Wayne County launches air-quality monitoring system

Wayne County plans to launch a three-year, $2.7 million initiative to install 100 air-quality monitors on streetlights and other posts across its 43 communities to track levels of air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and black carbon and other particulate matter.

The aim is to provide real-time data to the county's 1.8 million residents about the quality of the air they're breathing and alert them when conditions are poor and could make it difficult to breathe or could exacerbate chronic health problems, county leaders announced Wednesday.

The project will include 500 mobile air-quality monitors that can travel with residents as they go to school and work, providing data that can be used to track the quality of the air, and alert residents when it is poor.

“Air pollution poses a major health risk globally, as the smoke from the Canadian wildfires is showing us," Wayne County Executive Warren Evans said in a statement. “Here in Wayne County, we’re doing something about it. We’re taking the steps needed today to prevent the devastating effects tomorrow.

“Far too many of our residents have had to breathe the fumes from incinerators, factories, and idling trucks. Our kids suffer more from asthma than in almost any other part of Michigan. Meanwhile, the corporations that are polluting our air have been applying for permit after permit to increase the level of their emissions. That environmental injustice has got to stop."

Text messages will alert residents to bad air

The money for the project, which is to continue until December 2026, will come from American Rescue Plan Act funds. The county is contracting with JustAir, a Detroit-based environmental tech company, which will collect the data and create an online dashboard and text message alert system to give people real-time information about the quality of the air.

"Our data and alert system can literally save lives and, long-term, this data will inform policymakers' decision-making to prevent air pollution and reduce the impact of poor air quality on residents," said Darren Riley, co-founder, and CEO of JustAir.

Riley, who lives in southwest Detroit and has asthma, said the information also could be used to help researchers better understand what pollutants are triggering asthma exacerbations in the community.

"The mobile monitors will come with a Bluetooth (device) that you can assign to an inhaler," he said. "We're focused on at-risk kids with asthma, so we'll be able to monitor when the inhaler is triggered. A location stamp and time stamp will then capture a fingerprint of air quality not only on the mobile monitor, but also at the closest local stationary air monitors.

Data will hold polluters accountable

"So you can imagine the database we can build showing that we've had this many exacerbations in this district and they typically happen around this time."

That data can be used to help county and community leaders hold polluters accountable for the health problems associated with their industries, said Wayne County Health Director Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

"For a lot of people, the risks that can be posed by breathing bad air have only recently been demonstrated because of the wildfires in Canada," El-Sayed told the Free Press on Wednesday. "For too many people in our communities, a bad air day is an everyday occurrence."

Too often, he said, industries promise government leaders that they will work to mitigate pollution and limit emissions, but don't follow through.

"Those industries may not be going away," El-Sayed said. "They are important. There has to be industry to accomplish a number of things. That being said, it doesn't have to be industry that wantonly puts pollution out into our air or into our water. The choice not to mitigate that pollution is an economic choice that's often made by the corporations that run these facilities to the detriment of local communities.

"Our job will be to leverage that data to hold them accountable for the commitments that they made, but also when they want to increase their emissions, we'll be right there with information to say, 'Well, here's what your current emissions are doing in the local community. And here's how they map to health outcomes in that community.' "

It doesn't have to be a choice of either supporting industry or protecting the environment, he said.

More: Michigan’s bad air quality: Everything you need to know

"We can have both," El-Sayed said, "create jobs and protect the environment. A lot of times, it's just that corporations are choosing not to make the investment in a cleaner operation."

Wayne County at the bottom for air quality in Michigan

Called the Wayne County Community Air Quality Project, the effort will begin this month with research and planning. Air-quality monitors will be distributed in early 2024, with data monitoring and reporting to follow.

JustAir already is providing some air quality monitoring in the city of Detroit, and El-Sayed said the plan is to provide a countywide network in cooperation with the city. Eventually, he said the county would also like to partner with university researchers.

"Some of the communities in our county have upwards of threefold the probability of asthma hospitalization than the state average," El-Sayed said. "We also know that in some of these communities, there are documented higher rates of lung cancer and chronic lung disease. ... On almost every health metric that you can imagine, Wayne County tends to (fare the worst, ranking) 83rd out of 83 counties.

"If the air you breathe is systematically polluted, the water that you drink is more likely to have impurities or to be exposed to pollutants, if the roadways that you walk are in disrepair and the job that you work is less stable, all of those things are going to come together to create poorer health outcomes.

"But that first piece of it, the air, that's the thing that we're really focused on here because it's something we sometimes take for granted. We take thousands of breaths every day, but for a lot of people, those breaths don't just carry oxygen, they carry all kinds of other things that we don't want in our bodies. That shows up in high rates of things like asthma, lung cancer and chronic lung disease."

Contact Kristen Shamus: kshamus@freepress.com. Subscribe to the Free Press.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Wayne County launches air-quality monitoring system