With summer fast approaching, outdoor enthusiasts will soon launch thousands of boats and personal watercraft into rivers, lakes and the ocean, unleashing a huge pulse of smog-forming exhaust into California skies.
Manufacturers post booming sales and produce even more permutations of vessels -- personal watercraft, kayaks, ski boats and pontoon party barges, to name a few. Although powerboats are a staple of the season, they are hard on the environment, especially in California, which has about 900,000 such registered vessels, the highest in the nation.
A major source of pollution is how Jerry Martin, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, characterizes them. "Those engines are not nearly as well controlled as cars," he says. "They drop a good portion of fuel back into waterways that are our sources of drinking water, and these small engines are inefficient and produce a lot of emissions."
On a typical summer weekend, officials say engines statewide release about 390 tons of air pollutants daily, 10% of all the emissions from mobile sources, a category that includes cars, buses, trucks and other vehicles.
In the Los Angeles region, recreational boats emit nearly four times as many smog-forming fumes as all of the area's oil refineries, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Although recent regulations have resulted in dramatically cleaner new vessels, the state air board estimates one 5-year-old personal watercraft steered for seven hours produces the same emissions as a new car driven 100,000 miles.
Some of the emissions consist of volatile gases and combustion byproducts that, when mixed in sunlight, form ozone. Ozone, a widespread and poisonous gas, causes chest pains, nausea and headaches and long-term exposure can lead to loss of lung function. California has the worst ozone pollution in the nation.
But other pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, can be acutely toxic. Boat exhaust has been linked to dozens of fatalities in California and the West as swimmers, bathers and water skiers unwittingly inhale the odorless gas and drown. To prevent such accidents, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year banned the controversial practice of "teak surfing," in which riders hang from the stern of a moving boat.
Air quality officials say boat pollution is particularly troublesome because emissions increase during the summer when smog is already at its worst. Stagnant air, bright sunlight, long days and high mountains make most of inland California a smog trap.
