Monitoring to probe South End air pollution
Research to be hyperlocal, including inside volunteers’ homes
ALBANY — Third grader Lewlani Weldon learned something new on Monday. “I didn’t know that air had to do with asthma,” she said, standing outside of Giffen Memorial Elementary School.
She and other students were waiting for a tour of a specially equipped van that researchers from the University at Albany would soon be using to take air samples outside of Giffen as well as spots in Troy, Schenectady and other urban areas up and down the Hudson Valley.
Funded by a $1 million federal Environmental Protection Agency grant, the van, as well as a fleet of 200 smaller air sampling devices, will be deployed to measure air quality in places like the South End, populated largely by lower-income residents, many of whom are Black or members of other minority groups.
Prior to the tour, a group of local, state and federal politicians and government leaders celebrated the new initiative, which was pushed through by U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko. “It’s a great opportunity,” Tonko said.
Using air collection devices, researchers over two years will gauge levels of pollutants and irritants including fine particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, said Aynul Bari. He, along with fellow researcher Jie Zang, are heading up the project.
This isn’t the first time air quality in the South End has been studied.
Technicians from the state Department of Environmental Conservation in 2017 put an air quality sensor near the Ezra Prentice Homes public housing project and the Port of Albany, which is about a mile from the school.
At the time, there were concerns about pollution that might come from trains filled with oil tankers coming to the port.
The oil trains have since stopped, a function of market changes, but the study also pointed out that many of the irritants were coming not from trains but from the heavy truck traffic going to and from the port.
That’s led to plans for eventually routing trucks around any residential areas on their way to the port.
“People in the community say ‘We want to fix it,’ but we have to know what we are fixing,” Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan said.in a way, this latest series of measurements should give a more granular picture of potential air quality problems since there will be monitors in several schools and in peoples’ homes.
“We’re going hyper-local,” state Environmental Commissioner Basil Seggos said.
Homeowners who volunteer to get the monitoring devices for a week will get $30 gift cards, as well as individualized air quality reports for their dwellings.
Focusing on neighborhoods like Albany’s South End is part of a broad federal and state environmental justice push to help repair the damage done by air pollution which has often hit poorer communities the hardest.
Disadvantaged neighborhoods often are next to heavy industrial areas, where there may be pollution as well as lots of truck and train traffic nearby.