LOS ANGELES, Dec. 17 - During a recent morning rush hour, a commuter called a talk radio station here to ask just what the heck was looming beyond the downtown.
My God, she said, it looks like a mountain!
It was.
Something remarkable happened this year in the city synonymous with smog: The skies over the Los Angeles basin were the cleanest since monitoring began here four decades ago. Vistas such as the nearby mountain range to the east, usually obscured by a yellow-gray miasma, made numerous appearances. The metropolis looked positively Salt Lake City.
The relatively cleaner air, air pollution specialists say, can be attributed to years of cutting-edge and costly anti-smog improvements (California requires the use of the cleanest cars and gas in the world), plus the dreaded El Nin~o.
In this case, the periodic weather phenomenon helped flush the skies over Los Angeles with nice, fresh, unstable tropical air, which broke up the inversions that normally trap noxious air over the basin.
While Los Angeles still has the worst air in the nation (followed by Houston, New York and, on some days, Washington), its slow but steady improvement serves as a reminder that environmental catastrophes can be reversed, say air quality experts. It just takes money, political will, public support and time.
In addition, some pollution specialists say the improvement of the air over Los Angeles should give comfort to the nations now dreading the cost of confronting the heat-trapping gases associated with global warming.
While citizens and industries here have spent untallied billions of dollars reducing and scrubbing their emissions, researchers report that the overall economy of the Los Angeles region has not been harmed by the efforts, but instead outperformed the rest of the country, including comparable industrial cities.
As for its air, Los Angeles this year experienced only a single Stage One Alert -- the warning of dangerous levels of ground-level ozone that means the aged, young and weak of lung should stay indoors and everybody else should avoid vigorous outdoor exercise. Ozone is the main ingredient in the stew of chemicals known as smog.
For comparison, last year saw seven Stage One episodes. Ten years ago, there were 66 such alerts. Twenty years ago, 121 really bad air days -- meaning that a child with asthma would be advised to remain indoors for one-third of the year.
"We had a really good year," said Joe Cassmassi, senior meteorologist with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which monitors the air over Los Angeles. "The weather patterns helped, but it is all part of a trend of continuing improvement. The hours [of smog]. The duration. The peak concentrations. They're all going in a favorable direction."
Weeks went by during this year's May-October "smog season" when one could see not only the famed Hollywood sign but also the San Gabriel Mountains, now dusted with winter snow in the far distance.
These improvements have come as Southern California has continued to boom economically. In a series of landmark studies reviewing the regional economy of the last 25 years, Jane Hall and her colleagues at California State University at Fullerton found even while consumers and businesses spent more than anyone else in the country on reducing pollution, the measurable sectors of job growth, family income, economic opportunity -- and even manufacturing -- all outpaced the national average.
"We went looking under rocks for anything that would point to detrimental costs of cleaning up the air, whether it would have made us less competitive," Hall said. "We couldn't find any."
A study of the most heavily regulated industries -- refineries, cement, steel -- found that they too did well.
And while Southern California suffered from a deep recession in the early 1990s, the cause was not smog-busting, Hall said, but the meltdown of the defense industry, which was caused by the Cold War's end.
"When you spend a dollar on pollution controls, it is not like lighting a match under the money," Hall said. "It doesn't disappear. Every dollar you spend on smog is a dollar that goes into somebody else's pocket. It gets kicked back into the economy."
The better air has appeared not just over Los Angeles but around the state.
"It's been a good year for everybody," said Alan Hirsch, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, the agency that oversees the activities of the state's 35 air quality districts.
But "good" in California is still far from healthy. While Los Angeles had only a single Stage One episode, it violated federal standards for clean air at least 67 times. It also surpassed the stricter state standards 135 times. The Environmental Protection Agency is now tightening federal air quality standards.
Los Angeles will probably be the last region in the country to attain a clean bill of health from the EPA. The target is the year 2010 -- though anti-smog timetables are notoriously loose.
The most current master plan, updated last year, calls for ever stricter standards for industrial refineries and printing presses. Also targeted: consumer goods, such as water heaters, paints and cleaning solvents.
Each polluting source has its own constituents, who often fight against new regulations -- even as environmental groups sue the EPA to enforce the Clean Air Act.
And while California has the strictest emission standards for vehicles, they will become even tighter over the next decade. Buses, ships, planes and trucks all will be required to burn cleaner fuels and reduce emissions. One of the most challenging tasks will be reducing emissions from airplanes coming and going at Los Angeles International Airport, one of the busiest -- and still growing -- hubs in the world.
Also, the state is far from attaining its goal of having one of every 10 new vehicles sold in California by the year 2003 powered by electricity.
Moreover, in a proposal announced this week, which already is generating stiff opposition from the auto industry, the California Air Resources Board will consider over the next year whether it will demand that light trucks, minivans and the ever popular sports utility vehicles operated in the state be affixed with the same smog controls as passenger cars.
Such vehicles are now exempted from the stricter standards. But as they replace the family station wagon, there will be great pressure to make them conform.
Sports utility vehicles are the hottest-selling mode of transportation in the state.
"I think the basic message is that while we've made tremendous progress, we have a long way to go," said Bill Kelly, spokesman for Los Angeles's air management district.
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