By Khara Persad
Cronkite News
Photos by Kazi Haque/City of Maricopa
The air gets so bad on some days that Marilyn Wyant has to wear a mask to travel around the City of Maricopa, or face suffering an asthma attack.
Wyant, the director of health services for the Maricopa Unified School District, said its nine schools now follow a color-coded flag system to warn students, teachers and parents about the air quality on any given day – as around 800 of the district’s 5,900 students were diagnosed with asthma.
“It’s become part of our everyday life,” she said.
Everyday life in Maricopa means living with the highest levels of particulate-matter pollution in the state, according to an analysis of Environmental Protection Agency monitor data from 2000 to 2010. The city’s monitor averaged particulate matter levels 50 percent higher than the next-highest monitor, in Nogales, and from 2006 to 2009 Maricopa was well above the federal standard for such pollution.
City officials don’t dispute the numbers but they call them misleading: The city’s monitor is located in the worst possible place, they say, near a dusty feedlot that is home to about up to 30,000 cows at a time.
How they rank
Air-quality monitoring sites around the state, and their average readings for 2009-2011 for particulate matter of 2.5 micrograms (PM2.5)
• Cowtown, City of Maricopa: 13.3
• Durango Complex, Phoenix: 11.3
• Nogales: 11.1
• West Phoenix: 9.9
• South Phoenix: 9.9
• Yuma (Courthouse): 9.4
• North Phoenix: 9.3
• Casa Grande: 9.3
• Glendale: 9.1
• N. Phoenix (JLG Supersite): 8.4
• Mesa: 7.5
• Yuma (Supersite): 7.5
• Apache Junction: 6.9
• Flagstaff: 5.9
• Scottsdale: 5.6
• Tucson (Orange Grove): 5.4
• N. Tucson (Children’s Park): 5.4
• Prescott Valley: 4.3
• Peach Springs, Mohave: 4.2
Source: Environmental Protection Agency
