Local Air Quality
The Port of Hueneme installed air quality monitors at Haycox Elementary and the first results have been collected. We have found in 5 years of air monitoring that air quality in Port Hueneme and South Oxnard is generally very good but that wind direction and the time of year makes a big difference in moving air pollutants around our community from sources like the 101 freeway and wildfires which our monitors can detect. Watch our presentation on the findings given to the Board of Harbor Commissioners on October 19, 2020.
Transcript
0:00 - hi good afternoon president ramirez and fellow board members i appreciate uh
0:04 - having a little of your time this afternoon to share with all of you
0:08 - essentially the first seven months of data that is being collected at the wonderful
0:16 - sorry i'm just pulling up the slideshow as we speak um air monitors
0:20 - that the board approved a little bit more than a year ago about a year and a
0:23 - half ago um i will keep brief we are talking about air quality so it gets really
0:29 - technical and down in the weeds at times but i'm going to attempt to float above
0:33 - all that and give you guys really the kind of meat of the what we're seeing and the
0:38 - the sort of science we're looking at so as the commissioners will remember we
0:44 - have uh placed these monitors on the roof at haycock's elementary which is down on
0:50 - perkins many of you are familiar with that location there and uh is adjacent to uh
0:58 - Hueneme road as our corridor there and then in a large residential area typical of
1:03 - south oxnard a little more than a mile to pretty much due east of the port this was selected
1:10 - because of its kind of representation of the broader community and then the proximity
1:15 - to the port we began monitoring back in December of last year so in a few months
1:20 - we will be coming up on a full year's worth of data now what does this stuff look like well
1:26 - you you will remember when we had the the sort of unveiling ceremonyuh we had some
1:31 - of the equipment out on the table for the community to see this is what it physically looks
1:35 - like in location on the roof there we purposefully uh positioned it in a place where it
1:42 - would be and um less visible from from the road there and what we're actually
1:47 - monitoring for is essentially two things we're measuring for tiny tiny air particles called
1:53 - particulate matter of different sizes and then we're also measuring stuff around kind
1:58 - of what the atmosphere is doing what is the temperature what is the wind what
2:02 - is the direction the wind is coming from so you can see the the the one on the
2:07 - right that looks sort of like a mini fridge that is the enclosure that contains the
2:12 - the expensive high accuracy monitors and then the the tp or excuse me tree
2:18 - looking thing on the left is our sort of atmospheric measurements and the little
2:24 - small mobile monitors so those two work together to give us our information
2:30 - so you will remember from that unveiling this piece of equipment was available
2:34 - for the public to see and sort of look at and ask questions about this is our reference grade
2:41 - particulate monitor and the reason that reference grade piece is important
2:46 - is because there's a full range of air monitoring equipment from the inexpensive
2:53 - small mobile types of monitors all the way up to the other end of the
2:57 - spectrum which is this monitor and so this monitor gives us information
3:02 - data around the air quality that is the same quality as that which a group like the
3:09 - environmental protection agency the air resources board the air district
3:14 - would use the same type of data so it is the very highest quality
3:18 - data available so it is really kind of the standard if if one were to ask what is air quality like
3:24 - in ventura county a monitor like this would be where they would get their answer
3:29 - so this piece of machinery here is measuring three different sizes of that
3:33 - particulate matter including humidity and humidity is really important because of course
3:39 - humidity is just a measurement of moisture in the air but those moisture pieces those little
3:43 - bits of water right are are acting like little sponges so they're grabbing pieces of dust or
3:49 - other particulate out of the atmosphere all the time so the more water you have the more
3:55 - difficult it can be to get a really accurate measurement so that's an important measurement
3:59 - there the other one that's similarly uh accurate and of high quality is this one called
4:08 - an athlometer kind of a fancy word for saying that this is a machine that does nothing
4:14 - but measure very very tiny particles called black carbon and the reason that
4:20 - we're doing that is important because communities environmental justice
4:26 - public health advocates etc have become very very focused in on something called diesel
4:32 - particulate matter and diesel particulate matter is essentially a combination of byproducts
4:39 - that are left over from the combustion of diesel fuels and it's diesel it's fuels that are similar
4:46 - to diesel so gasolines and distillates and bunker fuel and a whole bunch of stuff
4:52 - they put out a kind of a variety of of air pollution that includes gases and particles and
5:00 - diesel particulate matter in and of itself is very very difficult to monitor for
5:06 - because of that sort of mix of all the different things in it so black carbon is the surrogate
5:11 - that is used in place of diesel particulate matter so we test for black carbon to
5:17 - understand what the diesel particulate matter that's out there would actually
5:21 - look like and this is widely done and this is a means of understanding what that dpm
5:27 - which is the acronym for diesel particulate matter looks like
5:30 - and then the other really important piece to this is that black carbon doesn't just come
5:35 - from burning diesel fuel it also comes from burning other organic substances wood
5:42 - in particular so anytime people are having a fire at home in their fireplace
5:48 - anytime there is a brush fire or forest fire this machine can allow us to
5:54 - differentiate between which is which when is it brush fire smoke and when is it diesel smoke
6:00 - so that's a really important thing we'll talk about a little bit more
6:05 - we put up a series of these little small handheld meters um these are less accurate of course
6:11 - and what we're trying to do with these is create a relationship between the little ones
6:16 - and the big fancy one so that we can be able to use these little ones
6:20 - in other locations take them down put them at the port you know put them at a community
6:25 - location and understand what the readings should actually look like based
6:29 - on that so what particular matter why black carbon well of course so particulate matter 10
6:37 - that's the biggest number it's the biggest size it's things like dust right if you were
6:43 - to be walking on a dirt field the dust that would get kicked up that is pm10 that would get
6:47 - stuck in your nose stuck in your mouth pm 2.5 much smaller four times smaller
6:54 - that stuff is goes through your mouth and through down into your lungs
6:59 - and can get into your basically into your lungs pm1 which is again half as small
7:06 - and more than 2.5 these are tiny tiny particles and these can go into the bloodstream
7:13 - and can travel all around the body and can get into different organs and cause different
7:18 - negative health outcomes so that's why that that fine grain stuff
7:22 - that that really small particle stuff is really getting a tremendous amount of attention
7:27 - from the state in particular the california air resources board is very focused on uh on pm
7:33 - and dpm right now so where does this stuff come from where does the black carbon that
7:37 - we're measuring the diesel particulate matter that we're measuring where is this coming
7:43 - from well it comes from a couple different sources on-road stuff so all the trucks
7:48 - buses cars trash trucks vans everything out there off-road stuff so
7:55 - our ocean-going vessels the ships construction equipment cargo handling equipment trains
8:02 - agricultural equipment whether it's a tractor or groundwater pump
8:06 - but then again of course we've got that other piece that is that
8:09 - biomass that is that plants you know wood that people are burning and those
8:15 - wildfire pieces so that's that sort of mix of combination of stuff typically
8:20 - that sort of brush fiery wood stove stuff is less than 20 percent but that
8:25 - can change and and we'll see that so wildfire wildfire as you guys know is one of
8:33 - the most visible signs of our changing climate and is one of the most readily um
8:40 - obvious sort of sources of bad air quality we all know we've all seen and breathed
8:46 - in the last two months smoke from fires that can be hundreds of miles away from us
8:53 - you know sort of lending to this how fluid air is air moves all over the globe
8:59 - that smoke that came from california wildfires is being measured in europe parts of asia now
9:05 - it circumnavigates the entire world so why is wood smoke bad why do we care
9:10 - about this well because when there are wildfires nearby those average concentrations can
9:18 - increase by 20 times or more those really high high peak levels can go up by more
9:25 - than a hundred times from wood smoke so it's very important to us that we
9:30 - understand when there is wood smoke where is it coming from is it wood smoke those sorts
9:36 - of questions because what we're trying to do is help to understand
9:40 - when there's bad air quality in the oxnard plane where is that pollution coming from
9:47 - so let's cut to the chase what are we talking about what are the numbers
9:50 - here we have our first seven months of data december through august and this is
9:56 - black carbon again and the units that we're talking about here are
10:02 - of course um micrograms so that is a thousandth of one gram
10:09 - if you were to take that and put it into a big box a meter cube
10:14 - if you were to drop a thousandth of a gram into that box of air that would be a microgram
10:19 - so what we're seeing is january december february those cold weather months
10:26 - are our worst air quality months and then our numbers have gotten
10:31 - sequentially better all the way until august and then in august because of the
10:36 - fires those numbers went back up again and we'll get into some more detail as to
10:40 - why this is but this generally is showing us that air quality is very good and it's
10:46 - very consistent and that's really important that consistency is important because
10:52 - bad health outcomes come from long-term exposure to bad air so if we have long-term
10:59 - consistent numbers showing good air we can say that overall
11:04 - air quality in the oxnard area is very very good so this is just another diagram showing
11:10 - you those first three months december january february see how that bar is
11:15 - almost twice as high as all the subsequent months so that's showing
11:20 - we have bad air when it's cold and better air as it starts to warm up
11:26 - why is that giles did you go back to that slide before if yeah if i was going to try to shoot
11:34 - bullet holes in it i would go well in march we got shut down you know with kobet
11:38 - everybody stayed off the road so how does that impact this data
11:43 - absolutely that's a great question commissioner rooney i appreciate that
11:46 - i will show you the answer to your question in just a second because we
11:49 - actually have the data showing when there are ships present and
11:52 - when there are not ships present and showing our numbers of ships from
11:57 - last year as a comparison against this year so let me just jump into that in just
12:02 - one moment i just wanted to display kind of the why this stuff is bad in the
12:06 - winter and the reason it is bad in the winter is really because of atmospheric science
12:12 - wonderful complexities of air and temperature right when air gets
12:17 - hot it gets bigger it's why a hot air balloon rises up or when you have a fireplace and all the
12:22 - heat goes up to the ceiling that cold dense air sinks to the ground
12:27 - to the bottom so in the winter everywhere oxnard ohio etc we get a very cold
12:34 - layer of air that gets squashed by a very thin layer of warm air with heavy cold
12:41 - air sitting on top of it it's kind of like a cake and so the same amount of pollution is
12:46 - getting made all the time that source the source of pollution the cars the buses
12:51 - they're all just driving doing their thing but the amount of air in which all that pollution is
12:58 - sitting gets squashed in those cold months by more than half
13:03 - so you have half as much space for the same amount of pollution
13:07 - so it gets twice as bad that's really what's driving that so we're going to do a quick
13:13 - comparison against la long beach and Hueneme the purple line you can see
13:18 - here that's la long beach numbers the lower darker line that's our haycox monitor so the
13:25 - message here is that we're basically the air quality is about twice as good
13:29 - consistently across same thing here this is without any fire data included there so
13:35 - same thing about twice as good as those la numbers so now commissioner rooney to
13:40 - answer your question how do we know it's not a covid related artifact that we see these
13:46 - decreases here is december we're going to look at ships and port and no ships in port what
13:50 - we're looking at here is each of these dots is a one hour average each image left and right
13:58 - has 720 dots on it if you see blue blue means good air if you see red red means bad air and
14:07 - where the dot is on the map tells you where that wind was blowing to blow that
14:15 - that air into the monitor so as you can see the bad air that we see in december
14:23 - when there's ships at the dock is coming from the north it's not coming from the west
14:28 - where the port is located when there's no ships you see the same
14:32 - thing you see bad air coming from the north and from the northeast a little bit as well
14:38 - but predominantly even in the bad air times you see good air lots and lots and lots
14:45 - of good readings same thing in january chips no ships same thing same thing in february
14:53 - another cold month lots of clean dots in the center these bad
14:58 - dots if we want to call them that these are all taking place at two and three in the morning
15:05 - when the air is the very coldest when that layer of air is squished to its very thinnest
15:10 - if you want to breathe the worst air in the entire year go outside at three in
15:17 - the morning three in the morning on christmas morning santa claus gets it because
15:23 - everybody's having a fire andeverybody's you know got their fireplaces going
15:27 - and that mo that cold air again squishing february we see it march same thing now
15:33 - march is interesting because as you guys know having been around the port for a long
15:37 - time in the spring that air that wind starts to shift from being gentle
15:42 - to blowing out of the west so see this little clump of what looks like feathers right
15:47 - in the middle that's a like a wind rose that's showing us wind direction
15:53 - and the more colorful and the longer they kind of look like turkey feathers
15:57 - the longer they are that means the more wind so here we start to see
16:01 - look at that this is april we see long turkey feathers from the west
16:05 - that means air blowing in from the west again lots and lots of good air a little bit
16:12 - from the west but those readings again were very late at night that's essentially
16:17 - the story here is really that air in oxnard is really really fluid um it's really about
16:27 - consistent numbers good quality air numbers that we're seeing there
16:32 - there's lots more data i could show we can really sink our teeth into this if
16:36 - you guys are interested but i wanted to give you kind of that high level and the the
16:40 - takeaways are essentially that we have consistently very good quality air the worst air that
16:46 - anybody breathes in oxnard is really being driven by long-term seasonal
16:53 - changes in the temperature and wind regime for the area that there isn't a distinct
17:01 - signature of port pollution discernible in this monitoring data and that's important because
17:08 - it says that as we had hoped air quality is consistent it's fluid and it's good quality
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