Grant aims at easing wildfire smoke for kids
25 October 2022
Published by: https://www.mailtribune.com
USA – Children breathe more air per pound of body weight than adults, and their lungs are still developing, making children uniquely vulnerable to wildfire smoke seeping into buildings, according to Sara Jones, community engagement coordinator for the Ashland Forest Resiliency Project.
Thanks to $40,000 in grant funds from Oregon State University’s ASP3IRE Center, new air filtration systems will be installed in four indoor spaces serving children in Ashland.
The systems will not only filter smoke and protect vulnerable young lungs; they also will contribute to research in children’s environmental health and potentially contribute to engineering better filtration systems, Jones explained.
Ashland is hit with smoke in two ways, she said. Low levels of smoke come every year from controlled burn operations in the Ashland Watershed, and then there’s smoke drifting into the valley every summer from wildfires close at hand and far away.
The city of Ashland, Jones said, is home to 3,400 children younger than 18.
The Rogue Valley is an ideal location for conducting wildfire smoke research, she said.
“It can go all the way to increases in anxiety and sleeplessness to lower test scores and long-term impacts to heart and lung function,” she said. “This is a field where a lot of that information is emerging because it’s a long-term impact. It’s hard to capture all of that data at once,” she said.
The buildings in this project are a mix of old and new, she said. Smoke can enter through windows, doors or aging heating or ventilation systems.
“These tiny smoke particles are invisible to the naked eye until they collect so much in a building that you can see them,” Jones explained. “This project will give us a little bit of data and information. … We hope to start learning more about the air quality inside where children are spending several hours of the day.”
The air filtration systems will be equipped with low-cost air-quality monitoring sensors called Purple Air, taking readings every 10 minutes.
The data collected from the sensors will be shared with researchers from OSU and National Institutes of Health. OSU received its funding from NIH, which is funding six other organizations around the country focused on children’s environmental health research.
The city of Ashland received the grant money on behalf of the local coalition of public and private agencies known as Smokewise Ashland. As a partner of Smokewise, the Ashland Forest Resiliency Project looks at the installation of these air filtration systems as taking action on its Ashland Community Response Plan for smoke.
Jones said she looked forward to the research that could be built from this project, and to the potential for not only better air filtration systems, but systems for households with children.
“There are a lot of spaces where children are going to be playing inside while it’s smoky outside,” she said. “But we can only do one project at a time.”
