By Christopher Johnston for Eye on Ohio.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for Ohio News Connection Collaboration reporting for the Ohio Center for Investigative Journalism-Public News Service Collaboration

While running for Cleveland City Council Ward 3 seat last year, Ayat Amin spent a lot of time canvassing neighborhoods and talking to residents about environmental issues. 

“What came up time and again in our conversations that really resonated with people was air quality,” she said. “Specifically there were a lot of residents who felt they were experiencing poor air quality but didn’t know what to do about it.”

When she inquired about signs of air pollution in their neighborhood, residents told her they would have to wipe soot off of their outdoor plants or off their houses. In Ohio City, residents of Lakeview Terrace, one of the oldest public housing complexes in the U.S., complained of particles in the air from the roughly 1,000 trucks passing through, spewing exhaust and stirring up dust that landed on their cars, homes and in the air they breathed every day.

After she lost the election to incumbent Kerry McCormack, Amin convened an informal citizen action group that met regularly to research available data and discuss air pollutants such as methane and lead in the air. They talked with representatives from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency and Cleveland’s Division of Air Quality, which was helpful and “wanted the same things we wanted.” However, the group stopped meeting after about five months.

“Our group stalled at the beginning of last summer because we were struggling to determine what we could actually do about air pollution,” she said. “There wasn’t enough data for us to prosecute, and the city was already working on getting more monitors. We didn’t have definite sources of pollution data that we could mobilize people in the neighborhood and say, ‘Hey, your air quality is poor, and here’s the proof of where the pollutants are coming from.’”

Since then Amin has continued to research the problem and looked at what other cities are doing to address air pollution. She found an innovative study from Portland, OR, using moss as an air pollution detector. Because moss plants don’t have roots, they absorb whatever substances are in the air on their surfaces, thus serving as a cheap air quality monitor. 

“The researcher and a large group of volunteers collected moss samples throughout the city on a very granular level in about a ten-block radius,” Amin explained. “They were able to create an almost block-by-block map of pollution hot spots, and having that data enabled Portland residents to go to their City Council and advocate for legislation.”

Seattle later replicated the project, enlisting mainly high school students to collect the moss samples. She is still studying the feasibility of doing a similar study in Cleveland neighborhoods. Amin, who works as a product manager at ChargeNet Stations, a renewable energy company, was recently named to a new position as co-director of Environmental Justice with the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party. If the moss study proves feasible, she said, it will be implemented as one of several environmental projects with the county organization.

“I’m very happy with what the people who work for the city [addressing air quality] are able to do with the resources they have,” Amin concluded. “But as a resident, I don’t know if it covers all of the needs.”

New Air Pollution Control Code in the works

One of the barriers to identifying specific sources of air pollution violations for Amin’s citizen group was Cleveland’s greatly outdated Air Pollution Control Code, which hasn’t been revised since the 1970s. 

According to Christina Yoka, chief of air pollution outreach for the Cleveland Department of Public Health, the department is currently working through the public engagement process that she expects to continue into spring of 2023, and a revised code will be proposed by the end of 2023.

“We want to update the code with items that will benefit the community and that the community wants to see in the air code,” Bryan Sokolowski, chief of air monitoring, Ambient Air Monitoring Section for the Department of Health.

His department, which includes permitting and enforcement divisions, relies on those city codes, along with state of Ohio Administrative and Revised codes, to enforce air quality concerns throughout Cuyahoga County.

“We cover the whole county,” Sokolowski said. “If there’s a violation of an air permit within the city and the violator does not come into compliance, then the city would pursue the enforcement process through the law department.”

Cleveland scores low air quality grades from ALA

In April, the American Lung Association released its “State of the Air” report:“Cleveland’s Air Quality Gets Worse, Residents Exposed to More Unhealthy Air Pollution.” ALA’s report ranked Cleveland as the 27^th most polluted city for ozone pollution. 

In terms of short-term spikes in particle pollution, which can be “extremely dangerous and even lethal,” according to the ALA, Cleveland’s ranking worsened to 58^th. 

The city’s metro area ranking did improve significantly for year-round particle pollution, though. The city jumped from 14^th to 42^nd worst, “taking the Cleveland metro area well off the list of dirtiest cities in the nation for this pollutant measure.”

Sokolowski said that ozone is a challenge for several reasons, though his department is only responsible for stationary sources, and most ozone pollution is generated by mobile sources. However, he believes that an imminent national standard update will improve Cleveland’s air quality in the near future. 

Approximately every five years, the EPA reviews its pollution monitoring standards to determine whether they need to be lowered or changed. Currently, the EPA is reviewing the Particulate Matter 2.5 standard, which measures very fine particulates two and a half microns or less in size, small enough to get deep into a person’s lungs. Generally, it is produced from fuel combustion, coal, natural gas, diesel or gasoline. The other type of particulate matter the city monitors is PM 10, a larger, coarser material that typically shows up as soot or dust on cars or plants.

“Some early indications are that the standard might get lowered,” Sokolowski said. “If it does, we will probably be in nonattainment for PM 2.5. in our area. So that would mean more restrictions on facilities, and the Ohio EPA would need to develop a state implementation plan on how we’re doing to be in attainment for that pollutant.” 

Sokolowski expects to hear by the end of this year or the beginning of 2023 whether or not the standard is going to change.

Cleveland’s sizable air quality monitoring system

The Clean Air Act of 1970 started mandatory air quality monitoring, and Cleveland maintains a fairly robust air monitoring operation that Sokolowski said is always searching for ways to improve. 

The George T. Craig Air Quality Monitoring Site on the corner of East 14^th St. and Orange Avenue stands just south of downtown Cleveland. The facility is one of 14 such sites throughout the city, all of them smaller than this flagship site, that combined hold 56 different pieces of equipment, The Division of Air Quality is responsible for monitoring the U.S. EPA’s criteria pollutants: lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and larger and smaller particulate matter as well as ozone.

As the Chief of Air Monitoring, Sokolowski oversees a crew of 12 operators and technicians – currently down one – who ensure that the equipment is up and running 24/7 to maintain vigilance of the city’s ambient air quality. In addition to monitoring, the division is also responsible for permitting and enforcement of air quality standards at facilities throughout Cuyahoga County.

“The primary purpose for monitoring ambient air is to determine if our city/region is in compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards,” he said. “Without constant air monitoring we would be unable to determine if these health-based standards are being met. Then we would not know if additional restrictions are required to improve air quality.”

New monitors will increase air quality data for PM 2.5

Through the American Rescue Plan that passed Congress in March 2021, the US EPA received $20 million to invest in air monitoring throughout the country. As part of that grant, Cleveland will obtain three more continuous, real-time data particulate matter analyzers to complement its three existing monitors. 

“We’ll have an additional three PM 2.5 monitoring sites within the next year from that funding,” Sokolowski said. “Those are the gold standard of monitoring equipment, and they will give us a good real-time, hourly understanding of what the current air quality is.”

The entire state will gain roughly 30 new such monitors during the next year from the grant. In the meantime, Sokolowski’s department plans to install low-cost sensors to identify any pockets of the city where these monitors would be most effectively placed to enhance air quality monitoring.

“The more data we can get, the better we can understand the air shed not only in Cleveland, but Cuyahoga County,” Sokolowski said.

Citizens can check their monitoring any time for Cleveland and every US city at AirNow.gov.

Why ozone is an ongoing challenge

“We have had some tremendous gains in the past 50 years and the past 20 years as our air quality continues to improve,” said David Hearne, commissioner of air quality, Cleveland Department of Public Health. “However, we still have some areas like ozone where we need to continue that improvement.”

Ozone is particularly tricky, Hearne said, because it is not emitted by one source that can be regulated. Rather, it forms in the atmosphere when nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) blend with sunlight and heat to generate ozone. Ozone causes a serious health concern because when it is formed, it creates an additional oxygen molecule that then prevents human blood systems from being able to absorb oxygen, causing respiratory difficulties. 

Those substances, known as ozone precursors, are emitted by mobile sources such as cars, trucks, construction equipment, trains, etc. 

Cleveland’s geographic location on a Great Lake facilitates the ozone problem. “We only have exceedances in the spring, June and early July,” Sokolowski said. “The lake is very cool in those months, so that sets up an air boundary, and all of the pollutants emitted in urban and industrial centers get blocked by that cool air over the lake. As the lake warms, pollutants can disperse better, so we don’t have exceedances.”

The EPA allows four exceedances per year, and Cleveland surpasses that number every summer. Ozone season used to be April 1^st to September 30^th, but about five years ago, the EPA expanded that season, adding a month to each end to account for the sun and high UV readings even in October in some states.

Cleveland’s has 72 parts per billion of ground-level ozone during the ozone season, the EPA requires 70 parts per billion.

Cleveland is the final remaining ozone non-attainment area in Ohio, according to John Mooney, division director for Air and Radiation Division of Region 5, U.S. EPA Chicago. “To have only one non-attainment area in a state the size of Ohio with the industrial mix is quite a remarkable accomplishment,” he said, adding that during the past 10 years, Cleveland has reduced its ozone about 10%.

However, he added, other Midwest cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Milwaukee also remain in nonattainment for ozone.

According to Anthony Chenault, media coordinator, EPA, Northeast, Central and Southeast Districts, Columbus, the Ohio EPA also uses highly sophisticated air monitors to monitor for various pollutants across northeast Ohio. These federal reference method monitors produce the type of data that can be compared to the national air quality standards. 

“When looking at more long-term data, currently the highest reading ozone monitor in the area is at a monitor in Eastlake,” Chenault said. 

“It takes about three hours for ozone to be formed,” Sokolowski explains. “So by the time the air mass over Cleveland moves, and it usually moves west to east, it ends up over Lake County, and that’s why they’re seeing those high values of ozone on the Eastlake monitors.”

Air quality data tables with hourly updates are available at the Ohio EPA’s pollution control and data website. 

Ohio EPA also provides funding in the Cleveland and Akron areas for lawnmower change-out programs, Chenault said. Owners can exchange their gasoline lawnmowers for credit towards all-electric models. 

NOACA plans future solutions to improve air quality

As the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the area, the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) plans transportation funding for the region. The agency’s work has a significant impact on the region’s environment, too, specific to transportation infrastructure and movement.

“We’ve been evaluating the air quality issues, and currently about a third of the greenhouse gas emissions are caused by mobile sources,” said Grace Gallucci, NOACA’s executive director. “That is the single largest source of that pollutant, so we then are able to focus on mobile emissions and look to remediate the air quality concern.”

The reverse of the Division of Air Quality, NOACA has jurisdiction over mobile emissions only, not stationary sources.

Last year, NOACA completed its long-range plan, Equity Northeast Ohio 2050 (ENEO2050) that outlines projects, programs, plans and policies from 2022 to 2050 that they developed and are now looking at implementing.

One of the key goals is to reduce usage from 94% single-occupancy vehicles to 89% by increasing reliance on multimodal transport options including public transportation, bicycles and pedestrian modes.

“We have about 1,000 items in the plan, including very specific projects related to long-range public transit and significant projects related to pedestrian and bicycle transportation such as trails and bicycle-protected trails that have been defined and programmed into the plan with funding, so they will happen,” Gallucci said.

With an eye to the future proliferation of electric-powered vehicles, plans include roughly 50 Electric Vehicle charging stations that will be located at public parks, libraries, City Hall, etc. for convenient access. A priority was placed on ensuring that “environmental justice communities” were accommodated in all transportation plans, as well.

“We want to make sure that we are offering facilities for minority and low-income families,” Gallucci said. “When we talk about air quality, we know it is an issue of equity and that the worst air quality is in the environmental justice communities who live in denser urban and industrial centers where they are exposed to more mobile emissions. So we want to make all of [the] improvements for everybody, but we also recognize that some of the largest areas of concern are environmental justice areas.”

NOACA also created a Regional Climate Action Plan to provide more detailed initiatives to help keep the city in attainment for ozone by taking more vehicles off the road, for example, and expanding the highway system throughout the region. There are also long-range plans to extend RTA’s rapid transit system from Hopkins International Airport to different parts of the region such as Elyria and Medina, but those have not been funded yet.

The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed in November 2021 included $100 million for transportation infrastructure improvements in Ohio. The act also included $66 billion to support long-range improvements and expansion for AMTRAK, but funds from the five-year plan have not yet been allocated to individual projects in Northeast Ohio.

Business leaders, clean transportation advocates and other experts say new technologies are helping to accelerate the transition to clean trucks and sustainable freight across Pennsylvania. Members of the Clean Trucks Pennsylvania Coalition are calling on federal and state leaders to back programs that support the deployment of clean-power trucks across the Commonwealth.

Jordan Stutt, senior director, northeast region with CALSTART, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing clean transportation solutions, said the goal is to get gas and diesel-powered trucks off the road.

"We are going to take one of the busiest freight corridors in the country, I-95, and turn it into one of the first zero-emission freight corridors in the U.S. That investment and the jobs that it will bring underscore that this transition to clean trucks is all about opportunity," he said.

The coalition is urging Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and state and local leaders to adopt the Advanced Clean Trucks Act. Advocates say the act would reduce emissions by 50% by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050.

Brooke Petry, field organizer with Moms Clean Air Force of Pennsylvania, said zero-emission trucks are the key to cleaning up the air Pennsylvania families breathe. When residents of South Philadelphia step outside in the morning, the air often has a distinct toxic smell, and she added that toxic air pollution doesn't harm everyone equally.

"Here in Philadelphia, children of color are hospitalized for asthma complications at five times the rate of their white peers. Reducing harmful diesel pollution from trucks is a key component to address climate justice in our city and beyond," she explained.

Erin Johnson, Registered Nurse with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, said diesel exhaust is responsible for multiple types of respiratory illnesses and cancers in the region.

"The trucks, buses, trains and port operations that keep goods and services moving through our region also contribute to deadly air pollution. Diesel exhaust contains more than 40 known cancer-causing organic substances. The good news is that we have solutions to this diesel pollution problem," she said.


get more stories like this via email

Members of the environmental nonprofit GreenLatinos are involved in a push to get more Latinos across Texas involved in the fight against methane gas. Texas is one of the largest producers of the hazardous chemical.

Rogelio Meixueiro, Texas community advocate with GreenLatinos, said a large part of the campaign is educating the community.

"They tell me all the problems that they're experiencing, and the moment I connect with them the fact that there's a fracking site less than a mile away, they start seeing how, 'yeah ever since we moved to this area, we started having breathing problems.' The one that hurts me the most is really the birth defects. Learning that Latino women are some of the most impacted with birth defects is heartening," he explained.

He added that meetings will be held across the state over the next six months, culminating with a final day of action in Austin before the state Legislature.

The organization is forming what they call the Latino Methane Table, to make sure everyone has a seat at the table. Meixueiro said elected officials are passing laws that directly impact the immigrant population, and they hope to give them a voice before the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

"We're seeing how Latinos are constantly affected the most in the agriculture fields, construction. It's so hot, often we don't associate 'oh, methane' - the thing that we are getting out of the Permian - is actually the one that is creating some of the conditions," he explained.

He added the state has a history of being unfair to minorities.

"For Dallas and Fort Worth, what we're noticing is that there's a long history that is tied with redlining. And we notice how often the communities with the most amount of permits approved for fracking - fracking near day-care centers, fracking near homes - it's usually areas where particularly Latino and Black communities live," he continued.

By Julia Tilton for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Oregon News Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

When Oregon’s 2024 fire season ended in late October, over 1.9 million acres had burned across the state – an area larger than Delaware. For Tyler McCarty, district manager at the Coos Forest Protective Association (CFPA), in the coastal southwest part of the state, fires today are a “night and day difference” from what they were twenty years ago. 

McCarty spent more than two decades with the Oregon Department of Forestry before starting his current position in rural Coos County, where he also commands one of the state’s incident management teams that responds to large fires and other natural disasters. He started his career right out of high school as an entry level firefighter, and has been fighting fires since 2000.

“When I first started, a two or three thousand acre fire was a big fire,” McCarty told the Daily Yonder. “One of the fires that my incident management team was on this year was 180,000 acres.”

As the Oregon fire season trends longer and fires burn larger, McCarty and others who work with Oregon’s remaining few forest protective associations are grappling with questions about how they will retain personnel and secure enough funding to fight the fires of the future.

“You need more people to manage a 180,000 acre fire versus a 6,000 acre fire, which our system is kind of built on,” McCarty said. “Right now we’re operating in a system with a funding model that doesn’t support the fires that we’re seeing today.”

A Century of Community-Based Forest Protection

The first iteration of the forest protective association in Coos County was organized in 1910. Two years later, in 1912, the Douglas Forest Protective Association (DFPA) formed in the next county over. In those days, the goal was fewer fires and a sense of shared responsibility among those who owned and logged land in Oregon’s forests. 

Nowadays, the state of Oregon mandates that private forest landowners – many of whom are in the timber industry – have fire protection. Membership in a forest protective association like the one McCarty leads is one way to meet that requirement. 

The state of Oregon provides about 50% of the funding for these associations, according to Patrick Skrip, the district manager at DFPA. The other 50% comes from private and public landowners, such as the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Currently, Oregon has three forest protective associations that operate with this or a similar funding model. 

To the east, Idaho has its own version of community-based forest protection. Called timber protective associations, the state’s two organizations have operated in some form since the early 1900s. At the edge of the Payette National Forest in McCall, Idaho, the Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association protects over half a million acres including private land, state-owned land, and portions of federally-owned land and national forests. In northern Idaho, the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association protects nearly one million acres owned by private landowners and state and federal agencies. 

As in Idaho, Oregon’s forest protective associations provide fire suppression and prevention services rooted in community partnership. There are no similar protective associations anywhere else in the country. 

“It’s a system that’s been in place for over a hundred years, and we believe that the best answers come locally,” Skrip told the Daily Yonder.

This local approach is exemplified by the resources shared between private landowners and their forest protective associations. Ken Canon, the president of the board of DFPA, said it is common practice for landowners to lend firefighting teams their timber equipment like excavators and dozers during a fire.

“The nature of DFPA and the way it’s set up is that they not only value the resource that the landowners own, but they also value the very, very close relationships they have with the landowners,” Canon said.

Canon is a retired attorney who has lived in rural Oregon for most of his life, and in Douglas County for over two decades. The 282 acre parcel of land he owns is part of the 1.6 million acres DFPA manages. Mostly forested, the area makes up some of the most productive timberlands in the lower forty-eight, Skrip told the Daily Yonder. It is also a vital part of the local economy. 

In the summer, this same land can pose a significant fire risk. But shutting down timber production, even temporarily, also means shutting down an income stream for local landowners. As a district fire warden, Skrip is one of the people with authority to close the woods for logging activity. It is not a responsibility he takes lightly.

“Those are tough decisions, and I’m very mindful,” Skrip said. “They impact our operator community and our mills, and those are mortgages that people have to pay.”

When Skrip has had to make those tough calls, the larger private landowners have generally supported the decision, Canon said. Many landowners – Canon included – take their own measures when it comes to fire prevention. In Coos County, McCarty said private landowners do the same, from making evacuation plans to ensuring their homes are as defensible for firefighters as possible. 

Even with the close cooperation between landowners and their forest protective associations, the increase in bigger fires burning at the same time means resources are stretched thin.

Firefighting Challenges

Ken Canon has a 120º vista from his property, which sits atop a small mountain surrounded on two sides by forest owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That land has not been managed in any way for years, Canon said, partly because of efforts to protect the spotted owl that date back to the 1990s. Today, the land is heavily forested as a result.

“It’s pretty dense, and the denser the fire, the more intense they are,” Canon said.

To mitigate against a future fire on the federal lands jumping to his property, Canon has taken to creating a boundary between his property and the federally-owned neighboring land. He said he has taken out the undergrowth on his side of the property line and left the old-growth trees with space between them.

Forest management is just one part of the story when it comes to the kinds of fire blazing in Oregon today. Dense forests like the one bordering Canon’s property are filled with fuels that sustain fires. On the landscape’s other extreme, burn scars from previous fires that have experienced some regrowth also provide what Skrip calls “light and flashy fuel” for fires to consume quickly as they advance. 

Climate change is also upsetting conventional methods for fire management. Warmer-than-average temperatures and heat waves during the summer season dry out fuels. Combine this with the state’s current megadrought conditions, which are drier than any other period in the past thousand years, and there is a new host of challenges for fire prevention and suppression efforts. 

“In this era of fire, we’ve seen more acres burned in our district in the last 10 years than in the last hundred years combined,” Skrip said. The fire regime is also marching to new lengths, Skrip said, with burning happening more frequently north of Roseburg and in the foothills of the Cascades. 

Adam Sinkey, the North Unit Forester for DFPA, started firefighting at seventeen, and has worked his way up the ranks since the early 2000s. During the first half of his career at DFPA, Sinkey said there was one big fire beyond what the district could handle. That was in 2004, and Sinkey said the district’s next big fire after that was in 2013. Now, Sinkey said, those big fires have become commonplace.

“We’ve had one in the district or multiple in the district it seems like every year, or every other year, ever since 2013,” Sinkey said. 

Larger and more severe fires strain a system where there are only so many resources to go around. Fires also carry a significant financial burden and put a heavy physical and mental demand on firefighters. McCarty said his team spent 50 days out in the field this past summer. Other teams were out for as long as 60 days.

“That’s a lot of days sleeping in a tent during the summertime, sleeping in the dirt,” McCarty said. Asking firefighters to be away from their families for months on end while working some of the toughest seasons the state has seen risks high rates of burnout. And while both CFPA and DFPA offer wintertime work in the form of co-ops to retain summer employees, the associations still face year-over-year retention challenges.

Sinkey is one firefighter who built his career in part thanks to DFPA’s winter co-op programs. When, after college, he realized he wanted to make firefighting his full-time job, he stayed on throughout the year. Sinkey’s co-op work ranged from supporting fuel reduction in Douglas County – much like what Canon does each year on his own property – to short stints with the Oregon Department of Transportation operating snowplows on state highway mountain passes. Today, Sinkey said around 40 of DFPA’s 100 summertime employees stick around for the winter co-op program. 

“Not only are we reducing heavy fuel loads around people’s homes, but it also allows us to retain good folks and good firefighters throughout the years,” Sinkey said. 

Still, Skrip and McCarty agreed they could do with even more full-time employees as today’s fires demand additional resources. Year-round employees allow forest protective associations to retain their leadership on the ground. Ultimately, Sinkey said, it’s “boots on the ground” that put out fires. 

But shifting the hiring model to have the majority of employees be permanent would require increased funding at the state level. 

Finding a New Funding Model

After the catastrophic 2020 Labor Day Fires destroyed more than 1 million acres over the course of a few days in Southern Oregon, 2021 ushered in a series of conversations among the public and the state government about how to better fund firefighting efforts across the state. 

In 2024, a large portion of the 1.9 million acres burned were in Eastern Oregon, a predominantly rural region. Canon said he expects there will be talk about the cost of those fires – a staggering $317.5 million across the state – in the 2025 legislative session.

For private landowners and the forest protective associations that provide for them, the price tag is a reminder of the burden that falls on rural communities.

Private landowners who are members of their local forest protective associations pay for their coverage by the acre. Prices have gone up across the board, McCarty said, to the point where fire protection is no longer affordable, particularly for ranchers and grazers whose land generates less profit than timber.

A more holistic approach to funding would include more investment from urban folks, Canon and McCarty said. Already, every Oregonian pays into a general fund that accounts for 50% of the funding that is dispersed to forest protective associations like in Coos and Douglas counties. But a new era of fire demands more financial resources. Canon and McCarty said those cannot come from rural landowners alone, especially when the fires affect everyone.

One idea is to impose a tax on camping equipment or cars, since both are connected to fires and their common causes: fires set from recreation and malfunctions with catalytic converters. Another idea is to raise the state’s income tax to cover the growing costs of fire protection in the state. A task force was organized by Oregon’s governor earlier this year to look at future possibilities for fire funding. Their findings are due before the legislative session begins in February 2025. 

Canon said he wants to see more participation from urban areas, where he said the effects of fire are only growing more apparent.

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is it’s not fun going to the Shakespearean Festival in Ashland in choking smoke,” he said. “It’s not just a discomfort, but it’s a health risk.”


Julia Tilton wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


get more stories like this via email