Hamilton air pollution testing now underway on a utility pole near you

The largest air-quality tracking experiment in Hamilton history is underway and should soon be tracking pollution at a utility pole near you.

Yes, even if you live on the Mountain, in Waterdown or Binbrook, according to a study map released ahead of a virtual public meeting Tuesday at 7 p.m. for residents interested in eyeballing the nearest neighbourhood pollution sniffer.

Believe me, we've put them up from one end of the city to the other," said University of Toronto masters student Elysia Fuller-Thomson, whose team has climbed street lights in every ward since January to install 60-plus monitors. The goal is to get good (air pollution) information at a real neighbourhood level."

That's a big deal for a steel city that already measures air pollution - but mostly near the industrial bayfront. Three provincial stations also provide data for Ontario's online air quality index" tool.

But that index doesn't always reflect what you're breathing on the Beach strip, in an east-end apartment or in the backyard on the south Mountain, said Lynda Lukasik of Environment Hamilton, which is doing outreach for project partners that include the city and a university team headed by professor Matthew Adams.

Past mobile air monitoring snapshots," for example, have shown worrisome neighbourhood levels of dust and particulate in some bayfront neighbourhoods, near scrapyards and highways.

Lukasik said this is the most comprehensive" air pollution study she can recall in the city. It's exciting because it should give us hyperlocal results."

Given Hamilton's industrial footprint, more monitors are located in downtown and lower-city neighbourhoods, with socioeconomic factors like poverty also considered. But pollution sniffers are in every ward in the city, including in outlying communities like Lynden, Freelton, Winona and Mount Hope.

The air monitors will track contaminants like nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and the cancer-linked pollutant benzene.

The unobtrusive white monitors are easy to miss, with canisters the size of pop cans mounted just above head height on utility poles - but researchers are posting signs to let curious residents know what is happening.

The passive monitors cannot share data in real time, so the first meaningful test results won't be available until the fall. To register for the public meeting, visit environmenthamilton.org.

Matthew Van Dongen is a transportation and environment reporter at The Spectator. mvandongen@thespec.com