CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Wyoming, famous for its crisp mountain air and breathtaking, far-as-the-eye-can-see vistas, is looking a lot like smoggy Los Angeles these days because of a boom in natural gas drilling.
Folks who live near the gas fields in the western part of this outdoorsy state are complaining of watery eyes, shortness of breath and bloody noses because of ozone levels that have exceeded what people in Los Angeles and other major cities wheeze through on their worst pollution days.
“It is scary to me personally. I never would have guessed in a million years you would have that kind of danger here,” said Debbee Miller, a manager at a Pinedale snowmobile dealership.
In many ways, it’s a haze of prosperity: Gas drilling is going strong again and, as a result, so is the Cowboy State’s economy. Wyoming enjoys one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates — 6.4 percent. And while many other states are running up monumental deficits, lawmakers are projecting a budget surplus of more than $1 billion over the coming year in this state of a half-million people.
Still, in the Upper Green River Basin, some wonder if they’ve made a bargain with the devil. Two days last week, ozone levels in the gas-rich basin rose above the highest levels recorded in the biggest cities in the United States last year.
“They’re trading off health for profit. It’s outrageous. We’re not a Third World country,” said Elaine Crumpley, a retired science teacher who lives just outside Pinedale.
Preliminary data show ozone levels last Wednesday got as high as 124 parts per billion. That’s two-thirds higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum healthy limit of 75 parts per billion and above the worst day in Los Angeles all last year, 114 parts per billion, according to EPA records. Ozone levels in the basin reached 116 on March 1 and 104 on Saturday.
The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality urged the elderly, children and people with respiratory conditions to avoid strenuous or extended activity outdoors.
High levels of ozone happen in the Upper Green River Basin only during the winter. They result from a combination of gas industry emissions, snow on the ground, bright sunshine and temperature inversions, in which cool air near the ground is covered by a layer of warmer air. Pollution builds up during the day and becomes visible along the horizon as a thin layer of brown smudge — smog — by midafternoon.
