They got the endless summer, but there's something in the air that's starting to sting, reports CBS News Correspondent Richard Schlesinger. Many days it forces Diane Howard to stay inside. Diane suffers from emphysema and thought the air here was dry enough and clean enough to make her life a little easier. Now she has to listen for warnings about air quality before she leaves home. There's no fancy name for it.
Scientists call it the brown cloud.
Every day county environmentalists check their monitors to measure how dirty the air is. And once a week they shoot a beam of light across the city to measure how much visibility has been lost. We do see more frequent hospitalizations, more frequent emergency room visits, and also more frequent office visits. After years of warnings about the air, Arizona took a deep breath and took its first step towards a solution. The governor appointed a blue ribbon commission called the Brown Cloud Summit to sift through the causes of the problem and try to clear the air.