Insights from Developing and Implementing a Community Air Monitoring Plan in an Environmental Justice Community: Richmond-North Richmond-San Pablo, California.

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) recently completed implementation of a Community Air Monitoring Plan (CAMP) for the Richmond-North Richmond-San Pablo area in California, an effort under California State Assembly Bill 617. The Richmond-North Richmond-San Pablo area is an environmental justice community with a high density of complex pollution sources and where residents face a disproportionately high health burden due to cumulative impacts. To develop the CAMP, a 35-member Community Steering Committee (CSC) met regularly to learn about and discuss air quality concepts, health effects of air pollution, and different air monitoring methods and approaches. The CSC identified air quality concerns across the study area to serve as the foundation for developing and selecting air monitoring projects, and in turn, to provide data that can help inform emissions and exposure reduction efforts. The CSC selected several air monitoring projects for the CAMP, such as networks of lower-cost sensor networks that helped illustrate spatial variability and short-term peaks in fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) concentrations, in addition to providing real-time air quality information to the public for personal decision making.

The CSC also voted to move forward with a project using BAAQMD’s recently developed mobile monitoring platform (mobile lab), with a focus on collecting measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in target areas centered around community-identified air quality concerns, adjacent neighborhoods, and spaces where the public spends time. The mobile lab is outfitted with gaseous and particulate air pollution instrumentation, meteorological sensors, and a global positioning system, and is advantageous for providing air pollution measurements with high spatial resolution over a larger area than is possible with fixed-location monitoring systems. For this air monitoring project, data collection is heavily reliant on the mobile lab’s Proton Transfer Reaction-Mass Spectrometer (PTR-MS), which provides measurements for selected VOCs. Following data review and quality assurance, the data were analyzed and interpreted to better understand spatial variability in VOC levels, locate areas where levels of VOCs are unusually high, and identify possible sources for those higher levels. Collection of data for combustion-related pollutants, including carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides, allowed for differentiation between combustion and non-combustion sources of VOCs. Numerous occurrences of higher than typical levels of VOCs were detected, including in the vicinity of specific facilities and operations in the study area, such as tank terminals, refinery operations, gas stations, auto body shops, plastics manufacturing, and bakeries. The findings from the CAMP projects may point to opportunities for emissions and exposure reduction strategies as part of BAAQMD’s broader effort to improve air quality in environmental justice communities.