While driving across the new Oakland Bay Bridge this morning, you could see the bad air settling across Oakland as well as San Francisco.  Welcome to an official Spare The Air Day, summer edition.

In the Five Day Forecast, notice the “55” projected air quality for the Coast and Central Bay area, which includes Oakland and the Oakland Hills.  We are experiencing moderate quality today, which means “unusually sensitive people should consider limiting prolonged outdoor exertion.”

So we are relative safe for now, at least from an overall public health perspective.  Pity the Santa Clara Valley southerners, whose orange “101” translates into a full-on alert to sensitive groups.

Yet the numbers themselves don’t begin to describe how the smog looks as it settles on the land.  It looks quite terrible, when gazing across the vistas from the Bay Bridge.  We can count our blessings that the sky and vistas are still visible, right?

For the record, there have been ten officially-declared Spare The Air Days so far this year and 13 days through all of last year.  Over time, the Bay Area has registered increases in its ozone box scores – so there’s no reason to feel complacent about our fossil fuel contributions.

We have no aspirations to join Los Angelenos!

September 26th Update: We are up to 13 officially-declared Spare The Air Days so far this year!  The area quality is going back to green, which means no health effects, starting tomorrow.