The construction on Interstate 81 is affecting Central New Yorkers' crisp fall air. A project with SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry and other partners will be monitoring the health effects from the ongoing construction and changes in traffic as the project continues.
Wilson Park in Syracuse sits 50 feet away from the viaduct. Families playing in the park and residents nearby have been subject to vehicle exhaust. There are also concerns about the air quality when traffic patterns change, once the I-81 viaduct comes down, in addition to air-quality impacts during the construction phase.
SUNY ESF professor Dr. Jaime Mirowsky said she is interested in how much traffic will still come right through the community.
“So the diesel exhaust, if you've driven behind a truck and it gives you a plume of black smoke, that's usually what our biggest concern is,” Mirowsky said.
Mirowsky and other researchers created a new air quality monitoring network called AIRaCuse to see how healthy the air is around I-81.
The researchers placed five monitors alongside the highway, and fed the data into an online portal. The dashboard color codes the real-time air quality levels closest to you, “to make that available to the entire community, whether they live here or live ten miles away, because everybody is kind of concerned about their air quality,” said Mirowsky.
The dashboard suggests activities based on the current air quality level. On a good day, it says you can take kids outside or go for a run. On a bad day it might suggest staying indoors. You can also set up text and email alerts with notifications at some of these different thresholds.
“For somebody who maybe doesn't have any underlying disease, you might set that threshold a little bit higher,” Mirowsky explained. “But if you have asthma or if you have children that have asthma, you might set the threshold a little bit lower.”
Community members picked the locations of four of the monitors. Mirowsky explains that anyone can download the data from the monitors.
As a researcher she is interested in traffic patterns changes during and after construction, “right now it's just so piece by piece that it’s really hard to get a good concept on ‘that's (the viaduct) not going to exist in another year and a half’,” Mirowsky said.
The AIRaCuse system will track air quality changes over time in the area around I-81. Construction in the I-81 project is scheduled to continue through 2031.
The project was funded through a grant from the Onondaga Environmental Institute.
