AIR QUALITY MONITORING TAPS BORDER RESIDENTS
Health advocates say community participation brings equity to emissions reduction efforts
Participating in an air quality study was not something Rudy Lopez would have done had it not been for his son Bruno.
Bruno was diagnosed with asthma before his second birthday in 2014. It’s a respiratory condition Lopez had seen before in his sister, who died from an asthma attack at 35.
“I don’t think an air study would have piqued my curiosity normally,” Lopez said. But the San Ysidro resident was curious about the role that living near a train station and one of the busiest border crossings played in his son’s condition. He came across the study in an email calling for participants.
Casa Familiar and research organizations are turning to San Ysidro community members to set up air quality monitors around the neighborhood.
The nonprofit has led similar efforts for years with plans to continue expanding its monitors in the area. Currently, there are 12 sensors installed at schools, businesses and homes.
Casa Familiar has four monitors waiting to be deployed around the community. The nonprofit also plans to install monitors inside and outside the homes of residents, although it’s unclear when that work will begin because it requires staff to visit the homes, which is difficult with COVID-19.
San Ysidro is a community with some 26,000 residents, 90 percent of which are Latino. A 2015 study by The San Diego Association of Governments found that the neighborhood’s asthma rate is nearly 18 percent higher than the region as a whole.
Residents and health advocates have long complained about emissions pollution from the thousands of cars that cross the U.S.-Mexico border every day.
Community-based monitoring allows organizations and residents to bring attention to issues that might not be represented in state air quality measurements, said Alejandro Amador, community air program supervisor with Casa Familiar.
A Casa Familiar air study that collected data between 2016 and 2018 showed a 12 percent higher concentration of pollution in San Ysidro than what was identified in the state’s pollution screening tool, CalEnviroScreen, which informs funding decisions for under
served communities.
Amador said the state’s screening tool was not taking into consideration the traffic from the border. That data was later added in a different version of the screening tool, he said, which showed that San Ysidro had a higher concentration of pollution.
“The better represented the data is of the community, to show how impacted it is, the more funding that is available to San Ysidro as a disadvantaged community,” Amador said.
The work is being done through a California Air Resources Board grant in partnership with The University of Washington and San Diego State University.
Researchers alone could identify locations that would be ideal to measure air quality, but without community input it’s easy to miss key areas, said Edmund Seto, a researcher with The University of Washington.
“Our role is to listen and figure out what is really important to the community,” Seto said.
Sarina Vega, environmental programs associate with Casa Familiar, said it is valuable for community members to have access to data because it can help advocate for their neighborhood for long-term solutions.
“Air pollution is not just an environmental issue. It’s a social issue that we’ve seen exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic,” Vega said.
Casa Familiar is holding a series of workshops about community-based monitoring to encourage similar efforts in other communities.