Thousands Told Not To Drive in Three States
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Thousands of Americans have been urged not to drive on Wednesday amid concerns over high air pollution levels.
Ozone Action Day alerts have been issued for parts of Colorado, Texas and Arizona, which remain in force until Wednesday evening.
The warnings mean that ground-level ozone concentrations are forecast to reach dangerous levels that could pose a risk to sensitive groups and the general public.
Smoke billows from a wildfire burning in Arizona in May.
Smoke billows from a wildfire burning in Arizona in May.
Grace Trejo/Arizona Daily Star/AP
Why It Matters
The National Weather Service (NWS) warned in its alert notices that there is an "increasing likelihood of respiratory symptoms and breathing discomfort in active children and adults and people with lung disease, such as asthma."
It added: "Active children and adults, and people with lung disease, such as asthma, should reduce prolonged or heavy outdoor exertion."
What To Know
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issued its alerts for Douglas, Jefferson, Denver, Araphoe, Adams, Broomfield, Boulder, Larimer and Weld Counties until 4 p.m. on Wednesday.
In its warning, it urged people to limit driving gas- and diesel-powered vehicles until at least 4 p.m.
It added: "Hot and stagnant weather conditions will result in ozone concentrations reaching the unhealthy for sensitive groups category."
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued its alert for the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
"Atmospheric conditions are expected to be favorable for producing high levels of ozone air pollution in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on Wednesday. You can help prevent ozone pollution by sharing a ride, walking, riding a bicycle, taking your lunch to work, avoiding drive-through lanes, conserving energy, and keeping your vehicle properly tuned," it said.
Meanwhile, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality issued its alert for the Phoenix Metro Area.
"Consolidate your travel, stabilize loose soils, slow down or avoid travel on dirt roads, reduce or eliminate fireplace use, and avoid using gas-powered lawn equipment," it said.
What People Are Saying
The NWS said in its warning for Arizona: "Coarse particulate matter—also known as PM-10 - is an air contaminant that can aggravate heart and lung disease conditions, especially in older adults, children, and those with asthma. A decrease in physical activity is recommended."
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said on its website: "Ground-level ozone is an air pollution problem that impacts the health of all Coloradans. Exposure can cause acute respiratory problems and trigger asthma attacks. During Ozone Action alerts, avoid rigorous outdoor activity during the heat of the day. Prolonged exposure can cause long-lasting damage to your lungs.
"You can make a difference by doing your part to improve air quality along Denver's Front Range. Even during periods of wildfire smoke, reducing your personal emissions can help decrease ozone production. Combining or skipping just two car trips a week has a positive impact on our air quality."
Jonathan Grigg, professor of pediatric respiratory and environmental medicine at Queen Mary, University of London, told Newsweek previously that there are "very clear links" between inhaling particles and earlier death from both respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
He added: "There are vulnerable groups and classically they are children because they've got an extra issue to do with their lungs developing, whereas our lungs are not developing as adults."
What Happens Next
The warnings remain in effect until Wednesday evening.
Air quality warnings are updated regularly by the Environmental Protection Agency and NWS. Residents in affected areas can access real-time forecasts and health guidance via airnow.gov and local agencies as conditions develop.
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is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. A day before my 47th birthday last month, I took the subway to Manhattan's Upper East Side for a coronary artery calcium scan (CAC). For those who haven't entered the valley of middle age, a CAC is a specialized CT scan that looks for calcium deposits in the heart and its arteries. Unlike in your bones, having calcium in your coronary arteries is a bad thing, because it indicates the buildup of plaque comprised of cholesterol, fat, and other lovely things. The higher the calcium score, the more plaque that has built up — and with it, the higher the risk of heart disease and even heart attacks. A couple of hours after the test, I received a ping on my phone. My CAC score was 7, which indicated the presence of a small amount of calcified plaque, which translates to a 'low but non-zero cardiovascular risk.' Put another way, according to one calculator, it means an approximately 2.1 percent chance of a major adverse cardiovascular event over the next 10 years. 2.1 percent doesn't sound high — it's a little higher than the chance of pulling an ace of spades from a card deck — but when it comes to major adverse cardiovascular events, 2.1 percent is approximately 100 percent higher than I'd like. That's how I found myself joining the tens of millions of Americans who are currently on statin drugs, which lower levels of LDL cholesterol (aka the 'bad' cholesterol). I didn't really want to celebrate my birthday with a numerical reminder of my creeping mortality. 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According to a recent study in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the proportion of all deaths attributable to heart attacks plummeted by nearly 90 percent between 1970 and 2022. Over the same period, heart disease as a cause of all adult deaths in the US fell from 41 percent to 24 percent. Today, if a man over 65 is hospitalized with a heart attack, he has a 90 percent chance of leaving the hospital alive. By my calculations, the improvements in preventing and treating heart attacks between 1970 and 2022 have likely saved tens of millions of lives. So how did we get here? How to save a life In 1964, the year after the coronary heart disease death rate peaked, the US surgeon general released a landmark report on the risks of smoking. It marked the start of a decades-long public health campaign against one of the biggest contributing factors to cardiovascular disease. That campaign has been incredibly successful. In 1970, an estimated 40 percent of Americans smoked. By 2019, that percentage had fallen to 14 percent, and it keeps declining. The reduction in smoking has helped lower the number of Americans at risk of a heart attack. So did the development and spread in the 1980s of statins like I'm on now, which make it far easier to manage cholesterol and prevent heart disease. By one estimate, statins save nearly 2 million lives globally each year. When heart attacks do occur, the widespread adoption of CPR and the development of portable defibrillators — which only began to become common in the late 1960s — ensured that more people survived long enough to make it to the hospital. Once there, the development of specialized coronary care units, balloon angioplasty and artery-opening stents made it easier for doctors to rescue a patient suffering an acute cardiac event. Our changing heart health deaths Despite this progress in stopping heart attacks, around 700,000 Americans still die of all forms of heart disease every year, equivalent to 1 in 5 deaths overall. Some of this is the unintended result of our medical success. As more patients survive acute heart attacks and life expectancy has risen as a whole, it means more people are living long enough to become vulnerable to other, more chronic forms of heart disease, like heart failure and pulmonary-related heart conditions. While the decline in smoking has reduced a major risk factor for heart disease, Americans are in many other ways much less healthy than they were 50 years ago. The increasing prevalence of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and sedentary behavior all raise the risk that more Americans will develop some form of potentially fatal heart disease down the line. Here, GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic hold amazing potential to reduce heart disease's toll. One study found that obese or overweight patients who took a GLP-1 inhibitor for more than three years had a 20 percent lower risk of heart attack, stroke, or death due to cardiovascular disease. Statins have saved millions of lives, yet tens of millions more Americans could likely benefit from taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs, especially women, minorities, and people in rural areas. Lastly, far more Americans could benefit from the kind of advanced screening I received. Only about 1.5 million Americans received a CAC test in 2017, but clinical guidelines indicate that more than 30 million people could benefit from such scans. Just as it is with cancer, getting ahead of heart disease is the best way to stay healthy. It's an astounding accomplishment to have reduced deaths from heart attacks by 90 percent over the past 50-plus years. But even better would be preventing more of us from ever getting to the cardiac brink at all. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
