colorado -- but I've never hit my stride when it comes to hitting the pavement, which might explain why I haven't experienced the searing pain I felt in my lungs while in east LA over the weekend.

My friend Ana is pretty much obsessed with public transit and when you live in LA, that's a bizarre obsession since everyone gets around by car, but there are those lucky individuals who live close to the subway or main bus lines and swear by the efficiency.

Ana asked me a couple weeks ago to participate in the first ever Transit People race that was held this past weekend. The race asks teams to start from locations around the city and race to a final destination, all by using public transit to more or less elevate the fact that you can get around LA pretty easily using public transit. Transit People is also a charity that uses public transit to take inner city kids on field trips to the aquarium, natural history museum and numerous other LA attractions.

Our team was planning to start the race from the USC campus, so after meeting Ana at her apartment in Silverlake (sortof north LA), we headed to USC (south LA) via rail and bus, connected with the rest of our team, received our final coordinates and took off for the nearest bus. Turns out we almost missed the bus and everyone had to sprint for it. Not being a sprinter, this was mildly embarrassing, but we all made the bus which ended up taking us to the final destination without a transfer, but not before another rival team got on the same bus with us. Once we figured out they were also with Transit race, our team sketched out a strategy to jump off the bus and book it to our final destination, Heritage Square Park in east LA.

Sure the bus stop and park were maybe a little more than a half mile away, but again, we were sprinting and it was 75 degrees out already, and I swear, we were running uphill. Luckily, I was not the first to slow down, and thankfully the majority of the other team really never tried to catch us (they later referred to our team as "all fitness types"), which meant that we'd won the race, but for 30 minutes after we made it to the park, everyone on my team was still wheezing and most of us were still coughing. Everyone said it tasted like there was something in the air, like a fine coating of pollution, or as Ralph Wiggum describes it, it tasted like burning. More than 24 hours later, it still felt like I had something caught in my throat.

The type of air I inhaled after sprinting to Heritage Park and again to make the rail stop a couple hours later is the worst in the country and has been for decades. My colleague and an LA native, David Pettit, tells me how it felt like a knife was piercing his lungs after playing outside while he was growing up.

This was the first time I can remember breathing air like this. I'm lucky to live on the Westside of the city, near the ocean breezes that blow pollution inland, to hover over areas like east LA. It's a combination of weather patterns and the expansive pollution from cars, diesel trucks, trains, and stationary sources like power plants that contribute to this choking soup of air pollution. Who knows how much particulate matter I inhaled during those short sprints? What really concerns me is the kids who were at the park, putting on a talent show for us and their families from east LA. They have the rest of their lives ahead of them and are stuck breathing this toxic brew every day. 

I want to say we can fix this, but LA has dealt with smog stinging Angelinos' eyes and lungs for more than 50 years. And now we know it also kills 24,000 Californians annually or 15 people a day if you live in the LA air basin (page 4, the 5,400 premature deaths figure, citing CARB). We need to do better. East LA is home to some of the region's worst polluters and many minority families. Those families deserve to go outside and sprint if they want to without feeling like they're taking years off their lives.

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