For the “Man with the Machine,” particulates matter

By Chris Lombardi

On Friday at 9 a.m., local members of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association will be at the corner of 39th Street and Ninth Avenue. They’ll stay there for the next six hours, tending to a machine that will tell them exactly how bad the pollution at that intersection really is.

Why six hours? Because “if you don’t take readings for six hours, the EPA won’t accept them,” boomed John Culpepper, who bought the “E-Sampler Particulate Monitor” in 2004 for his Lower Washington Heights Neighborhood Association. “You want your result on record with the EPA!” he chimed, his voice rising in both pitch and volume.

For the past 17 years Culpepper, a 77-year-old former engineer, has been working to stem the rising rates of asthma afflicting his Washington Heights community. He’s been called a gadfly, pest and Volunteer of the Year by folks at the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and was written up as one of City Limits Magazine’s Veteran Shakeup Artists for 2005. But to a large segment of citizen volunteers who are familiar with his work, Culpepper’s been known as The Man with the Machine.

The machine in question, the “E-Sampler Particulate Monitor,” measures particulate matter—those tiny fragments spat out by vehicles, factories, power plants and construction sites —and generates how much is found per cubic centimeter (the official EPA limit is 15). Culpepper has brought the E-Sampler, a portable version of those monitors installed by the EPA, all over the five boroughs when asked. He’s gone from being the pest whose calls were dreaded by DEC to chair of its Citizens Advisory Committee, and from fighting the EPA to being cited as a 2005 EPA Environmental Achiever.

So, why Hell’s Kitchen? Because Christine Berthet asked.

“We’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” said Berthet, who is co-chairperson of C.B. 4’s Transportation Committee and an HKNA board member. “We’ve known for a while that our neighborhood had the second-highest rate of asthma hospitalizations in Manhattan. We just testified before the New York Metropolitan Transit Council (NTMTC) that serious traffic-reduction measures and pollution controls were needed.” When the group learned about the monitor, Berthet called Culpepper and scheduled the scan immediately.

Traffic has been a concern to advocates of all kinds on the West Side, from Housing Conservation Coordinators’ John Raskin and Lucas Shapiro to Transportation Alternatives, whose spokesperson Wiley Norvell called Culpepper “a part of our traffic relief coalition.” Norvell agreed when asked if the E-Sampler is highlighting a once-unknown set of pollutants: “All our clean-air laws date back to the 1970s,” he said, “when carbon monoxide was the enemy. But now, there’s an increasing amount of data about what these [particulates] are doing to our neighborhoods.”

Unlike the more easily detected CO2, the E-Sampler is going after something much smaller: the fine dust usually called “particulate matter,” or PM for short. Over the past 15 years, the existence and effects of PM on human health and the environment have gotten on the radar of scientists and environmentalists.

We are all chimney sweeps—sort of

When asked what “particulates” were, the first answer given by staff at the Chelsea nonprofit Environmental Defense (ED) was “soot,” as if autos and construction sites threatened to make Manhattan residents’ lungs the same as Oliver Twist’s. But mention that analogy to Mel Peffers, director of ED’s air-quality program, and she becomes emphatic. “Soot mixed into everything else!” said Peffers, who came to ED after three years with the EPA.

Peffers added that unlike organic particles like coal, ordinary dust or wood chips, much of this PM is coming out of power plants, exhaust pipes and buildings. And it’s smaller: While a particle of coal is 10 microns, according to Peffers, particulates are defined by a size of 2.5 or fewer. “That’s thinner than one-thousandth of a human hair,” said Peffes. “Not only can it embed in your lungs and aggravate asthma, but that stuff—it can get right into your blood.”

Peffers, who co-authored “All Choked Up,” ED’s recent study of New York traffic congestion, also worked on a high-profile 1993 Harvard study credited with changing the pollution conversation to include PM. The study, “An Association Between Air Pollution and Mortality in Six U.S. Cities,” analyzed mortality data over 14–16 years in six mid-size cities in Massachusetts, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin and Kansas. After controlling for the effects of smoking, said Peffers, the results were startling even to the researchers.

“For the first time, we showed that people who were just living their daily lives had increased mortality where there were more PM’s,” Peffer said. The strongest effects on mortality, according to the study, were from PM’s 2.5 micrometers or smaller.

Particularly surprising, Peffers added, was a strong association not just with lung cancer but with death from cardiopulmonary disease. “We have a researcher in Washington State trying to get a handle on the cardiopulmonary link,” she said.

As a result of these new understandings, the EPA included a maximum level of such particulates in its National Ambient Air Quality (NAAQ) standard for clean air. “Finally,” said Peffers, “we had a NAAQ we could enforce.”

Now Peffers spends much of her time traveling, explaining and advocating on behalf of efforts to curb these tricky particles. She has worked closely with HKNA’s current clean-air efforts, like their campaign to get the MTA to mandate that all vehicles entering New York City be converted to diesel fuel.

“A bad diesel truck is like 400 clean cars,” said Peffers. “It’s full of so many core particles—organics, soluble. To breathe that in is like breathing in toxic soup.” In Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, she added, residents also have to worry about all the building construction going on. “Construction sites are usually running diesels,” said Peffers, often the old, polluting kind.

Why not get your own monitor?

In 1990, just as Peffers’ Harvard colleagues were starting their study, a retired engineer on West 155th Street was getting sick of hearing about asthma.

“I was already on Community Board 12,” said Culpepper, who lives just downhill from the George Washington Bridge (the traffic equivalent to living at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel). “I got myself appointed to the Borough President’s solid waste management board, and started learning.”

When the EPA started a pilot program to monitor traffic, he said, the agency asked his board “to find places where traffic was heavy.” They put a monitor at 181st Street, just south of the bridge, and told Culpepper, “John, your neighborhood is polluted!”

As the years went on, and Culpepper learned more, he said, he asked them to put up another on 155th Street. In 2003, after hearing that question dozens of times, someone asked Culpepper, “John, why don’t you get your own monitor?”

So the Lower Washington Heights Neighborhood Association (LWHNA) found a portable unit, the E-Sampler, made by MetOne, and applied for grants to pay for it. “Those guys at the EPA tried to discourage me,” said Culpepper. “You see how well that worked.” After persistent lobbying, Culpepper received support from Representative Charles Rangel and other elected officials. And the Citizens Committee for New York, a Chelsea-based nonprofit that, for years, has also given funding to HKNA, gave LWHNA $8,000, nearly half the monitor’s cost.

“What he’s doing is so important,” said Peter Kostmayer, the committee’s director. Pointing to a September report that the American Lung Association was starting to study the effects of PM on teens, he added, “Maybe we need a few more of him.”

Since 2004, Culpepper has brought the E-Sampler to Red Hook, Brooklyn, southeast Queens, various spots downtown, and all around Uptown Manhattan, including 219th Street in Inwood, at the northernmost edge of Manhattan. Most of the time, the results make the EPA standard of 15 PM’s per cubic meter seem laughable.

At 219th Street, Culpepper said, “You have it all: Time Warner cable transmitter, the bus turnaround, all those car repair shops spitting out fumes.” As a result, the first reading was 252 PM’s per cubic meter, nearly 20 times the EPA standard of 15.

“The second time we tried, it was 239—not much better,” said Culpepper.

Given the amount of monitoring already being conducted by the EPA and DEC, official opinions vary about the actual value of Culpepper’s E-Sampler. One EPA official told City Limits Magazine in 2005 that the EPA “already knew” the air in trafficked zones was unhealthy, though he granted super-local data could turn out to be handy.

But to Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives, the Chelsea-based cyclists’ environmental group, work like Culpepper’s is invaluable.

“Our neighbors are really waking up to the hazards of through traffic on their streets,” said Norvell. “Things like that air-quality monitor are great, because we’re still in the phase of quantifying things, which we need to do as we develop better public policies. Policies that will make it more possible to bike, to recreate and to live.”