Earth Protect Blog

By Bruce Finley The Denver Post

Metro Denver and Fort Collins rank increasingly high on a notorious list that comes out each year — the worst U.S. cities for air pollution.

Only the Los Angeles area and parts of California’s Central Valley now consistently outperform Colorado’s Front Range cities with their levels of ground-level ozone, which is linked to hospitalizations, ER visits and thousands of premature deaths.

Metro Denver ranked eighthworst for ozone, up from 10th in 2020 and 12th in 2019, according to a compilation of federal data by the American Lung Association. (Denver is tied with the Salt Lake City area.) Fort Collins jumped to 17th-worst, up from 19th in 2020 and 24th in 2019.

“We’re failing. It is not necessarily an easy problem to solve. A lot of the easy juice to squeeze, that’s already been done,” said National Jewish Health pulmonologist Dr. Anthony Gerber, who also serves on the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission, which guides state policy on air pollution.

For the second week in a row, residents of metro Denver and other northern Front Range cities are facing air quality alerts as ozone levels spike above the federal health limit of 70 parts per billion — 89 ppb in Golden, 74 ppb in Rocky Mountain National Park, 81 ppb at the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, 76 ppb in Fort Collins and 73 ppb in Chatfield State Park southwest of Denver.

The American Lung Association