Eyeing Asthma, Dwight Tracks Pollution

Three small, white domes will soon be able to tell Dwight neighbors exactly how much pollution is floating around their neighborhood as they brace for an influx of up to 1,000 new cars a day.

That’s thanks to an environmental health project that began with concerns about the traffic impact of an $838 million, 505,000 square-foot neuroscience center Yale New Haven Hospital plans to build at George Street and Sherman Avenue.

“We started all this because we wanted to look at pollution in our neighborhood. Some of this causing asthma in our neighborhood,” Dwight Central Management Team Chair Florita Gillespie told neighbors at a recent meeting.

The neuroscience treatment and research center has unanimous approval from the Board of Alders. (Construction has been delayed during the Covid-19 pandemic.)

Dwight neighbors worry that more cars going to the expanded hospital will exacerbate already high asthma levels. They have held meetings about ideas for addressing the issue.

One major problem — how to measure whether pollution is increasing?

“There was no source for neighborhood-scale air quality data,” said Yale Urban Design Workshop director Andrei Harwell, who is consulting on the project.

Neighbors put their heads together and found cheap air quality monitors through the company PurpleAir. Citizens used the same monitors to track unsafe air quality levels during last summer’s California wildfires. News articles about the fires caught the Dwight group’s attention.

Each sensor costs $250. All it needs to get started is electricity and an internet connection. The Yale Urban Design Workshop ordered one sensor immediately; the management team pulled together funds to buy two more.

The three sensors went live on Tuesday — from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) air monitoring station at Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven. DEEP is helping Dwight calibrate their PurpleAir sensors against the state’s more sensitive, and expensive, versions.

After two weeks, the sensors will go to their permanent locations at Augusta Lewis Troup School, the Greater Dwight Development Corporation and one other undecided spot in the neighborhood.

Small Particles, Big Impact

The little, white PurpleAir sensors beam up air quality stats into an international map of other sensors. So far, the Criscuolo Park sensors show that the waterfront air is relatively clean.

The PurpleAir map allows viewers to toggle between different metrics of air quality. The most user-friendly category is the fine particle Air Quality Index (AQI). This translates the measurements experts use into ranges the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has defined as ​“good,” ​“moderate,” ​“unhealthy to sensitive groups” and then increasingly hazardous levels.

Experts prefer to look at the raw numbers, the concentration of fine particles per cubic meter. Fine particles are 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller — about one-twentieth the size of a human hair. Particles at this size get easily inhaled into lungs and pass into the bloodstream. Those exposed to high concentrations of these ​“PM 2.5” pollutants can develop asthma, heart disease, kidney disease and mental illness over time. Days with particularly high levels of pollutants mean spikes in health crises too.

The pollutants caught under the ​“PM 2.5” umbrella include metals, arsenic, lead and other small particles. Experts estimate that PM 2.5 pollution causes 4 million deaths a year, including roughly 300 in Connecticut.

“If we look at the whole health burden from all risk factors, including smoking, PM 2.5 pollution actually ranks very high,” said Yale School of Public Health assistant professor Kai Chen.

Chen researches the health impacts of pollution and has found that there is no ​“safe” or ​“good” level of PM 2.5 pollution. Even the relatively low levels of pollution in Connecticut affect human health.

Pollution generally does not respect town, state or national borders. The smoke from California wildfires eventually reached the East Coast.

However, those living close to highways, factories and other sources of air pollution are exposed to toxins more than those who live further away.

“This does matter. What we are looking at here is just from this park. The air pollution level in the Dwight neighborhood may be well above this level. If we don’t have a monitor, we don’t know how bad it is,” Chen said.

Act Of Heroism

Harwell said he is hoping that the air quality project will become a model for other communities. In addition, he said, he hopes the data will inform the neighborhood plans the Yale Urban Design Workshop has helped Dwight write over the years.

Harwell, along with neighbors Pat Wallace and Richard Crouse, are planning to build an online dashboard that shows the Dwight air quality data over time. The Yale Urban Design Workshop has a grant that can pay a student researcher to write an environmental justice history to contextualize the results. And Crouse is working to pull in students from Troup School. Yale medical student Osman Moneer was previously leading the project and has stepped back recently.

The story of the project also includes a small act of heroism. While DEEP was happy to help Dwight calibrate the monitors, the department was unable to extend WiFi to the devices. Wallace reached out to the nearby business Phoenix Press.

The tech expert at Phoenix Press, Paul La Croix, agreed to help. Despite battling a severe illness, La Croix set up an internet connection for the neighbors to use within 24 hours.

When Wallace offered a few days later to drop off thank-you pies at Phoenix Press, she learned that La Croix had passed away.

“This all took between Monday and Thursday in the same week. From what I understand, this was entirely in Paul Le Croix’s character that he was ready to extend himself and to help us out in this way,” Wallace said.

Wallace asked Dwight Alder Frank Douglass to read a proclamation for the Branford father and husband. Douglass obliged.

“He did this for free, because he was concerned about all of us. That’s what makes him special. He was part of the glue that binds us and keeps us all together,” Douglass said.