Gabriola Island Clean Air Society

Here we go again Kamloops. Wood smoke pollution is starting to build rapidly yet government sensors are slow off the mark once again. Our community and all communities deserve real-time and not averaged and lagged indicators for air pollution. The government hates these low-cost devices because they erode their control over access to information and individuals/alternative interpretations of risk.

Here's what happens when one very dirty diesel delivery truck drives past a PurpleAir sensor. Note the spike and relatively higher level of PM2.5 compared to other sensors in the area. The increase in pollution is still a fraction of what wood burning stoves and fireplaces generate, and the diesel pollution dropped in a few minutes. We still need to work on replacing such polluters since air quality is the biggest environmental health risk of our times. Air pollution is also the main and likely only driver of climate change.

How much is a human life worth? If you live in rural British Columbia or in resource-based communities like Kamloops you may be surprised to learn that your life is worth far less than someone from Vancouver or Victoria. Recent forest fires in the interior of BC, and the massive amounts of wood smoke produced, demonstrate how risk communication tools like the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) are designed to treat differentially exposures across populations. The AQHI is a scale used in Canada to weigh the relative contribution of three air pollutants; namely, particulate matter in the 2.5 micron range (PM2.5), ground level ozone, and nitrogen dioxide. It normally ranges between 1-10 or from “low” to “very high” health risk but can reach numbers like 49 as was recorded on August 3, 2017, in Kamloops. The formula used for calculating the AQHI is straightforward and it involves using a three-hour average for these pollutants in micrograms/m 3 for PM2.5, and parts-per-billion (...

The following commentary is from Gabriola Island Clean Air Society director Dr. Michael Mehta. Dr. Mehta is a Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Thompson Rivers University and an expert on health and environmental risk issues. In cities like Beijing, when a "red alert" day is called due to high air pollution levels, many restrictions come into effect including a shutdown of industrial operations that may exacerbate the problem. With the extremely high pollution levels in Kamloops over the past month, the following questions arise: To what extent do current industrial operations like those engaged in by the Domtar Pulp Mill contribute to these high levels, and do their operations makes thing worse d uring emergency situations like this? This is a very difficult question to answer completely, and without full access to provincial air quality data I can only make some inferences and educated guesses. Here's what I have seen, and this suggests that...

The air quality on Gabriola Island is returning to acceptable levels.

Our PurpleAir network of realtime air quality monitors is starting to show the first signs of air pollution from the forest fires in the interior of BC. The air quality can change dramatically and quickly as we saw in Kamloops these past two weeks. Keep an eye on our live sensor map by clicking here .  There is no provincial air quality monitoring on the island so our citizen science initiative through this non-profit is the place to go for information. We can see the trend line going up rapidly this afternoon around 3PM. These are the current sensor readings for a sister network in Kamloops. Anything over 25 micrograms/cubic meter for a 24 hour averaging period is considered unacceptably high.

Over the past two years the Gabriola Island Clean Air Society has worked with community groups and individuals to setup more than 50 low-cost, realtime air quality monitors in BC. These devices m ade by PurpleAir have created a more nuanced and detailed picture of our air sheds, and also have provided much needed empirical evidence to support the claim that wood burning from a variety of sources creates local pollution hot spots that are not being detected by provincial air quality monitoring. The accuracy of these instruments has been questioned by some, in part, because people are often uncomfortable with the results.  Residential wood burning including the use of fireplaces, wood stoves, bon fires, and yard clearing exposes people who live nearby to air pollution risks that are hyper local, and as high (but on an ongoing albeit episodic basis) as forest fire smoke. The forest fires unfolding in the interior of British Columbia this past week provide some importa...