Air Watch Bay Area
With deepening concerns for respiratory and other emissions-related illness, and being mindful of our air quality, especially living a refinery town, it is important to know the air quality resources available to Benicians.
In 2017, under the auspices of Fair Tech Collective at Drexel University and the Community, Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab at Carnegie Mellon University, the five frontline Bay Area refinery communities collaborated to create Air Watch Bay Area.
Air Watch Bay Area (airwatchbayarea.org) is a comprehensive website with real time and historical air quality data taken from community, air district and those refinery monitors that are accessible in the North Bay Area of California. We know that emission pollution travels. Emissions in a community depend on wind direction and topography. Therefore, for Benicians, it’s important to have a big picture of air quality readings.
In 2019, a part of the final Valero/Good Neighbor Steering Committee settlement allocated monies were given to enhance the information and usefulness of the airwatchbayarea. org website.
The first job was to add additional Purple Air monitors activated throughout Benicia as well as to add data extracted from the Valero fence line monitors. This has been available for quite some time already, but was recently upgraded to make it easier to find and use.
The second aspect was to work with the CREATE lab at Carnegie Mellon and their Smell my City project (smellmycity.org) to provide both an app for citizens to report air quality issues and to begin working on “opt in” push notifications when emissions levels exceeded safe standards. This phase requires on going research to determine the trigger points for notifications.
Finally, data analysis is essential to know whether conditions are improving, where our emissions are coming from (at least the direction), and where action might be taken. This aspect is still being researched.
The Benicia Community Air Monitoring Program (BCAMP) is also in the process of establishing a community air monitoring station. Once this is up and running the information from it will also be available on the Air Watch Bay Area website.
The Benicia Fire Department has a rich webpage devoted to air quality links and links to the ability to sign up for Public Information Bank notification alerts. Please visit the Public Information Bank website at www.ci.benicia.ca.us/publicinfobank for more information. We recommend both Level 1 and 2 notifications along with signing up for www.alertsolano. com .
We urge Benicians to use AirWatchBayArea.org for their own information and to contribute to smellmycity.org. You can download the free app at the Apple App Store or Google Play.