Photo Courtesy of Leatra Harper
This project started off as a small community organizing effort but then grew to a large multilateral cooperation around the Ohio River region. We initially held a webinar to educate the community, then produced a peer-reviewer paper (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6ad6/meta) using our study results and community engagement, and then applied for and received a ~$500 EPA grant to conduct air monitoring, the results of which we will demonstrate at AGU Fall Meeting 2024.
Key Project Milestones:
5 November 2020: Making the Invisible Visible: What you don’t see can hurt you (first webinar)
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11 November 2020: Making the Invisible Visible: What you don’t see can hurt you (second webinar). A coalition of community advocates and air quality and health scientists present Making the Invisible Visible, an informational webinar on the inadequate regulation of Ohio’s fracking-related air pollution, specifically focusing on Belmont County and the site of the proposed PTTG ethane cracker plant. The slides can be found here.
1 December 2020: A 1-minute presentation about this project prepared for the AGU Fall Meeting Roll Call
3 December 2020: Community Science in Ohio – Science Policy Starts At Home Session – AGU Fall Meeting 2020
11 December 2020: Making the Invisible Visible. A 15-minute presentation about community science for environmental monitoring in the Ohio River Valley. This talk will be presented at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall 2020 meeting.
25 May 2022: Results from the project were published in Environmental Research Letters and Columbia University issued a press release.
We initially held a webinar to educate the community, then produced a peer-reviewer paper (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac6ad6/meta) using our study results and community engagement, and then applied for and received a ~$500 EPA grant to conduct air monitoring, the results of which we will demonstrate at AGU Fall Meeting 2024.
The community has benefitted immensely from the additional monitoring and education. The $500 million EPA grant has expanded monitoring capacity and has helped the organizers hire part- and full-time staff to do organizing, media and scientific work.
Lessons Learned
We planned for this to be a 5-6 month project but as we finished milestones, we continued to think of what else the community would need and create new goals. At this point, the team has been meeting 1-2 times per week for one hour for about 4 years. As folks have gone through life changes and as capacities have changed, some folks have stepped off and some have stepped on, but the work continues, and often folks come back to help when their expertise is needed.
The Concerned Ohio River Residents community group is concerned about the potential for contamination from a proposed Ethane “cracker” plant in Belmont County on the Ohio River. The primary concerns are around Nitrous Oxides, CO2, and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) that the plant would emit.
Because of all the unconventional shale drilling (fracking) and associated waste facilities (injection wells) being permitted in Belmont County, the proposal to build a huge ethane cracker plant in the region is likely to put the county into a state of non-compliance with Ohio EPA standards. There is a growing awareness in the region of the public health effects of fracking.
There is an immediate need for baseline monitoring around the proposed plant and an interest to get a cumulative look at particulate matter, VOCs, and greenhouse gases from plants with air permits in current operation. The expected emissions from the new plant would be overlaid with the existing information to understand the larger impact to communities in the vicinity.
12/2/2020 WTOV9 article about another community facing similar issues: “Salem Township residents now have tool to monitor emissions“
The community is a group of organizers and concerned residents in the Ohio River Valley who are impacted by fracking through air, water and soil pollution. The grassroots groups – Concerned Ohio River Residents and Freshwater Accountability Project, along with a broad coalition of environmental groups in the area including FracTracker, CMU Create Lab, etc – worked together to organize the rural population into developing air pollution monitoring and modeling to understand how fracking is impacting the health of residents and the environment in the area.
Beverly Reed and Barbara Mew are longtime residents of Belmont County, and leaders in the community’s activism with the Concerned Ohio River Residents. Bev Reed has been financially supported by nonprofit organizations in her role in Concerned Ohio River Residents (Sierra Club initially, and Freshwater Accountability Project as of October. They serve in the local organizing, community outreach and volunteer recruitment capacities, and will be leading the local instrument installation and maintenance efforts.
Leatra Harper is a community activist working with the FreshWater Accountability Projec. She serves as an advisor on this project, and has been a previous community lead on the Cambridge, OH Thriving Earth Exchange project.
Lyssa Freese is a PhD student in Atmospheric Science at MIT’s Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Science Department. She researches the intersection of atmospheric chemistry, climate, international energy policy, and health outcomes. Prior to joining EAPS, she worked Rock Environment and Energy Initiative in Beijing, and the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She graduated in 2016 from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with a degree in Science, Technology, and International Affairs.
Garima Raheja is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a BA Data Science and a BS Civil and Environmental Engineering. Working at the nexus of science and environmental justice, Garima hopes to empower communities with the tools to make change. She currently works at the Maui Nui Botanical Gardens in Kahului, Hawaii, serving as a seed bank manager helping preserve native endangered species, and serves as a US State Department Air Pollution Fellow and on the AGU Art and Science Community Leadership Team, and has previously worked for NASA, NOAA, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and as the President of the Bay Area Environmentally Aware Consulting Network. In Fall 2020, Garima will begin her PhD at Columbia University, focusing on low-cost solutions for environmental monitoring.
