Detroit’s industrial past and present mean people around the city don’t have clean air to breathe. This story is part of Exhausted in Detroit, a series copublished with Outlier Media examining our air quality problem and what can be done. See the full series here.
Dominique and Aidan Johnson are mother and son who dote on their English bulldogs and love stopping for a fruity pop with boba from the Biggby Coffee drive-thru on the way to school.
And both live with asthma.
Dominique has been getting worse after several bouts with COVID and a collapsed lung. Aidan is an eighth grader with less severe but still life-altering symptoms like asthma attacks.
The Johnsons think air pollution is the problem. Air pollution can be both indoors and outdoors.
Dominique said her asthma is triggered mostly when she’s outdoors, but Aidan tends to get triggered indoors.
That’s one reason the Johnsons met up at Detroit’s Kemeny Recreation Center in June for a workshop on DIY air filters and air monitoring with Dr. Teresa Holtrop and scientist Jeff Gearhardt of the nonprofit Ecology Center. (Editor’s note: Ecology Center is a partner in this series.)
The filters are inexpensive — they’re made of a box fan, furnace filter and duct tape – and can capture harmful indoor dust and particulate matter, which can help keep asthma symptoms in check.
At the workshop, Aiden and five other kids were also outfitted with a shiny new backpack and a portable air quality sensor roughly the shape of a TV remote. The kids can strap these to their backpacks, and the monitor connects to a smartphone app. Aidan and Dominique can see on the app what he’s breathing in real-time. The monitors track particulate matter (PM 10 and PM 2.5), nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds.
As Aidan walked into school in June, rocking a vintage Nike windbreaker and the bright blue backpack he’d chosen to carry his air monitor, Dominique said she hoped the data sparked interest in the public and her son.
“As a learner, he’s hands-on,” she said. “I want him to be involved with things that grasp his attention.”
A new routine
Dominique and Aidan filled out an online survey for the project about Aidan’s work with the air quality monitor every day for two weeks.
Aidan’s hypothesis was challenged by data from the first days of the experiment.
“It’s kind of surprising,” he said. “I expected it to stay low.”
Instead, the graph from the previous day showed a spike in pollutants in the evening, when he was at home, and immediately after he left school in the afternoon. He breathed healthier air in the wee hours, as the family slept, and while he was at school.
Aidan attended Mark Twain School for Scholars in southwest Detroit until recently. The school is across I-75 from several of Michigan’s worst air polluters: the Marathon refinery, the Levy steel slag processing facility and the Cleveland-Cliffs Steel Corp.
Dominique was not surprised that the numbers climbed when her son walked out of school.
In 2020, Marathon entered into a consent agreement with the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy to pay an $81,853 fine and to invest $282,000 in an air filtration and purification system at Mark Twain. According to EGLE spokesperson Hugh McDiarmid, Marathon agreed to pay the final $500,000 system cost.
Holtrop said the DIY air filter project gives the community tools to help cope with a failed system. They can get civically engaged to fight polluters and do things in their homes to minimize their exposure.
Holtrop said the survey is also important for identifying additional things families can do to improve indoor air quality.
The Johnsons and other participants answered questions about their households that can help identify sources of indoor air pollution and asthma triggers — from smoking to incense to gas stoves.
Each participating family receives a score of up to 140 according to a scale developed by CLEARCorps, a health housing advocacy group.
The Johnsons’ house scored 52, the highest among the participants — they got dinged for having furry pets and some potential mold issues at home. But the filter helped, according to preliminary results of Holtrop’s study and Dominique’s feedback.
Dominique said she noticed Aidan breathed better at night when his filter was running in his room while he slept.
“He doesn’t have asthma attacks while the fan filter is running,” she said. She also has noticed fewer nosebleeds, which have plagued him alongside his breathing problems.
Preliminary data shows lower concentrations of pollutants when the DIY air filters are turned on. Data provided by Dr. Teresa Holtrop.
The Johnsons continue to use the air filter whenever Aidan is home. Dominique knows she’ll need to replace the filter soon and plans to head to Home Depot to pick up a new one. Both learned a lot by participating in the monitoring, she said.
“I think he was intrigued with how much things had changed as far as his asthma,” she said. “He liked just being able to look at that data and interacting with the scientists.”
This series is funded through a civic science and journalism collaboration grant through the Rita Allen Foundation with support from the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Journalism organizations Planet Detroit and Outlier Media and civic science organization Ecology Center partnered to produce the stories for this project. Planet Detroit and Outlier Media made all editorial decisions independently of Ecology Center, which provided technical expertise and guidance.