EGLE closes ozone season with Holland still the state’s high reading

HOLLAND — Michigan’s 2026 ozone season is over, and the state says Holland was the place the standard still missed.

The Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy said Nov. 6 that ozone season runs from March through October, when the weather is most likely to form ground-level ozone. Director Phil Roos said the drop in ozone “reflects years of investment in cleaner technologies, stronger emissions controls, and strong partnerships,” and that the point is cleaner air. The release said monitors across most of the state, including during wildfire smoke, were at or below the federal standard. “Holland remained the exception, recording the highest ozone concentrations in the state,” the department said, “largely due to transport of pollution across Lake Michigan from upwind states.” Every other monitor location, including the Detroit area, stayed in compliance, the release said.

What the department did not rank

The Nov. 6 release does not print Holland’s parts-per-billion number. A separate EGLE table of the highest 8-hour readings, updated through Sept. 30 and marked “subject to validation,” is the worksheet behind the network, not a sentence in the press release. This story does not pull a single Holland figure out of that grid and call it final. The sentence that is final, in the release, is the ranking: Holland was the high end, and the department’s explanation is pollution moving across the lake, not a Holland smokestack the release does not name.

What still happens after October

EGLE said it will keep monitoring, keep issuing air-quality alerts, and keep working with communities and businesses on emissions. An October department explainer, written before this week’s season wrap, said the state runs 26 ozone monitors, eight of them in southeast Michigan, inside a wider network of more than 40 sites. That explainer also said wildfire smoke is not something Michigan can regulate, and that setting those days aside for regulatory math does not erase the health effect of the smoke. The Nov. 6 release is narrower. It says the season’s ozone numbers, smoke included, still met the standard almost everywhere except Holland.

For Holland that means the lake is the department’s explanation, not a local factory the release never names. Roos’s line about healthier communities is the statewide claim. The Holland exception is the sentence that keeps the release from reading like a clean bill for every monitor. People who want the alert, rather than the season ranking, still use EGLE’s air-quality notices. The photograph is downtown Holland in 2010. It is not a monitor and it is not the lake.

Sources:
EGLE, “Michigan wraps up 2026 ozone season with strong air quality results,” Nov. 6, 2026, https://www.michigan.gov/egle/newsroom/press-releases/2026/11/06/2026-ozone-season
EGLE, “Understanding ozone attainment and exceptional events,” Oct. 14, 2026 (monitor counts, wildfire context), https://www.michigan.gov/egle/newsroom/mi-environment/2026/10/14/ozone-attainment
Photo: Andrew Jameson, “Holland Downtown Historic District D.JPG”, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHolland_Downtown_Historic_District_D.JPG

Holland

Tags: Holland · EGLE · Air quality · Ozone · Lake Michigan