If you want to appreciate how much DEQ has grown technologically, talk to Jim Sydnor about his early days. He started his environmental work in 1965. “Then I guess it was in 1969, in Fairfax County, that we set up the first air pollution control agency there, which is still in operation,” he says.

 

“At that time, the biggest complaints we had were from small incinerators at grocery stores, and open burning, because the area was being developed and the thing then was to bulldoze all the trees, put them in a pile and burn them, regardless of where people were. Our focus, initially, was on the smoking incinerators, and there were a lot of them without controls.

 

“There was very little interest in the early ’70s in air pollution control unless you had a major problem,” Sydnor says. “In Virginia, people just didn’t perceive a problem. We dealt with a few issues, all the burning complaints and things like that. That was really the attitude and interest of people at the time, at least in air pollution control: If it’s not near me, I don’t see it. If it was not creating an odor, there was no interest.

 

“The five-member Air Pollution Control Board had a very weak, and sometimes nonexistent, permit program. It wasn’t necessary in all cases to get a permit. You had to report your emissions but not necessarily get approval to build or modify something. All that’s changed now. People are much more interested in permits and regulations.”

Recalling the early days of air quality monitoring, Sydnor is struck with how little was known in the 1970s. “We set up the first air monitoring program in terms of continuous monitors for sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide. At that time, when we measured particulate matter, we did it in what were called ‘dust fall buckets.’ You put out 3-gallon plastic buckets. You’d put a little water in the bottom, and collect those samples in 30 days, taking them back to the lab to evaporate the water and weigh what we’d collected in the bucket. The results of that showed tons of particulates per square mile.

 

“For sulfur dioxide, we [used] something like a candle that was impregnated with certain chemicals, and from that the sulfate or sulfur concentration was measured. It really was a crude thing—I think if you had a museum of air monitoring equipment, that would be there. But at that time there was no instrumentation to measure pollutants, and not much expertise in how to do it.”

 

Eventually, Sydnor left the air board to take a job with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “The EPA was just coming on as an agency, and I wanted to add more involvement and more comprehensive programs. So I worked for a number of years in that and finally wound up as the branch chief of the air program. I think I learned a lot there, and coming back here [to DEQ] I was able to have the knowledge that came out of my time at EPA, knowing all the good things and all the bad things that they could do and didn’t do.”

Decades later, Sydnor is optimistic about the future of environmentalism in Virginia. “I think with the amount of people and money going into environmental protection, the trend has to be positive. I don’t see anybody giving up on it.

 

“There will be work to be done here for many, many years. Maybe forever.”