DETROIT – Folks living in Southeast Detroit neighborhoods in and around Corktown say they feel like they’re a casualty of war because of the air they breathe.
With constant dust and dirt from truck traffic, industry and demolition, residents said they’re fed up with dirty air. Thanks to a grant from Ford subsidiary Michigan Central, six air quality monitors were recently installed around the neighborhood for a year-long study. All day, every day, air quality monitors around Corktown quietly analyze what’s in the air and give it one of the following five grades, based on EPA standards: Good, moderate, unhealthy for sensitive groups, unhealthy, or very unhealthy.
Local 4 has been checking and documenting those air monitors every day for the past month.
Every day, around the same time, Local 4 took a snapshot of the air quality grades for each of the Corktown monitors. What did we learn? Our preliminary look at the Corktown area air quality found that it isn’t good more than half all 28 days we checked.
For example: a monitor at Fort Street and Rosa Parks Boulevard found mostly “moderate” quality air. According to the EPA, moderate air quality is OK for almost everyone to breathe, but it may be unhealthy for some people. For the rest of the month, air quality at that monitor was mostly “good,” but on one day, the monitor gave the air an orange grade, which is “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” which the EPA defines as: older people, children and people with certain health conditions.
Less than a mile away, next to a playground at Porter and Brooklyn streets, the monitor there reported orange “unhealthy for sensitive groups” for six days. “Moderate” quality air was recorded on 12 days and “good” air quality for only 10 days.
“It kind of makes you feel like a casualty of war,” said Sylvan Wright, while watching his daughters play at Riverside Park, next to the Ambassador Bridge. ”Like I’m just caught in the middle of something that I can’t really control.”
The neighbors around Corktown may not be able to control what’s in the air, but at least they can now make informed decisions about whether they want to go outside.
The City of Detroit said it’s not part of the Corktown air quality monitor project so they wouldn’t comment about the data so far.
The company maintaining the network of monitors is JustAir, an innovator based in Detroit. On the company’s website JustAir.app -- you can see real-time air quality data collected in several cities. JustAir is in the process of setting up 100 air quality monitors for Wayne County.
More: Local 4 Investigations