File photo
File photo
The City of Dallas and The Nature Conservancy have teamed with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute in an effort to start introducing neighborhood air quality monitors in nine Dallas areas.
he "Breathe Easy Dallas" project is part of a plan to upgrade the infrastructure of the city and in local communities.
“We are so excited to finally get this equipment into the neighborhoods,” Susan Alvarez, assistant director of Environmental Compliance & Sustainability, said. “This project will give us better insight on neighborhood-level air quality, while also advancing the state of the science related to this equipment. These instruments have been calibrated to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality monitors that are used to determine overall air quality in Dallas. It will be interesting to see how well these instruments work, and how we can best use the data from these sensors to improve public health. We are grateful to our partners who are working with us on this important effort.”
The Dallas Healthy Cities Program Director also reflected on the effort, saying that the data collected will be distributed to health care stakeholders.
“In deploying these air monitors in the field, we embark on a critical, one-year study that will provide us with the data necessary to better understand the role that local air quality plays in relation to pediatric asthma,” Dallas Healthy Cities Program Director at The Nature Conservancy in Texas Kathy Jack said. “The collected data will be shared with local health and community stakeholders to advance additional, parallel research efforts and inform future air quality-related health interventions.”