Indoor Air Quality
The Brightline Podcast: Season 2, Episode 10
In our last episode of season two, we’ll be hearing from SRO resident Agnes and UCSF’s Dr. Neeta Thakur on indoor air quality in San Francisco units. Specifically, we’ll dive into the Follow the Smoke Study led by UCSF, Brightline, and UC Berkeley, which explores the health effects of wildfire smoke on SRO tenants.
Transcript:
Agnes: I'm not giving up. I'm San Francisco. You're not chasing me out. I'm the OG now. I'm going to make this better. I'm staying, you know, and with bright light on my side and you we will make a solution.
Aubrey: This is The Brightline Podcast from Brightline Defense. We explore environmental justice issues, or EJ issues, in the Bay Area and California, highlighting the work of community-based organizations, including our own. My name’s Aubrey, and for the final episode of this season, we're taking another look at the issue that we focused on in the very first episode of this podcast: Air Quality. And this time, we'll follow one research team's journey to some surprising discoveries..
Neeta: I would go all the way back to when we started having wildfires in California on a yearly basis.
Aubrey: This is Neeta Thakur.
Neeta: I'm an associate professor at UCSF. I'm also a practicing pulmonologist at our county hospital, San Francisco General.
Aubrey: A few years ago, Neeta noticed that a new kind of season had been added to San Francisco's calendar: wildfire season.
Neeta: It was just like, Oh, we know that every July to November, we're going to have wildfires and therefore us living in San Francisco in the Bay Area have to worry about the smoke.
Aubrey: She wasn't just worried about herself. As a pulmonologist, she saw the impacts that the smoke was having on her patients.
Neeta: Patients were doing okay at the very beginning of those phases, but when we would check back in with us, they're like, you know, that event that happened a few weeks ago was really tough for me and I'm now having more symptoms.
Aubrey: Neeta knew how to treat these issues, but she was less sure about how to prevent them.
Neeta: The number one, two and three public health guidance is stay indoors and close your windows. And that's great, great advice, for a lot of people, but as a physician at San Francisco General and caring for patients that don't always have the best housing quality, that recommendation kind of falls flat.
Aubrey: Some of Neeta's patients live in SROs, or Single Room Occupancy Hotels. You may remember hearing about SRO's in past episodes of this podcast.
They have a long history of housing immigrants and low-income folks in San Francisco. Most SRO hotels are made up of small, single room units with communal kitchens.
Neeta: But since many of the buildings that have been converted into SROs were built around the 1900s, many of them are leaky, don't have good ventilation systems. And so we, we just didn't understand how that space in particular was impacted during wildfire events.
Aubrey: And it wasn't just wildfire events that Neeta was worried about. A lot of SROs are located on congested streets. She suspected that the people living in them might be more exposed to fine particulate matter, also known as PM 2.5.
Neeta: This particulate matter is smaller than the width of a strand of human hair. And because it's so small, when you breathe it in, it not only goes into the airways, it can actually go deep into the lungs and cross over into the blood and go to other parts of the body.
Aubrey: Exposure to fine particulate matter is associated with a whole host of negative effects, from impacts on heart health to neurological problems like strokes and even dementia.
Neeta: And we know the SRO community has a higher burden of chronic health conditions.
Aubrey: Neeta started asking her colleagues at UC Berkeley to see what they knew about the impact of wildfire smoke on people living in places like SROs.
Neeta:Do we, do we have a good idea in housing that may not be as well insulated? Do we know how much of that bad air is getting inside? And so together, we started to look into different research studies to try to understand this problem and recognize that the type of housing that my patients live in wasn't really represented in the literature, and we needed to try to fill that gap.
Aubrey: But they couldn't fill that gap alone.
Neeta: I started to work with the San Francisco, Department of Public Health and the San Francisco Office for Resilience and Capital Planning. And it was through those interactions that I had the opportunity to connect with Brightline Defense, and we realized that we had a lot of common interests
Aubrey: So, Neeta and Brightline hatched a plan. What if they were able to gather the missing data themselves?
Neeta: And then we started talking more and more about if we were to go forward and do an indoor air monitoring study, putting in air sensors in people's homes, measuring the air quality on a continuous basis, and then making some conclusions based on what we saw, what were the really critical things that we should get out of it.
Aubrey: Brightline and Neeta sat down and came up with some goals.
Neeta: The first one, it seems obvious that the air quality inside SROs, compared to other residential housing types was going to be bad. But we realized that that actually was never measured, and just measuring it and demonstrating that that is in fact true is really, really useful.
Aubrey: But their goal wasn’t just to get the hard numbers.
Neeta: We also wanted to be like, okay, if we find things, then we should also get input from the community about what they're currently doing during wildfire smoke events, what it's hard for them to do during those events, and what would they like to see happen.
Aubrey: So, Neeta, Brightline and UCSF drew up plans to launch what they called the Follow the Smoke Study. First, they wanted to estimate the penetration of pollution and wildfire smoke from the outdoors into SROs. And they were also curious about the effects of an existing intervention that they thought might already be improving air quality.
Neeta: One of the retrofits for cooling that's been commonly used is called a variable refrigerant flow system or VRF system.
Aubrey: VRF systems basically send a coolant throughout a building to bring down the temperature in individual rooms. So the team found one SRO building that had VRF, and one that didn’t so they could see if it affected air quality. They also wanted to document what kind of health concerns residents had, and what steps they were taking to address them.
Neeta: First step was making partnerships with not just Brightline, but with the different SRO hotels that we would be going in and recruiting from, which was great because we ended up being able to meet and partner with all of the tenant leaders that Brightline had a good relationship already. And with those tenant leaders, we co-presented about the research study to the SRO residents and then there was a lot of interest.
Aubrey: Including from one especially enthusiastic South of Market SRO resident named Agnes.
Agnes: I've been living in San Francisco over 20 years. I'm just delightful that I'm here to be part of this study to make a, you know, to make a difference.
Aubrey: When Agnes first moved into her current SRO building, she struggled with the lack of airflow in her room.
Agnes: I personally am asthmatic. I was born with asthma and I have severe, um, apnea. I was in 304, which was, there was no proper ventilation. And I had to get a doctor's notice to say that she really needs it.
Aubrey: Agnes was moved into a new room. And it did have better air flow from the windows that helped keep it cooler and a little less stuffy. And a few years later, a wildfire sent a blanket of smoke over the city.
Agnes: I was in San Francisco when we had the fires From Santa Rosa. Everything was orange. It was awful. It was awful. I quickly went to go buy an air purifier and a humidifier.
Aubrey: Buying an air purifier isn't the only step Agnes has taken to manage the air quality in her SRO unit.
Agnes: The rooms are so small that I don't cook. I refuse to cook and add more to my little room. I don't cook anything in there. I don't even have a microwave.
Aubrey: So when the Follow the Smoke team showed up at Agnes' SRO, she couldn't wait to sign up.
Agnes: I jumped on it. Sure. I'm down. Didn't even have to think twice. Anything to help the building? You know, I'm down. And I can't breathe, so I want to be part of that study. I want to see the statistics. I want to see how bad my breathing is.
Aubret: So now with a cohort of SRO participants like Agnes, Brightline and Neeta got to work on setting up the air monitors in each unit.
Neeta: We ended up randomly sending these text messages one to two times a week. And they were sort of these in the moment saying, “Hey, are you at home right now?” And if they were at home, then we would ask them a bunch of questions about what they're doing and if they felt like the air quality in their unit at that time was bad or not. You know, you can measure air quality in a space over time really, really well, but we know that human behavior will impact that.
Aubrey: And to really be able to understand that impact, the Follow the Smoke team brought on another expert: William Woody Delp. But everyone just calls him Woody.
Woody: I have a Ph. D. in mechanical engineering. Have been working here at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for over 28 years now. Mostly with indoor air quality stuff. So I've been in lots of buildings and lots of places, measured lots of stuff.
Aubrey: And Woody's expertise with air quality goes back even further than his nearly 3 decade long career.
Woody: I grew up in a family HVAC business, so I've crawled around ductwork pretty much my entire life. And at the time, whenever I was going back into graduate school, ventilation was becoming more of an issue and there was the concern of indoor air quality was just starting to become on, on people's consciousness and their horizons.
Aubrey: And as the science around ventilation grew in the 70's and 80’s, Woody and other experts started to realize just how important indoor air quality is.
Woody: We spend about 90 percent of our time indoors. And you see that quoted over and over that, you know, we, we live indoors, we live in some sort of a structure. And so we need to pay attention to the air that's indoors. And a little bit more of a nuanced answer is if we don't pay any attention, we can pretty easily make the air indoors much worse than it is outdoors.
Aubrey: And it turns out, Agnes was really onto something with her no cooking rule.
Woody: If you cook and you don't use a range hood or don't ventilate, it's relatively easy to get air quality that could be equated to bad, you know, wildfire smoke type of days inside your home. And that's without even burning the food.
Aubrey: And then there are the actual wildfires smoke days.
Woody: A cooking event may just last for, you know, four or five minutes. It elevates the particles in the house for an hour or two and then everything goes back to normal. Whereas the wildfires may set in for days at a time.
Aubrey: So, we know that cooking and wildfires definitely have an impact on levels of indoor particulate matter. But historically, it's been really expensive to actually measure it. Woody says that the equipment used for regulatory monitoring can cost tens of thousands of dollars. And even the non-regulatory equipment that researchers have been using are several thousand each. That's way out of reach for everyday people or even small scale studies. So, the Follow the Smoke team looked to an innovative piece of technology that wouldn't break the bank.
Woody: So what we used recently in this particular one SRO project was a commercial device called Purple Air.
Aubrey: Each Purple Air monitor is about the size of an orange. They're easy to set up, wifi connected, and way cheaper than the alternatives.
Neeta and the team worked with each SRO participant to set up the Purple Air Monitors in their room, and showed them how to make sure it was online and working. So, with all the equipment in place, they waited for wildfire season to begin. They waited, and waited. And surprisingly, the Bay Area was actually spared from really significant or prolonged wildfire impacts that year.
Woody: So we were kind of like, huh, we don't really have any wildfires to work with, but let's see what the data's like anyway.
And that's whenever we went in, we brought the data off of the sensors that were in the SRO units and I started looking at the data and I was like, “Whoa, wait a minute here.” At first, I mean, honestly, I thought the sensors were broken. That we had some problems with the sensors because the data was so bad and so high, the air quality data inside these units.
Aubrey: Woody ran the numbers again just to make sure that what he was seeing was right.
Woody: Most of the time, the air was like a factor of 10 or so worse inside than it was outside. It could be compared to a bad air quality in Delhi or Beijing or bad wildfire day near the wildfire source. So we were seeing numbers that were comparable to some of the most polluted cities in the world inside these units.
Aubrey: The Follow the Smoke team had expected air quality in SROs to be bad. But not quite this bad. After applying some models to the data, Woody suspects that indoor vaping and smoking might be one cause. But that wasn't the only thing the team found.
Neeta: 85 percent of the outside air was coming inside. This is way, way, way higher than what I've ever seen for other studies. And it probably suggests that the community has to open their windows more than other housing types. But it also probably suggests that the buildings are more leaky.
Aubrey: And there was another surprise in the data. Remember the VRF cooling systems that Neeta mentioned earlier?
Neeta: The SROs that had VRF systems, you know, I went into it and so did our partners thinking that they also provided ventilation for the residents. And so I was really, really surprised to see that the air quality didn't differ at all between the buildings. And in fact, it was exactly the same. And in fact, some of the rooms that had the worst air quality were actually in the building that had the cooling system installed.
Aubrey: So with all this new data on air quality in SROs, the Follow the Smoke team had a new set of questions on their hands. What kind of strategies could help reduce the burden of poor air quality on SRO residents? First, short term solution.
Neeta: We did have a few residents that had air purifiers. And we did note that those spaces tended to have better air quality. so we, are hoping to have a next phase of this study with Brightline Defense where we put air purifiers in the rooms of participants and then also provide them with guidance on, like, when to use them, how often to replace the filters, and then see what the air quality looks like after such an intervention.
Aubrey: Next, the medium term.
Neeta: The other thing that we're exploring, not just with Brightline defense, but also with our city partners is thinking about weatherization in rented or public spaces, like maybe sealing the windows, you know, those small things that can happen at the individual room unit level require, you know, permissions from the manager and the building owner. So how, how do we facilitate that process?
Aubrey: And then the long term goal: retrofits of SRO buildings as a whole. But Neeta and the team know that that pathway is more complicated than it may seem.
Neeta: So we know retrofits and getting in that sort of line for city planning takes time. The retrofits also take time. And then also with retrofits, there's the risk of displacement of the populations that are currently living there.
Aubrey: For Neeta, the challenges of this long-term solution is a reminder of the environmental injustice that led to these conditions in the first place.
Neeta: I think this is an important opportunity for us to reflect on the historical nature of the United States, about which communities have been purposely divested from. And that purposeful divestment, whether through redlining, eminent domain, the list can just go on and on, sadly, that has led to communities being purposely placed in areas that are now disproportionately exposed to pollution, hazardous waste, and then also poorer housing.
Aubrey: But even in the face of historic and continued injustice, SRO residents like Agnes are committed to fighting for greater climate resilience and healthier housing.
Agnes: I'm not giving up on San Francisco. You're not chasing me out. I'm the OG now. I'm going to make this better. I'm staying and with Brightline on my side, we will make a solution.
Aubrey: This episode was written and produced by me, Aubrey Calaway. Original music by Maya Glicksman. Thank you to Eddie Ahn, Cecilia Mejia, Cristina Navarro and Sarah Xu for support on research and writing, and to Agnes, Woody Delp, and Neeta Thakur for sharing their stories. This podcast is funded by the Environmental Justice Small Grants from the California EPA.
For more information about Brightline, you can visit our website at BrightlineDefense.org or on social media @brightlinedefense. You can also find a transcript of this episode on our Medium Blog.
Don’t forget to give us a follow and leave a review if you enjoyed the show. And thank you so much for listening to season two of the Brightline Podcast. Take care.