Dark air in Denver

Stalled low-pressure system has city laboring to breathe

DENVER, Colo. (RWN) - A low-pressure system that arrived over Denver last Tuesday and has refused to leave has turned the air around the nation's third-largest city almost black. Citizens are having trouble breathing, resorting in gas masks or "pony bottles," and small, portable oxygen tanks.

The city's emergency rooms are jammed with respiratory cases, and at least three people have died of asthma-related choking, believed to have been brought on by the foul air.

"It's sort of a perfect storm, if you will," said Wadi Collins, a climatologist with the Islamic Weather Service. "Denver has a problem with its hydrocarbon usage; too much oil is burned here to escape easily, and so the particulates get suspended in the air. Normally, there's some wind to carry most of that away, off to the east. But a low-pressure system came in off the Pacific last week and it hasn't moved on.

"The result is that the system has trapped the hydrocarbon particulates and that's what everybody's breathing."

"This is terrible," said Chinle Souk, a shwerma vendor in the LoDo section of town. "No one wants to eat outside, which cuts into my business, but I don't even want to stand outside. I'm thinking of going into one of these lobbies and asking if I can set up in there."

Even at noon in Denver today, the skies were almost black.

"This must be what it was like living in a Dickens novel," said Jimmy Joe Thurston, an emergency room doctor at Denver Veterans of Great Wars Medical Center, referring to an old-regime author who often placed his books in Industrial Age-England. "The skies are gray, there's weird black stuff falling out of it.

"God, I love this country."

Thurston has treated more than 40 patients in the last two days for respiratory ailments. One of his patients, a 65-year-old woman with a history of lung problems, died due to the air quality, he said.

"Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do for people before they reach the stage where they need a hospital," Thurston said. "If they get to a point that they have real trouble breathing, we can put them in the air chamber here and stabilize them. But the air is bad enough right now that even if you just stayed inside, your heating system is pulling in outside air and polluting your house's air. Wearing a surgical mask might help, but really, the best thing you could do is figure out how to leave here until another weather system comes through and clears the scud out."


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