What the hell is an “ozone warning?”

You have a TV station that reports temperature and rain, but the biggie now is called "ozone," and you don't even mention it like you do [an] allergy [alert].

The EPA website has Green /good thru yellow, orange, red and purple air-quality indexes — for what? They do not tell you what they are measuring. Is it dog or cat hair? Carbon dioxide? Sulfate dioxide? What the hell is ozone in the troposphere or stratosphere?

If this is newsworthy for the [Asheville Citizen-Times], why can't [the TV weather] report on ozone?

It is about as stupid as [the fact that] we have to go to South Carolina to buy fireworks. The city of Asheville can't even turn off the street lights so we can [see] the fireworks, and then the microphone in the city park band stand could not even tell us that there was going to be a delay on the fireworks display because of a fire, [so] many people went home…

Shape up or ship out!

— Edward Sunderhaus
Asheville

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4 thoughts on “What the hell is an “ozone warning?”

  1. It’s my understanding that knowing the levels of ozone in the air is indeed important. Ozone is good far away from us up high. We need a protective ozone layer above the earth. what we read in the paper is about the lower levels of ozone, which results from hot bright sunlight interacting with certain chemicals in the air, like nitrogen oxide. When the heat and the chemicals interact you have ozone, a dangerous element that is harmful for people with heart and lung problems, the elderly and small children, especially those with allergies. Even healthy athletes must pay attention to high ozone days because when they work out in such a toxic mix, minute particles are breathed deep into their lungs that could prove harmful even for the healthiest of persons. Paying attention to ozone levels is probably more important than most of the small talk you hear on weather reports.

  2. travelah

    What to hael? Did you pause to think that maybe you should find out what it is before writng this silly letter? Next time there is a high ozone alert, please step outside and breath deeply for a few hours. The gene pool of the human species might improve.

    (please don’t take my advice)

  3. dpewen

    Good one travelah … what a crazy letter … apparently the writer does not know how to use google … or their brain!

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