In the recent EXPOSÉ, reporter Dina Cappiello reveals how she found shockingly high levels of toxic air pollutants in neighborhoods around Houston and Southeast Texas. According to the American Lung Association, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Bakersfield, and Birmingham also rank among the cities with the most air pollution.

Which cities have the cleanest air? Cheyenne, Wyoming tops the list, followed by Santa Fe, New Mexico; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Great Falls, Montana.

>> Worried about your town? Find out if the EPA is tracking toxic releases in your zip code. Check out the Air Quality Index for local air quality conditions and forecasts.

The EXPOSÉ: America’s Investigative Reports series is produced by Thirteen/WNET New York in association with CIR.

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.