State plan guarantees a hazy future for Texas’ wilderness areas
by Erika McDonald, February 2008

After nearly a decade since a federal mandate to improve air quality conditions in the country’s national parks, a state plan to reduce pollutants that obscure the vistas of Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks sets compliance deadlines decades into the future.

On February 19, commissioners are scheduled to vote on a State Implementation Plan to reduce regional haze. Among the agency’s detractors are environmental activists, park managers and federal regulators who claim the SIP needs major revisions before visibility improvements in the parks can be expected.

Regional haze is an amalgam of the pollutants sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide (also a major component of ozone) and particulate matter from both man-made and natural sources that form a bluish-white or brown smoky film. TCEQ data shows that the impact of haze in Big Bend, for example, is severely impaired visibility from 150 miles on a clear day, to fewer than eight miles on an increasing number of days throughout the year.

According to TCEQ air quality planner Margaret Earnest, agency deadlines to reduce haze to levels that comply with the federal Clean Air Act are 2064 for Big Bend and 2080 for Guadalupe. Many stakeholders have argued that Texans should not have to wait that long.

Big Bend Regional Sierra Club’s Don Dowdey said he believes that by focusing on emissions reductions from coal fired power plants TCEQ could revise the SIP to take strides toward improved visibility within the next five years. He accused the agency of dragging its feet.

“There was a time when, from the top of Mt. Livermore, you could see all the way to the Guadalupe Mountain on one side and to the Chios basin on the other and you just can’t do that anymore,” Dowdey said. “For may of us who remember those majestic vistas, the fact that we won’t live to see them restored is a depressing thought,” Dowdey said.

Similar impacts were seen in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which features popular attractions like the highest peak in Texas at 8,749, the storied El Capitan, a 2,000 foot sheer cliff at the southern end of the Guadalupe range, and the nearby Carlsbad caverns. Park resources manager Fred Armstrong also bemoaned the state’s slow response.

“Do we really want to relegate those visceral images to the storybooks and tales of the old west are we going to preserve them so that future generations can directly experience that connection with history?” Armstrong asked.

Dowdey and the Sierra Club advocate state take action sooner by closing down grandfathered power plants, pointing to an interagency study released in 2004, which found that sulfur emissions from coal fired plants in East Texas contributed a larger proportion of Big Bend haze than previously suspected.

Earnest explained the distant deadlines are a natural result of what she called a large and cumbersome process that involves a multitude of agencies to work together to control pollution from a multitude of sources, including coal fired plants in Mexico.

“When you consider how long we have been working at polluting the air to get the point where we’re at now, it’s really not that long,” Earnest said. She said that initial improvements to haze conditions in Big Bend and Guadalupe National Parks would not be visible until 2018.

However, federal regulators disagreed. In official comments submitted by the National Parks Service (NPS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), regulators urged TCEQ not to wait five years before taking action to reduce those emissions it can control.

In an excerpt from official comments submitted to the state on behalf of NPS and USFWS, officials wrote: “Inaction due to uncertainty is not prudent public policy since it places all risk on [visibility conditions in Texas’ national parks] and does not ensure reasonable progress as required by the Clean Air Act and the EPA’s regulations…Although TCEQ concludes that already planned controls are between now and 2018 are reasonable, it fails to address how multiple issues which prevent the state from accurately determining future emissions from specific sources will result in anything more than a toss of the dice with respect to addressing Texas’ substantial contribution to [emissions that cause regional haze].”

Houston sierra Club’s Brandt Mannchen complained that among other major shortcomings of the proposed SIP, TCEQ failed to consult with stakeholders. He called the SIP “a sham.”

“This is a bankrupt program which allows Texas’…treasured national parks to exist in a cloud of air pollution…the public which loves and visits these national parks will just have to suffer,” Mannchen stated in written comments he submitted to the state. Mannchen said he planned to travel to Austin next week to deliver the message in person.

TAKE ACTION
The public may submit comments via mail, fax, or online to TCEQ by clicking here. Comments will be accepted until February 22.