Jul. 27—ROCHESTER — Work continues in filling gaps needed to monitor Rochester’s air quality.
Most recently, a new monitor was installed at John Marshall High School through Air Quality Alliance efforts, which are building on work that started with a 2017 research project.
“We’re really excited about that location because there’s a lot of development in that area, and the highway goes through,” said Kayla Betzold, Rochester’s sustainability coordinator.
The latest addition brings the alliance’s total installed monitors to 19, with at least four more to install.
“If you look at the map currently, I think we have pretty good coverage across the rest of the city,” Betzold said, pointing to the potential for adding additional sensors south of Gibbs Elementary School and near Hadley Creek Golf Course.
The alliance’s interactive map is available at tinyurl.com/4dxavc6p, but doesn’t include four downtown monitors that are not able to provide real-time data.
The process isn’t as easy as finding a place to install the monitor, however. Each device is tested against an existing Minnesota Pollution Control monitor at Ben Franklin Elementary School to ensure they are collecting valid data.
Once tested, alliance members, which include city and Olmsted County staff, as well as Mayo Clinic, Destination Medical Center and Zumbro Valley Medical Society representatives, discuss goals and potential placement of monitors.
“We all kind of play a part in deciding the conversation around where those sensors go, and everybody in the group kind of has a different perspective on air quality,” said Teresa Blader, an Olmsted County GIS analyst, who has been helping map the sensors.
The agencies have also taken on specific roles, with the city leading sensor installation and maintenance efforts, the county leading website and mapping work, DMC leading purchasing efforts and Mayo Clinic providing scientific and medical expertise.
With the majority of the hardware being funded through grants, DMC Energy and Sustainability Manager Lauren Jensen said some of the next steps for the alliance will be seeking resources that could help fund maintenance efforts, as well as update technology, as it continues to raise awareness of the local efforts.
The alliance grew out of the Rochester Air Network group spurred by work of Matt Spiten, a respiratory care specialist at Mayo Clinic, who helped push for the additional monitors while studying respiratory health at University of Minnesota Rochester. He’s continued working with the efforts since joining Mayo’s staff.
The name change to Air Quality Alliance came earlier this year with the start of planning for long-term strategies and goals.
Hannah Kraling, an environmental analyst with Olmsted County Environmental Resources, said the primary goal remains providing transparency around local air quality.
The name change makes room for work outside Rochester’s city limits, but she said the key focus is on the city, with the county recently purchasing two monitors — one for the county’s east campus and one for the nearby Rochester Community and Technical College sports complex.
She said the monitors, which are tied into public mapping and reporting efforts, help monitor the county’s waste-to-energy facility and can be used to provide needed data for future policy decisions.
Colleen Fried, an alliance participant from the county’s environmental health unit, said the date and other findings are important amid changes in the city, but it’s also critical to be aware of larger impacts.
“I think it’s important to monitor new developments, like the (Olmsted County) waste-to-energy facility, extra traffic on Highway 52 and all that, but we also need to be aware of the fact that we’re not sitting in an isolated island,” she said. “Our air is coming from other places and carrying their pollutants with it.”
In recent years, smoke from northern wildfires have increased the number of days when air quality has been deemed unhealthy to people with specific sensitivities, including breathing conditions or heart disease.
At the same time, she said it’s important to not rely on the readings of a single monitor at a specific time in the day.
“Air quality is a regional issue,” she said. “If a sensor all of a sudden goes high, it could be the sensor went bad or a neighbor is having a fire or or grilling with charcoal.”
As a result, the alliance hopes to continue adding monitors throughout the city and county to help provide a clear picture of air quality and its potential impact on health.
The group’s website offers information on how to get involved, as well as options for purchasing an air monitor, but members say adding private monitors to the existing alliance map could take time.
“I would say that we’re still trying to work out exactly how this would work, but we’re definitely open to including more sensors into the map,” Blader said, noting the alliance’s requirement for calibrating sensors would make adding private monitors a challenge.
Betzold also noted access to service sensors could also be challenging, if they are on private property.
For now, alliance members suggest anyone wanting to install an air monitor for public access consider a Purple Air device, which is the most common among those installed by the alliance. The company provides the option to share data through its online map at tinyurl.com/2uwvnczh.
As work continues to fill gaps in the alliance’s mapping effort, members said they continue to look for ways to use the data collected, which includes being able to track changes in air quality and potential impacts in specific parts of the city.
“His goal was to get data and provide access to data to allow people to start researching some of these things,” Rochester Deputy Public Works Director Aaron Luckstein said.
Betzold and Luckstein are slated to provide an update on alliance efforts to the Rochester City Council during a 3:30 p.m. study session Monday in council chambers of the city-county Government Center, 151 Fourth St. SE.