Local air authorities and other government officials defend their work, saying the Valley's complex air picture has improved. It just hasn't improved fast enough to meet standards or deadlines.

Officials at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District hasten to say they have no control over 60% of the problem – vehicles, which are regulated by federal and state officials.

They point out that incentive programs and local control of "stationary" sources, such as oil refineries, have made the air cleaner despite a growing population. Their proof: The Valley has fewer violations or "exceedence" days – when smog spikes for a short time beyond the level where lung damage can begin.

"The number of federal [short-term or one-hour health standard] exceedences has dropped more than 40% since 1989," says planner David Jones of the air district.

But the eight-hour or long-term violations have been fairly static, actually increasing over the last two years. The smog here doesn't hit the one-hour peaks as high or as often as in Los Angeles, but Valley residents spend more eight-hour stretches in unhealthy air.

No matter how you measure the smog, nobody argues that this ugly haze is healthy to breathe.

"We know ozone is an oxidant and toxic to tissue, and the longer you have exposure to toxins the worse the damage is," says Dr. David Pepper, a member of the Fresno-based Medical Alliance for Healthy Air, an advocacy group. "It would not surprise me if studies come out that say we're all going to die years earlier."

What about my lungs?

Breathing is the bottom line.

More than 300,000 people – 10% of the Valley's population – are afflicted with chronic breathing disorders. More than 16% of the children living in Fresno County have asthma, a higher rate than any other place in California.

Ask Patty Haury what bad air can do to your life.

Haury, 62, grew up on a dairy farm seven miles outside Visalia. She and her husband, Jim, now grow citrus there.

She wakes up with a sinus headache and a sore throat that don't ease until she sticks her head over a sink of hot water to loosen the congestion. During winter months, the soot in the air even invades her home.

"I have been sitting here with a mask on in my own living room so I can breathe," she says of her cold-weather breathing problems.

Health is a main motivator for Sierra Club member Kevin Hall, who says he wants his 11-year-old son, Joey, to grow up with clean air. When Hall speaks of his favorite air pollution target – sprawl – he relates it to health.

"We essentially have a monster on our hands," he says. "And it's called sprawl. Its tentacles are freeways. It exhales smog. It devours open land, lays waste to inner cities, and it kills people."

Health advocates shudder over long-term exposure to acrid-smelling ozone, the main ingredient in smog. They worry over the damage being done to skin, eyes and lungs.

Smog, which has been heavily researched in the last three decades, may not even be the worst threat. New studies show small-particle pollution is connected to high death rates.

The naturally hazy Valley gets soot and particles from fireplaces, farm burning and pollutants reacting with ammonia from dairies.

Diesel particles are the scariest, researchers say. The tiny pieces shot into the air from diesel engines are not only a lung irritant and a trigger for lung conditions, but the state also says they are toxic.

Diesel truck rigs drive thousands of miles daily in the Valley, and hundreds of diesel irrigation pumps run around the clock in summer.

Combine these particles and corrosive smog in this big bowl, and you see why officials fear the Valley is the heir apparent to Los Angeles as the nation's dirtiest air basin.

Faced with this reality, people who have children with lung problems sometimes alter their lives for better breathing air.

Paul Price, 38, a California State University, Fresno psychology professor, drives 45 minutes from his pine-surrounded Oakhurst home to his job on the Valley floor. He does it for his 8-year-old son, Joseph.

The boy's asthma was almost out of control when they lived within a 15-minute drive of the Fresno State campus.

"It literally was every day he would get up and the first thing he would do is sneeze a dozen times and have to blow his nose and cough," Price says.

Since the family moved in April 2001, Joseph is off asthma medication, says his mother, Barbara.

The Prices still miss the convenience and the communal relationships of living close to the university, and the friends they had made since moving to Fresno from Michigan in 1996.

Paul Price says he was not pleased with the idea of moving to Oakhurst, which is just above the Valley's suffocating layers of pollution. But Joseph's deterioration seems to have stopped.

A dusty valley

MURKY ARCHITECTURE: A pedestrian crosses at Fulton and Divisadero streets in downtown Fresno on a smoggy morning. The poor air quality obscures the skyline in the background. (Mark Crosse / The Fresno Bee)

Dirty air is nothing new in the San Joaquin Valley. Pioneer William Brewer gazed across the Valley in the 19th century and saw haze and dust – lots and lots of dust.

"Dust fills the air ... It covers everything," Brewer wrote in his journal. "I cannot conceive of a worse place to live."

More than a century of modern civilization has only made things worse. Much worse. And far more complex.

Consider: The smog-forming gases in the Valley amount to less than half the amount in the Los Angeles area. Yet Valley air actually is worse by some measures.

That means there won't be an easy answer, such as simply driving cleaner-running cars or just cleaning up the oil industry. In fact, both of those fixes have been happening for a decade.

"It's not a problem that's going to be solved by concentrating on one area or one industry," says Mario Molina, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who won a 1995 Nobel Prize for research on the ozone layer and now is focusing on ground-level ozone.

That big view is part of two landmark studies, the biggest of their kind anywhere, analyzing smog in a massive swath of California's air. One study focuses on smog or ozone from Redding south to the Mojave Desert, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Sierra Nevada. A second study aims at particulates.

The results of this combined $50 million of research won't be available for another year or more. But this is not a time to sit and wait, say many experts.

The air fight will have to be waged by residents as much as by government and business, experts say, because the little things will count in this Valley. That fight can start anytime.

For instance, residents need to keep the tops closed on all paints and solvents so they don't leak fumes that later will become smog. Such common items send up 24 tons of smog-forming gases daily.

In Los Angeles, the air quality battle already is decades old. Federal and state regulators required Los Angeles to adopt the most stringent pollution controls anywhere in the country since 1990. And they are working.

Compare the Los Angeles area's improvement to the Valley now. You see dramatic differences.

Readings for ozone in Clovis and Parlier often surpass places in Southern California, such as Pico Rivera, Burbank or Reseda. Southern California still has more one-hour or peak violations than the Valley, but Southern California has dramatically improved since the early 1990s.

The Valley's improvements have been lackluster, especially around Fresno, even though many of the pollution control measures developed in Los Angeles are used here.

Why? The Valley is a bowl with many hot, windless summers and stagnant, foggy winters. Many experts believe the Valley is the most accommodating place in the country for air pollution.

At 25,000 square miles, it is the nation's largest air basin, and it has three distinct air pollution seasons – summer smog, fall dust and winter chemical particles. This pollution damages even mature pines in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks as it rises to the Sierra Nevada.

Within the Valley, the northern counties, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Merced, are the cleanest, even though they receive the stiffest dose of Bay Area smog blowing in from the west.

Pollution seems to accumulate more in Madera, Fresno and Kings counties, which have far more violations of the federal health standard. And Tulare and Kern counties to the south often suffer the most from stagnant air as the pollution moves to the bottom of the Valley's bowl.

It's not a pretty picture, even compared to Southern California.

"The L.A. basin is pretty well-ventilated compared to the Valley," says atmospheric scientist John Carroll, who has studied the Valley's air for the University of California. "You have a serious problem."

Bureaucratic breakdown

RUSH HOUR: Traffic backs up on Freeway 41 near the northbound Shaw offramp at 5 p.m. Pollution caused by cars and trucks is the primary factor in creating smog problems in the Valley. (Mark Crosse / The Fresno Bee)

Lung problems and the brown haze are common banter in break rooms and at soccer games. Yet, bureaucrats have heard hardly a peep from the public in the board room.

The public hasn't made a big fuss about the air, so regulators haven't felt a lot of heat to move faster.

Valley air district staff members have been pleading the dirty-air case for years, but their discussions are complex and jargon-laced. The details are all but impenetrable for the public without a steep learning curve.

Big-city environmentalists, who do understand the air-pollution speak, just didn't show up for the conversation.

For years, they have known the technical truth – that the Valley's air usually ranks right along with Houston or Los Angeles, the nation's worst basins.

But the Sierra Club didn't even mention the Valley in a sweeping 2001 study, "Clearing the Air with Transit Spending," which was critical of places with unsafe air.

Without environmentalists or a grass-roots push, local air officials have struggled in a political Bermuda Triangle. They are caught among powerful industries, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Air Resources Board.

Major federal cleanup plans – detailing goals and deadlines – have stalled for years.

The local district has passed many rules for cutting down on air pollutants, and thousands of businesses have complied. But the Valley has grown and sprawled, eating up smog reductions from the oil industry and vehicles.

Without the major cleanup plans, environmentalists believe the Valley would continue just spinning its wheels as the population grew.

Environmentalist Hall began learning about this bureaucratic inertia in 1999 when he joined the Sierra Club in Fresno.

In early 2000, he persuaded Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund in San Francisco to investigate the Valley's air problem. Earthjustice found 19 missed deadlines, and lawsuits followed.

"Everywhere we looked in the Valley, we found another problem," says lawyer Bruce Nilles, who was the lead Earthjustice attorney at the time.

The rest of the country has noticed the Valley as well. Many states and districts are waiting to see if the district boldly volunteers for the worst classification of smog polluters, occupied only by the South Coast Air Basin.

Air districts in other parts of the country might make the same shift.

Environmentalists consider the shift another delay because it would extend the smog cleanup deadline from 2005 to 2010. But air district officials say the Valley simply cannot make a 2005 deadline, and failure will be expensive.

Businesses would pay up to $30 million annually in penalties until the air meets health standards. Federal sanctions would hold up funds for more than $2 billion in road projects as well as impose extra fees on new and expanding large businesses. The Valley would then be bumped into the worst category anyway.

Whether the deadline is missed or the district volunteers for the worst smog category, the Valley's image would be further tarnished, some believe. Business and growth might be profoundly stunted in a place where double-digit unemployment already is among the worst in the country.

"I don't think air quality would run off half the new businesses, but bad air quality can be very damaging in attracting businesses," says John Quiring, a former economic development director in Fresno who is now a consultant. "There are so many choices for businesses to locate, why should they waste time on an area that has such poor air quality?"