When I was a kid growing up in the San Fernando Valley, regular smog alerts kept us off the playground and confined to our classrooms in the hottest months.

The air quality back then was famously terrible. Often, you could see an ugly brown stripe across the horizon. This made for colorful sunsets, but on bad smog days, if you inhaled sharply, your lungs would actually ache .

These days, thanks to strict regulations and technological advancements such as catalytic converters and the removal of lead from gasoline, much of the smog has disappeared from the skies above our city. But not all.

In the 1995 Todd Haynes film “Safe,” Julianne Moore played a woman in suburban Los Angeles who believed she was being poisoned by everyday chemicals in her environment — car exhaust, household clean

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