Wayne County has launched a new network of air quality monitors it hopes will provide a more detailed picture of the county’s pollution hotspots.
One hundred stationary air quality monitors are now operational, county officials announced Wednesday. They measure pollutants such as particulate matter, ozone, and nitrogen dioxide in real time.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the director of Wayne County’s Health, Human, and Veterans Services Department, called it an “exciting” development. He said this will give the county the hard evidence it needs to make important policy decisions.
“Then we as a county will have the ability to use that data to hold the biggest polluters in our community accountable. And to me, that's a really big deal,” El-Sayed said.
El-Sayed said the monitors were placed throughout the county with the help of local residents. “We wanted to make sure that we were concentrating in spaces with the highest burden of both poor air, and air quality-related diseases,” he said.
The project is a joint effort with the Detroit-based startup JustAir Solutions. The company says it condenses and streamlines highly localized air monitoring data, and makes it accessible to residents through an app. That platform also lets residents subscribe to air quality alerts that will let them know when pollution levels get dangerously high. County leaders hope that will help people with health conditions exacerbated by pollution, such as asthma.
JustAir co-founder and CEO Darren Riley said it's all about data accessibility in service of public health. “Our whole focus is to make sure that we have a high quality product that communities understand,” he said. “I want to build for the layperson, for the person who may not have heard of AQI [Air Quality Index].”
County officials hope the network will ultimately give them a more detailed and accurate picture of pollution hotspots in Wayne County, which has long been dogged by poor air quality, particularly in parts of Detroit and its Downriver communities. Ozone and particulate matter pollution have improved in recent years, but remain an ongoing problem in some communities. Of the 10 Michigan zip codes considered the state’s most polluted, three are in Detroit. That city also has an asthma burden that’s significantly greater than state and national averages, with a disparity that’s only grown worse in recent years.
This is only the project’s first phase. The second is to provide mobile, clip-on air monitors to 500 vulnerable residents, including children with asthma. The idea is to get a sense of the exact conditions that trigger asthma attacks or other respiratory problems triggered or exacerbated by air pollution. El-Sayed said those will be deployed later this summer, which is about when county officials expect to have their first usable datasets from the stationary monitors.
JustAir’s Darren Riley said the overall objective is one that “sounds crazy,” but he’s serious about it — if this project really succeeds, the company should no longer need to exist.
“We only exist because there's a problem,” he said. “And so hopefully, over time, we’ll mitigate that problem. So we don't have to worry about whether we can step outside and breathe the air freely, and don't have to check our phones to see if it's bad or not.”
