What Does a Bucket Brigade Need Most?

Air Quality Monitoring Grant Explained on Friday, Oct. 15

By Patric Hedlund

Do you want to know how to find out what you and your children are breathing, and if there is a link between pollution and health problems? What can you do about it?

A $25,000 grant won by the TriCounty Watchdogs will buy equipment and consulting, but your interest and volunteer efforts are needed to answer those important questions.

All this will be explained Friday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. at Cuddy Hall in Lake of the Woods. The “Bucket Brigade” is a simple tool that dozens of communities are using to learn for themselves what chemicals are in their air. Armed with their own data and information about the health effects of chemicals and particulate matter in the air, communities are winning reduction of pollution.

The “Bucket” is an easy-to-use air sampling device housed inside a 5 gallon plastic bucket.

It was developed by an environmental engineering firm to simplify and reduce the costs of testing toxic gases in the air. There is now a version to test for tiny particulate matter generated in diesel truck and factory emissions. Research is now linking this PM2.5 to heart attacks, diabetes, asthma, bronchitis and circulatory problems.

The Friday, 7 p.m. session will be followed by a daytime training session on Saturday, Oct. 16 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. to train “Brigadeers” who can be citizen scientists to help make scientifically useful samples for analysis by labs. The Global Community Monitor (GCM) project has been operating since 2002.

This is part of the October 15, 2010 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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