City teens to measure air
pollution in urban areas

Colleen Long

NEW YORK — Teenagers from a Brooklyn neighborhood surrounded by power plants, a waste-transfer station and a busy expressway will soon take to the streets to monitor the pollutants residents are breathing.

After completing training, volunteers from a New York-based Hispanic community organization, UPROSE, will use handheld devices to monitor levels of nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and other particles in the air in Sunset Park. Their efforts are part of a wider campaign to map air quality in several urban U.S. neighborhoods.

“In order for us to really change things, we need to know what’s there on a daily basis,” said Frank Torres, director of youth leadership for UPROSE. “We want to educate the community, put the power in their hands so they can change their surroundings.”

More than 90 percent of Hispanics and 86 percent of blacks in the U.S. live in urban settings, which are typically at higher risk for air pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Hispanics are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanics to live in places that fall short of EPA standards for airborne particle matter.

“We don’t give a unified health message to people,” said Jane Delgado, president of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, which is charting data from similar projects in Detroit, Watsonville, Calif., and Brownsville, Texas. “We tell people go out and exercise, but for some kids, breathing the air in their communities will contribute to asthma attacks and other problems. We need to know exactly what is going on near our homes.”

Some air pollutants commonly found in urban areas can cause skin and eye irritation, as well as asthma, particularly in children. Paula Gomez, head of the Brownsville Community Health Center near the U.S.-Mexico border, said spikes in asthma attacks in that area occur when winds blow from the south, where more than 150 factories that produce electrical devices and plastics are located.

“At night you can sometimes smell the chemicals in the air,” she said.

Data collection will continue for about six months, after which the alliance will create an interactive report using Google maps. It hopes eventually to collect air quality data from 20 locations, Delgado said.

“We need good data, close to the ground, collected by people in the communities,” she said. “If more people were concerned about emissions, their concerns would be answered by the government. By not keeping good data, it makes it hard to have a whole response.”

The project is funded by grants, mostly from the Kellogg Foundation, Delgado said. It costs about $2,500 to equip each of the four cities with the technology, including a GPS, video camera and the pollution detectors.

Wade McGillis, a professor in Columbia University’s department of Earth and environmental sciences, said using the handheld devices is a good idea, because the machines enable community members to get involved. But, he added, data should also be collected by stationary monitors, which provide more accurate readings and would be less prone to human error.

(Associated Press)