Posted on 05/08/2003 11:45:10 AM PDT by buffyt
Every year at this time, Joanne Driscoll is a prisoner to pollution.
Four air purifiers hum incessantly in her two-story West Houston townhouse. Industrial-strength air filters are stacked on her glass-topped dining room table.
She won't answer her front door without wearing a mask.
The culprit isn't smog, pollen or any of the other contaminants and allergens that make Houston's air infamous. It's smoke -- from agricultural fires set hundreds of miles away in other countries.
"Pollution knows no boundaries," said Driscoll, an asthma sufferer who had her first serious bout of illness during the particularly heavy Mexican and Central American fire season in 1998.
"It seemed like I was a character in some Stephen King novel that hadn't been written yet," she said. "It was called Fire Starter. Everywhere I went, I ran into smoke."
Driscoll, physicians say, belongs to a small group of people who are extremely sensitive to the smoke that blows into Texas each spring from thousands of fires set to prepare fields and clear rainforests for crops in Mexico and Central America.
While the smoke has reached only moderate levels so far in Houston, where it is predicted to persist until mid-May, Driscoll is already losing her voice and getting a cough.
And experts from Texas to Mexico are saying the fires -- already out of control in some places -- could burn as badly as they did in 1998, when dry conditions caused by El Niño stoked the flames, producing an ecological disaster across southern Mexico and sending smoke as far north as the Great Plains.
Satellite images show that hundreds of fires this year are still burning, creating a line of smoke that is pushed hundreds of miles by the wind and covering much of the state in a hazy blanket.
"All I see is the smoke on the satellite picture," said Josh Lichter, a meteorologist with the Houston-Galveston National Weather Service office in League City.
"It's a plume of smoke extending all the way down to the Bay of Campeche (near the Yucatan Peninsula) ... and as far east as New Orleans."
The gray haze typically doesn't flow into Texas until late April and subsides at the end of the May when the rainy season douses the flames.
But the miniscule smoke particles are able to bypass the hairs that line the nose and lungs, and lodge in tissue, doctors say, giving the smoke the potential to be even more dangerous than smog despite its being short-lived.
And unlike a high-ozone warning, which can be limited to one area, the smoke infiltrates the entire city.
"The smaller the particle size, the more significant its effect on the lungs," said Dr. Nick Hanania, director of the Asthma Clinical Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine. "The smoke we see is not what worries us, it's the smoke particles that we can't see."
Houston is on the edge of a plume stretching across the eastern two-thirds of Texas now, but all it will take is a weather shift for its air to be downgraded to unhealthy for sensitive groups such as the elderly and children and those with lung diseases, meteorologists and state officials said.
Friday, Harris County Public Health and Environmental Services issued an air quality watch and health alert because of the possibility of air quality here worsening. State health officials have advised people to limit their time outdoors and to reduce activities such as barbecuing and mowing the lawn that could exacerbate the poor air quality.
Experts from Texas to Mexico say drought conditions, coupled with stronger than average southeasterly winds, are creating conditions on par with those in 1998, when U.S. officials traveled south of the border to help extinguish the fires.
Mexico's National Forestry Commission reports there are 445 fires burning on about 45,000 acres in 28 of the country's 31 states. The commission says more than 90 percent of the fires involved clearing of fields and pastures, a traditional practice in farm country before the summer rains, which begin in June.
"This is the worst year since 1998, but it's still within normal parameters," said Arturo Raygoza, spokesman for Mexico's national forest fire commission.
Most affected are the southern states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero and the Caribbean coast state of Quintana Roo, where Cancun is located. So far, 4,650 fires have burned from Jan. 1 until this month.
Mexican federal officials Wednesday designated three townships in the Chiapas state as disaster areas. The communities are on the southern fringe of the Chimalapas forest, one of Mexico's few remaining virgin rainforests, which covers the narrow Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
But the main problem, according to Mexican officials, is on the Peten Peninsula in Guatemala -- the source for as much as 70 percent of the smoke affecting Texas.
"They asked for help, for helicopters, but then couldn't tell us where to send them," Raygoza said. "It is chaos there."
A Guatemalan official monitoring the fires said military units are fighting the fires but the extent of the threat is unclear.
"In 1998 the situation was critical," said Ariel Morales. "This year the situation looks similar, but it's too early to tell."
Emergency doctors at Ben Taub Hospital in Houston said they have only treated two or three additional people since Monday for lung irritation, but they said it was difficult to say whether the smoke or Houston's other air problems were to blame.
"We've had a few patients come in who already have underlying lung disease. But it's hard to attribute anything we see solely to Mexico, because we have other factors in our community," said Dr. Janice Zimmerman, director of medicine services at Ben Taub's emergency center.
Research shows that on days when Mexican smoke hovers over Houston, it can help form smog.
"The normal emissions in the city get added on top of it," said Bryan Lambeth, senior meteorologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Regardless of weather and other factors, some say, the seasonal haze is bound to get worse. As Mexico's population increases, the pressure to create more cropland out of forest to feed people will rise, meaning more burning.
For people like Driscoll, this is the bad news.
Each day the smoke lingers, her symptoms get worse. In years past, she has escaped Houston to Pittsburgh.
"When I get serious symptoms," she said, "that means an airline ticket."
Chronicle correspondent Jo Tuckman contributed to this story from Mexico City.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.