April 22, 2025
PITTSBURGH – The upcoming report from the American Lung Association on Pittsburgh’s air quality should summarize its findings this way: Lots of smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted into southwestern Pennsylvania in the summer of 2023.
Instead, the ALA is likely to describe in overheated language how the air in the Pittsburgh region is getting worse and is failing all of the report’s pollution standards. Yet in fact, the region was in compliance with all federal Clean Air Act standards for the years analyzed in the report (2021-2023) despite the wildfire smoke.
The report also illustrates how one of the cleanest places in the country for PM2.5 pollution – Washington County – is now considered by the Lung Association to be a failing area that is putting people’s health at risk.
Give the ALA credit for getting one thing right, though: It thinks everybody should read the Pittsburgh Works Together Clearing the Air 5.0 report.
“The American Lung Association continues to release assessments of our region’s air quality based on their own metrics to achieve a pre-determined outcome,” said Jeff Nobers, executive director of Pittsburgh Works Together, a coalition of labor unions, businesses and civic leaders. “The people of southwestern Pennsylvania continually read and hear the same inaccurate assessments of air quality in our region. What people need to know are the facts.”
Pittsburgh Works Together has repeatedly documented the flawed methodology that the Lung Association uses in its annual State of the Air report, relying on a single monitor in Allegheny County to pass judgment on a 12-county region that is almost as large as the entire state of New Jersey (see, for instance, our 2023 analysis of the report: https://pghworks.com/air-quality-report-long-on-hot-air-short-on-cold-facts-2/).
But this year’s State of the Air report will highlight a different flaw: The ALA’s made-up grading criteria.
Editor’s Note: The ALA selectively releases its report to news outlets under confidentiality terms, so critics do not have the opportunity to review and analyze the data and findings before they are publicized by the media. This critique is written based on the EPA data sets, methodology and practices that the ALA has used in its previous State of the Air reports.
Consider the Canadian wildfire smoke. The EPA, when analyzing whether a community meets federal Clean Air Act standards, throws out data that is extraordinary and out of the control of the community. Like results that come from a natural disaster in a foreign country.
Not the American Lung Association: “…the Lung Association…included the exceptional (e.g., wildfires) and natural events (e.g., stratospheric intrusions) that were identified in the database…”
The Lung Association then makes up its own grading criteria that are unrelated to federal regulations. Daily readings for tiny soot – also known as PM2.5 – fluctuate, so the EPA allows seven days over the course of the year when levels go high enough to be considered “unhealthy” before it considers the air in violation.
For the Lung Association, seven “unhealthy” readings in a single year are enough to give a region a failing grade for three years in a row.
Let’s see how that affects Washington County.
During a span of eight years from mid-2015 to mid-2023, Washington County had one single day where the air got dirty enough to be considered “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” not even “unhealthy” for the general population. Understandably the Lung Association included it on its list of “Cleanest Counties for Short-Term Particle Pollution” as recently as 2022.
Then came the summer of 2023, and the smoke from Canada. Between June 5 and July 17, Washington County experienced levels of PM2.5 pollution that for two days were “very unhealthy”, for one day “unhealthy”, and for five days “unhealthy for sensitive groups”.
Nearly two years later, no more dirty air days. No matter.
Washington County will earn an F in this report as well as the next two Lung Association reports, regardless of how clean the air in Washington County is, air that is supposedly putting its residents and people across the Pittsburgh region at risk.
“The ALA’s annual misrepresentations of our air quality are counterproductive and create more divisiveness and move us further from viable solutions,” Nobers said.
But Lung Association spokesman Kevin Stewart got one thing right when talking about his group’s State of the Air report and the annual Clearing the Air report from Pittsburgh Works with NEXTpittsburgh.
“ I do encourage people to read in full the new report [Clearing the Air 5.0] and see for themselves how the authors rank the Pittsburgh area,” Stewart told the publication in a story titled Is Pittsburgh’s air really that bad?
“It’s good that there’s some attention to the issue. It’s important for people to understand the quality of the air that they breathe and to use different sources of information for that,” he said.
“As long as people are open about their process and can point to the original data sources as we can, I think it’s always a good contribution to the discussion.”
Pittsburgh Works Together is a business-organized labor-workforce-economic development alliance working to grow jobs and expand the industries that are the foundation of our economy, including energy, manufacturing, and construction, to provide opportunity for all residents. To learn more, please visit pghworks.com.
Ken Zapinski
412-352-4364; ken@pghworks.com
