$50k grant launches new project to collect air quality data for Pueblo County
PUEBLO, Colo. (KRDO) -- Thanks to a $50,000 grant, a new project is underway to gather air quality data in Pueblo County.
The nonprofit Mothers Out Front Colorado received a grant from Environmental Justice Data Fund to start a new project called "Clean Air Pueblo."
Through the funding, Clean Air Pueblo purchased 18 monitors to install at participating residences and businesses around Pueblo County to better collect air quality data.
Along with the monitors, Clean Air Pueblo is designing surveys and outreach activities to increase involvement in the project. All of the collected data will be available to view by the public in real-time.
"The Mothers Out Front Pueblo team last year teamed up with both the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Pueblo Department of Public Health and Environment," Mothers Out Front Colorado Community Organizer Jamie Valdez said.
According to Valdez, Pueblo has a history of being used for polluting industries, and a lot of people don't realize how dangerous the air is.
"We know we have disparate health impacts," Valdez explained. "We know we have several large polluters in the area, but the air quality monitoring in Pueblo has been severely lacking for several years. We have one monitoring station in Pueblo on the Fountain Elementary School other than the self-reporting of the polluters themselves."
Project Coordinator Jane Fraser said making the data readily available to the public is crucial. As much of the air quality data collected in Pueblo by public agencies is only collected once per year and is not shared with the public.
"Pueblo has several of the state's largest emitters of toxic air containments including benzene, hydrochloric acid, and mercury," Valdez said. "We also have increased rates of asthma, COPD, and cardiovascular disease when compared with state averages. What we don't have is the air quality data to start to make any kind of correlations there. That's our goal is to collect that data and find out what might be contributing to Pueblo's desperate health impacts."
They'll be focusing on one type of pollution called particulate matter 2.5, or PM 2.5. But their hope is, as they start to build data on that metric, that they can approach state regulatory agencies to push for more strict air quality protection standards.
