It's a sneaky, silent, and surprising killer: the exhaust from your household gas water heater is full of very nasty toxins that kill scores of people in the Bay Area every year, and sicken thousands more. Every month, new research comes out showing how much worse these pollutants are for all of us.
Breathing clean air that doesn't sicken us must be one of the top human rights. How come, in one of the richest areas of the world, that we don't have that basic right?
The Air District is working hard on a program to phase out gas water heaters in favor of non-polluting electric heat pumps. This will save hundreds of lives over time, make almost everyone healthier and also have a remarkable impact on emissions of climate-destroying gases.
When gas burns, it releases a lot of toxic molecules, including NOx (nitrogen oxides), benzene, formaldehyde, and ultra-fine particles called PM2.5.
NOx is the best known of these. It's a chemically reactive molecule that gets into your lungs and burns the lining, causing many respiratory diseases, including asthma, COPD, bronchitis, and emphysema. The Air District estimates that NOx from water heaters and furnaces cause over 15,000 asthma attacks every year.
PM2.5 is a mixture of many tiny particles, nasty and toxic, so small that they not only damage your lungs, they penetrate into your bloodstream and travel to every tissue in your body. In the Bay Area, we breathe in about 15 billion of these particles every year. They cause havoc with many biological mechanisms, causing a huge spread of deadly diseases, including cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, and diabetes. They affect aging, cognitive function and development, and cause a variety of respiratory and inflammatory diseases.
Most of the people who die from air pollution don't even know it, and their deaths are attributed to other diseases... .... ....talk about how badly polluted the Bay area is.... ....maybe talk about young, poor and old being most at risk. Finish with some clear call to action that we should not stand for this deadly pollution and should support the Air District in clamping down on it. Add links to BAAD site and maybe mention scale - # deaths, worse than passenger cars etc. Maybe add a home page that talks more broadly about the pollution problem and about the action that BAAD is taking, to tie everything together