Air Quality Monitors Back On Line—But Show Stalled Progress Since 2016

The Port of Los Angeles’s four air quality monitoring stations are now operational — that’s the good news shared by consultant Joel Torcolini, who handles the program shared at its third update meeting Oct. 24 via Zoom. There were even backup monitors, which could be put in place within a day or two

But it’s taken enormous pressure from community activists, particularly Andrea Hricko, professor emerita with the USC Keck School of Medicine, to get them back online as their history of sporadic breakdowns turned into an almost total collapse as the pandemic set in, and the flood of ship congestion made the lack of monitoring data an even more grave concern.

At the meeting, the activists’ concern turned to the larger picture, as Torcolini turned his attention to long-term data from a report released in September. 

“The POLA has essentially made little progress in reducing many emissions since 2016,” Hricko summed up in the chat. 

Declines for the decade before that were significant, but have been incremental at best ever since, including those between last year and this, which were brought into question because of missing data.

“The static monitoring results should be driving more aggressive mitigation policies,” homeowner activist Kathleen Woodfeld told Random Lengths afterward.

A full report on the meeting will be published on Random Lengths website in the next few days.