Kerry Kinney (00:18) The sources of air pollution outdoors and indoors are complex, but there are strategies that we can implement now to reduce both the concentrations and the exposures to community members. So the community members can play their role, TxTC Staff (00:39) In this episode, Dr. Kerry Kinney and Dr. Pavel Mitstel from the University of Texas at Austin discuss air quality monitoring and modeling in Southeast Texas. I'm Jamie Masterson. TxTC Staff (00:52) And I'm Cedric Shye, and this is Lessons from the Field Lab. TxTC Staff (00:58) Thank you Dr. Kinney and Dr. Mischdal for coming today. If you want to each tell us a little bit about your background and the research team that you led. Kerry Kinney (01:10) I'm a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm in the civil architectural environmental engineering department and my group looks at outdoor and indoor exposures to air pollutants and also ⁓ microbial contaminants. And so I became interested in the Southeast Texas area. Actually, we had a project about six years ago now. where we were looking at what types of microorganisms people are exposed to in their homes. And as part of that, we were looking at, you know, areas around central Texas, but we also had started collecting samples with a colleague there in Beaumont and Port Arthur. And so we were looking at bacterial and fungi types of contamination and... We became very interested in like all the things that you see around opportunity came to kind of link outdoor air quality with some of the indoor air quality work that I've been doing earlier in the area and certainly across Texas as well. That was an exciting opportunity for our team. TxTC Staff (02:13) Thank you. Dr. Mestal? Pawel Misztal (02:16) Yes, so ⁓ I'm an associate professor at UT Austin in the same department as Kerry and my group develops novel techniques to measure the chemical composition of air. We see more than a thousand of different molecules and we have this incredible ability, it's like an electronic nose where we can actually smell actually see and quantify thousands of different chemicals in the air in real time. So we look at a lot of fundamental research questions both indoors and outdoors. For example, what makes up the odors we smell? And what do they tell us? What are the chemical fingerprints of different sources? And how can we engineer solutions to reduce harmful chemical exposures not only outdoors but also indoors because we understand we know a lot about relatively clean outdoor air but we know less about usually ⁓ more polluted in terms of gas phase indoor environments. TxTC Staff (03:27) That's great. And we're going to dive into the measurements and some of the work that y'all did as a team here in a second. But before we do, could you just both of you talk about maybe what inspired your involvement in air quality research? Pawel Misztal (03:42) Yes, so I have more than 15 years of experience measuring chemical air composition at the different scales. And initially, we looked at relatively clean outdoor air. We looked at the chemical composition above the forests. And yes, biogenics, ⁓ forests, plants, they also emit a lot of volatile organic compounds. which play a role in smog formation and air quality in general. So the exciting thing was when we started looking at indoor air quality, because then we realized, wow, it's actually, these are the environments. This is where the environments we should study because ⁓ the concentrations of gas-based pollutants are so much higher indoors than outdoors and we spend majority of our life indoors. TxTC Staff (04:36) Hmm. Wow. Interesting. We really want to dig into that in a second. Dr. Kinney, what inspired you for, you know, to get into this kind of this field and this work? Kerry Kinney (04:50) Well, I was also very interested in... outdoor air quality. That's, you know, the kind of where a lot of air pollutants and others are regulated. Having come from working on hazardous waste sites and other ⁓ locations, I was very interested in not just studying, but also providing solutions. So my, actually my doctorate work was on ⁓ biological treatment of air, biofilters. So you can take a contaminated air stream and run it through a packed bed that have microorganisms growing on it. And the microorganisms will actually degrade the pollutants out of the gas phase. So was kind of the green air pollution control technique. So a lot of my training was looking at different types of treatment systems and different types of sources of air pollution and primarily outdoors. But I also was ⁓ interested in what types of exposures are folks having in their everyday life. And it is quite compelling that we spend much of our time within the built environment and engineers such as ourselves design those built environments. We. design the ventilation systems that bring outdoor in to ventilate spaces. And there's a wide range of both microbial and chemical sources in the indoor environment. And frankly, in the outdoor environment, it's a continuum. And so I've been interested in a lot of my work has looked at like what type of fungi are found typically in residential homes all across Texas. We've done hundreds and hundreds of homes at this point. And so now we have a kind of a fingerprint of that. And then we also have been looking at the bacterial composition of the dust. We do a lot of dust sampling that are found in. and residential homes in Texas and other places. And from that information, we can start to tease out links between, for instance, is there a protective microbiome that protects against one of the things that we've been looking at is childhood asthma. It's one of the leading chronic diseases for children in the United States and trying to understand what may make, exacerbate asthma in your everyday exposures within your home is a really important area of research. And so we do a lot of microbial source tracking as well because we're trying to figure out, for instance, in one of our latest works, if you have a house that's across from some crop fields, well, the fungi in your house are going to tend to reflect the fungi or the mold that typically grow on those crops. And then trying to understand, wait, what are the protective bacterial mixture, if you will, that seems to protect against asthma. having a child with asthma in the homes. And so those are the types of studies that I'd been doing for quite some time. And I was very interested in the Beaumont-Port Arthur area initially because it's a very hot and humid place. And as we know, humidity tends to contribute to basically mold growth in many situations. And so we were really trying to do a compare and contrast around central Texas, which yes, we have humid days, but it's not as consistent and it's generally lower humidity. And so very TxTC Staff (08:01) Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (08:04) in the microbial footprint, then as part of that, when you're collecting indoor dust samples, you can also look at the chemical footprint and then see associations, for instance, with certain types of compounds and, for instance, childhood asthma. that had been kind of an active area of research for me, but also understanding that while we did a lot of collecting of outdoor samples, I'm sorry, indoor samples for understanding kind of these residential everyday exposures, we were also very interested in how the outdoor air quality might be affecting essentially exposures indoors where we tend to spend most of our time. So that's been kind of the inspired me, if you will. I started in air pollution treatment and then it was a biological system. So it was pretty natural then when I started looking at indoor exposures to look at kind of the microbial footprint, but also of course the chemical exposures as well, both whether they're happening outdoors indoors or frankly some of the outdoors as a pebble. I'm going to quote you pebble so you can the indoors is outdoors plus indoors right because it takes both contributions and that's actually what you're seeing a lot of in at least in this part of the the world where you spend especially in the hot season you spend a lot of time in an air-conditioned house or air-conditioned building. TxTC Staff (09:21) That's really interesting. Yeah, I don't normally think about the indoor air. So it's interesting that, and I think it's great that you guys did a lot of research and study there. So can you tell us a little bit about the air team itself? Like who's on your team? And maybe start talking about some of the methods that you guys used. Kerry Kinney (09:26) You don't, yep. So the team is, we have researchers from UT Austin and Lamar University on the air team. so Elena McDonald-Bueller has been, is one of the leading air quality modelers. She won't let me brag, but I will. I think in the state of Texas and beyond. And so she's done a lot of air quality. TxTC Staff (09:56) you Kerry Kinney (10:01) outdoor air quality evaluations and use this model she calls the CAM-X model to do that. We asked her to join the team and so she's been modeling, you know, she does an incredibly detailed emissions inventory, inventory figuring out what all the emissions are from all the different possible sources in the area. So that includes traffic, that includes wildfires, that includes prescribed burns, certainly industrial sources and other things that you typically think of as sources of air pollution. And then that she models over, I think it's a six to seven months period. And then we can identify, okay, we took, I think it's roughly six or eight pollutants that we're tracking for representing different types of sectors, if you will. And what are the potential sources? So that was the role that Dr. McDonald-Buehler played on the project. The other is the Lamar team was absolutely essential. Obviously Lamar University is in Beaumont and they understand the industrial sources there, but they also understand all the other types of sources. And so they led the canister sampling. So Sydney Lin is a professor at Lamar University and he led We call it canister sampling, but looking at 65 hazardous air pollutants essentially, and he's been collecting samples for, I don't know, at least a year. And I've lost track, but there's probably 400, 500, 600 samples they've run at this point. Both outdoor, a lot of outdoor samples. And then also they've recently been doing outdoor and indoor in collaboration with our team. TxTC Staff (11:36) Hmm, no. Kerry Kinney (11:45) And then finally, Clayton Jeffries is another professor at Lamar University, he's currently the co-lead now of the air team as well. And he's been looking at essentially the role of sediments, like if you have contamination in your soils and other things, how that might be contributing to airborne concentrations as well. And so it's really been a fantastic team to work with because we have Lamar University that's got beautiful facilities and are local to the site that they're working in. And then of course, Pavel can tell you about the amazing work his team has been doing with the sniffer. And so I'll hand it over to Pavel to talk about his work. Pawel Misztal (12:26) Thanks, Kerry. And it has been such a pleasure to work within this diverse community that Kerry described. Because the communities where we basically did very broad research, they trapped between many different stressors. So there's like flooding, there are different extremes. and air quality odors are part of this. So in my group ⁓ the very passionate students who have also been interacting with students from Karikini's group and other groups it's a really big ⁓ big team. My students specifically they focused on the fundamental research questions for example related to odor chemical composition and sometimes we know that there are different compounds because we can smell them. If you go to specifically to Southeast Texas you will immediately know that there are different molecules in the air because you can smell them. the communities can also smell them, so they get agitated. They might be sometimes worried about what does that smell mean? But the smell is not quantitative, so the community cannot tell, okay, this smell is toxic. You may have a situation that you may smell something and this smell is completely fine. and sometimes you may ⁓ not smell because the molecule is odorless and it can be a silent killer like for example carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulfide like basically the high concentrations can kill and it's all about the dose it's the famous paraselsus quote is that not the compound is the poison but the dose so my students have been quite passionate about addressing TxTC Staff (14:00) Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (14:17) research questions such as what is the composition of different odors and they took the lead like for example Evelyn Devraugh she ⁓ is writing a really nice paper on chemical fingerprinting of different odors air plumes and from very diverse sources and I just want to say that It's not always black and white like we sometimes think that it's either polluted or non-polluted. Even in a ⁓ relatively polluted place, you may have areas which are relatively clean and then you may have areas that are less clean and it also changes over time. So ⁓ it's not like it's always the air quality is bad and actually knowing when the air quality is good TxTC Staff (15:02) Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (15:08) and bad is very useful because the community can take appropriate measures to protect themselves. For example, they can use smartly the ventilation, for example, they can slow down penetration of acute blooms, like if you have a fire or marsh fire, then any kind of major combustion process releases a lot of different chemicals, including potentially hazardous pollutants. So if we are able to slow down the penetration indoors, then the exposure is so much lower. But the issue is that a lot of community members, they don't always know when TxTC Staff (15:40) Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (15:49) when to stop the ventilation, when to enhance the ventilation. Because most of the time, actually the air is relatively clean and during those times the communities absolutely should try to make sure that there's enough ventilation to dilute indoor sources. Because like ⁓ Kerry mentioned, quoted, thank you, that at least at the steady state situation, indoors is Kerry Kinney (16:04) Thank So, thank you. Pawel Misztal (16:15) outdoors plus. So we really need to make sure we ventilate and sometimes if communities are very concerned about the air outdoors they might smell something they might reduce this ventilation too much and then like imagine like if you do some cooking indoors or cleaning and so on the exposure to those chemicals becomes could be much worse than than outdoor pollution potentially Kerry Kinney (16:46) And I guess I would like to follow up with, you know, when we mentioned the team, we were talking, you know, air team. We were talking a lot about the samples we collect and the analyses we do, but I do want to mention how important the collaborations with Texas A Texas Target Communities, know, Catherine Liebernick and also Casey Faust. You know, recently we've been running a series of workshops with community members and And we also, of course, have been hearing from the task force members in the Beaumont Port Arthur area. But that input has been absolutely essential to understand. You know, kind of their lived reality in the Beaumont Port Arthur area and their concerns. So when Pavel talks about, well, should you be, you know, maybe you should open your window to, you know, ventilate on days where the air quality is good. But if folks are concerned about odors and they don't ever open up their window, then that's limiting outdoor ventilation that in some cases could be beneficial. Alternatively, when they're talking about you know, how they try to protect themselves in terms of improve their own or reduce their exposure in general to pollutants. You know, some of the things that Pavel's talking about can be effective, but also indoor air quality can be improved by. I'm installing things like the Corsi Rosenthal box or a similar portable air filter that can reduce indoor pollutant levels, but understanding under what conditions and how do you size it and other things is going to be important for the community members. But hearing directly from them about their concerns is as important to anything else that we've done because you understand. TxTC Staff (18:10) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (18:27) How, you where are you getting your air quality data? Are you looking at the AQI? Are you looking at something else is important? Because if you want to, you know, provide feedback and inform community members about the air quality, both indoor and outdoor, first of all, you need to understand, you know. their experience with it and then also where they're getting their information and then where we can maybe provide supplemental information and data from all the studies that we've been doing kind of as the broader air team in Southeast Texas. So I think it's. I think it's been absolutely essential to hear from community leaders, community members on. Their concerns about in this case, air quality, obviously, they also have concerns about the other stressors, which, you know, flooding, you know, internet outages, you know, et cetera. So, I think that's just been essential to the success of the project. TxTC Staff (19:21) Yeah, I mean, this is my first exposure to this kind of research and it was very educational for me. I just always, you know, grew up thinking, you're next to an industry that's probably, you know, you are exposed to a lot consistently all the time. But then I think about like how much I love campfires and I never would have thought that that probably is not. healthy thing for me. I guess your comment about the it's not the chemical but the dose, what were some of the higher doses that you were able to measure during your time in Southeast Texas, whether that was indoor or outdoor? Pawel Misztal (20:06) So, important distinction is between the acute exposure and the chronic exposure. So we get exposed to different chemicals all the time. So the important question is not only what the chemical composition of odors is, but also... TxTC Staff (20:13) Okay. Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (20:24) what molecules are we actually inhaling? And actually, like, if you think about some outdoor sources, the volume of the outdoor atmosphere is enormous, and it's basically those sources, the fraction that we are inhaling of those sources is very small compared to fraction of indoor sources. And if you, for example, if like TxTC Staff (20:27) Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (20:47) If people are smoking cigarettes, you get basically almost 100 % of those emissions are inhaled. the acute source is like if you imagine a house on fire. like we also studied not only Southeast Texas, but also other environments. We went to LA after LA 20, 25 fires. And basically if you imagine the house on fire, this black smoke, it's basically Kerry Kinney (21:04) Thank you. Pawel Misztal (21:16) inhaling directly this smoke it's it's just incredibly high acute exposure and but in everyday life we also get these smaller exposures and it's basically Kerry Kinney (21:23) Good. you. Pawel Misztal (21:30) it's low doses high stakes sometimes because if you continually get exposed to something then over time it might accumulate. And the bottom line I think we should be humble we actually don't fully understand the exposure that happens the chronic exposure at those low doses because since only recently we started being able to measure those compounds at sufficiently low concentrations Kerry Kinney (21:56) So thank you. Pawel Misztal (21:59) And when we measure it like the most abundant compounds, sometimes the most abundant is not the most toxic or might not even be the most odorous. Sometimes you can smell something and it's not the most abundant compound. It's something that is simply out there and the nose is telling. So usually we smell very well combustion sources. If something is burning, our sense of smell kind of developed to to smell those sources. Microbial, those sources that Kerry mentioned earlier, we some, how can smell, it kind of protects us from eating spoiled food or but there are a lot of anthropogenic sources which sometimes we don't smell and yeah. Kerry Kinney (22:37) Thank you. TxTC Staff (22:44) And anthropogenic is human, Maine. Yeah. Pawel Misztal (22:46) human-made like it can be for example solvents can be chemical ⁓ volatile products and and basically all different paints or some of those chemical products may contain toxic compositions Kerry Kinney (23:04) And it's also some of the work that we're we've been doing with the real time monitors indoor air quality monitors, which monitor the fine particulate matter, which is particles less than two and a half microns in size. These are the particles that when you inhale them, they can go into your deep lung. So the smaller fraction of the particles and. It's not only, of course, the size determines where it of deposits in your respiratory system, but it's what's the composition of those particles at the, you know, what's on those particles essentially, right? What they're made of. But one of the things that you see is that, you know, to this point, outdoor to indoor, and I'll let Pavel comment here in a moment, we actually happened to capture, I think it was a marsh fire that had happened, and you could watch the penetration of the ⁓ smoke plume, if you will, into the house and all the associated chemicals as well. But in your everyday life, when you cook in your kitchen, most of us don't turn on the vent hood because it's loud. That is actually there to vent the pollutants and you generate a lot of fine particles, these small particles, a lot of different types of chemicals are being emitted. you, you know, And so it's really actually quite important if you're, you if you'd love to cook, I love to cook and eat. Your exposure, you have a daily exposure that happens. And we've been doing, kitchens to other parts of houses. And you do see, you know, the short kind of acute. TxTC Staff (24:25) Likewise. Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (24:39) you know, high peaks and fine particle concentrations when you're cooking. So in that case, you know, to Pavel's previous point, it's really important to turn on that vent and, you know, even maybe crack the, you know, if you have any kind of window in the kitchen area to get a better draw. And just like your campfire analogy, you know, we have little mini campfires that we use to cook and we all love a good fajita, a good seared, you know, TxTC Staff (25:05) Yeah, I guess your steak, mashed potatoes. Kerry Kinney (25:06) steak or anything else. My vegetarian daughter is going to get me for that one. ⁓ we all like that. I that gives it the great taste, but you're also generating a whole slew of different types of compounds. in fact, we have a full scale test house. TxTC Staff (25:12) you Kerry Kinney (25:25) at the UT Austin campus and we use that there's a lot of cooking that goes on in that house because we're looking at different conditions and different things that can be emitted. So I guess my my thought here is is that air quality is important outdoors and indoors and the things that we can control indoors for instance running that you know vent hood above your stove you know using lower VOC, call it volt organic compounds, less smell if you will, ⁓ in your cleaning agents and other things. Making sure you keep the dust loads down, putting in a portable air filter if you have ⁓ someone who's sensitive to, could be both allergens as well, as well as particles and other chemicals that you can remove on these filters. So, TxTC Staff (25:56) Mm-hmm. Mm. Kerry Kinney (26:14) You know, you got to think about what you can do outdoors and then I'm sorry, indoors in your own kind of environments that you occupy. But then also, of course, it's very important that we understand what the outdoor air quality is and the things that you do smell or don't smell, which Pavel's team has been really amazing at picking out. And then also, you know, the work, the broader work that's done, understanding the community perspective. And then also just the looking at all the full emission inventory for all the different sources. TxTC Staff (26:19) Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (26:44) in the area to try to understand, is this coming from, is this a broad source that includes traffic and other things? Is it the wildfires that are contributing? Is it a particular type of industry that we need to understand? Okay, that's contributing this particular pollutant and we need to look at that. It's kind of this holistic view because we breathe every day all the time, hopefully. And as a result, wherever we are, we are being exposed via the airborne route. TxTC Staff (27:11) Mm. That's great. seems like y'all are, rather than painting a broad stroke of this is where the air is coming from, you're trying to really figure out, okay, this source just might be coming from this. This source could be coming from this. think that sounds like a lot of detailed work. And I know a big part of y'all's team was finding the right spots to monitor. I know you worked with community members for that. So can you just take us a little bit how you guys work with community members and finding the right locations and stuff? Pawel Misztal (27:45) Yeah, basically we also, like ⁓ Kerry mentioned, we looked at outdoor air. So we, like in my team, we developed this absolutely new technique where we can actually do mobile measurements and we can see how our composition, how heterogeneous it is. and really do even like hyper local measurements around communities. And we have now the fully electric mobile lab. think we were one of the first teams who actually did the spatial air quality mapping. it's kind of more teams have it. Recently we hosted an inter IFL where we hosted three different mobile labs, also from Johns Hopkins, from Texas ANM and UT Austin and we are basically together measuring and characterizing outdoor air composition. But the important thing is that we spend majority of time indoors and like Kerry mentioned the exposure occurs indoors actually and maybe we should have mentioned what exposure actually is because general community often wonders what is actually exposure. So exposure is the concentration, if you measure concentration over time is this area under the curve. And so basically you need concentration and you need time. If you have high concentration, the longer you are in that ⁓ high concentration environment, then the higher the exposure is. So TxTC Staff (29:00) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (29:23) by conducting those measurements with communities indoors and outdoors and we actually developed a new technique when we were able to switch between outdoor and indoor air rapidly because the instrument is real time so if you switch regularly you can get near simultaneous signals from both indoor and outdoor air and this is what blew us away initially because we actually learned that even in TxTC Staff (29:37) Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (29:50) the environments which are thought to be generally more polluted, there is still so much more chemicals indoors than outdoors. And so basically we measured indoor and outdoor simultaneously and also Kerry's group, ⁓ low-cost sensor network was extremely useful because then we can also look at PM and particles and gases, these are kind of two different animals because like Kerry mentioned, like the smaller the particle is, the deeper in the lungs it will go, but also some particles can be stopped by the envelope, the gases will penetrate more easily and also will penetrate deeper to the lungs. We simply know less about gases because of technological challenges. There have not been real-time measurements for a long time ⁓ and I think we learned a lot about health effects of particles thanks to studies like Six Cities Harvard studies that showed without the TxTC Staff (30:28) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (30:53) out the correlation between exposure to those particles and health ⁓ effects. But now I feel like we have this kind of revolution about the gas phase chemicals and emerging gas phase air toxins. because they can be inhaled deeply and some of them can penetrate to the brain. know like the smell of roses, for example, makes us feel good and those terpene alcohols actually improve ⁓ the mood. We don't know the effect of a lot of other indoor pollutants on our brain. There have been some papers that showed that students perform less good on tests in ⁓ TxTC Staff (31:19) Mm-hmm. Mm. Pawel Misztal (31:35) when the air quality is bad compared to when it is good. So we know that there is some effect of those gases, ⁓ and in ideal case we need to measure both particles and gases. TxTC Staff (31:44) Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (31:51) I guess I would just like to follow up with that is that certainly outdoor air quality is important because it's contributing to the indoor mix of pollutants that you're exposed to. But one of the things to think about too is that, and this is just kind of following off of what you said, Pavel, is that there is a psychological effect too. If you are very concerned about you you've got someone with asthma in your family or you have a pre-existing condition or... anything else and you're concerned about your health, obviously trying to understand and have strategies to minimize your exposures to pollutants in general, whether, you know, and we're talking about chemical pollutants, but also, you know, after this area has repeated flooding events. And I believe they use the term demucking when you need to go in and tear everything out that's been water damaged within about a day or you have excessive mold growth. TxTC Staff (32:43) Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (32:51) And so you have that problem on top of, of course, the water damage. And so when you kind of have these, you know, compounding stressors in an area, I think it is a challenge for folks to not, you know, be worried about sort of what's next. What am I being exposed to? And the more that you can provide information and data, TxTC Staff (32:55) Mm. Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (33:13) Both in terms of the flooding risks. I know they've been doing the flood mapping, a very detailed flood mapping to try to understand how can they mitigate these? The next flood will come. This is Texas, right? So how can they mitigate those? How can we look at events where there's a a large unexpected release, say from a single source, know, an industrial source, or, you know, is it the day to day being near a, you know, a highway, for instance, in terms of the vehicles going by? What are the different contributors to our overall exposure? And it's a challenge to talk about those because then you don't want more to worry about, right? But if we can talk about them in a way that TxTC Staff (33:56) Yeah. Kerry Kinney (34:00) You know, here are some strategies to reduce your exposures in this or that scenario. I think that's incredibly valuable and empowering for for people. Just telling me, you know, and I've done some work where, know, we've done a lot around, ⁓ you know, the Austin region and elsewhere. Just telling somebody you're being exposed to something without saying, OK, here's some ways that you can mitigate that exposure, reduce it. TxTC Staff (34:11) Yeah. Kerry Kinney (34:26) What can you do to improve your own health and then also, you know, protect yourself, your family. That's what people are trying to do. So I think you need to balance that every day in our lives, all of us are being exposed to chemicals, microorganisms. is, you know, ⁓ campfires. Now, maybe not every day, but I do like a good campfire too. And you go home and then four days later, you're close to smell of the smoke and you realize that was kind of a potent exposure. TxTC Staff (34:43) Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Kerry Kinney (34:55) You know, do I still do it? Yes, I still love a good campfire on occasion. Do I do it all the time? No. So it's really just balancing it, but then also for communities that are under stress, are, you know, they've had hurricanes, flooding, extreme heat. TxTC Staff (35:02) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (35:15) You know, there's a lot of sources of air pollution in the area. There's some that you think of and then the wildfires and other things that you don't necessarily think of or you know, the burns and other things that happen in that region. And so with all of that, we need to develop solutions. We need to work toward. TxTC Staff (35:24) Yeah. Kerry Kinney (35:34) providing a path forward for the community that helps with that stress, I would say. And personally, if I have my own multiple, you know, stressors, you know, it can cause, you know, psychological stress and we need to look at both the physical health and the mental health of community members because, you know, waiting for the next TxTC Staff (35:38) Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (35:55) Okay, when's the next hurricane going to come or what's my strategy for the evacuation? All of those, if they have a plan ahead of time and they have a way to, okay, if this happens, I have a way to protect myself, my family, my community, that is power and that's empowering. And I think that's what we should be aiming for. TxTC Staff (35:58) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So to that point in terms of preparedness, you've talked about ventilation, the key to ventilation. State of the art ventilation is obviously ideal. What would you say to someone who maybe can't get state of the art ventilation? Are there strategies and products that they can use? Pawel Misztal (36:13) Yeah. absolutely sucks. Kerry Kinney (36:32) So what, ⁓ so I was just gonna say one of the things is that there are low cost solutions that can be put in now. You don't need to redo your whole HVAC system, right? But you could invest in a better filter, maybe one with activated carbon in it that also removes more gas phase compounds. And then, well, I think you can't see it back here, but this is Pavel's CR box right there. ⁓ And you can build your own. TxTC Staff (36:41) Okay. Thank Kerry Kinney (37:01) from off the shelf materials to give you a very high ⁓ rate of indoor filtration. So I'll let Pavel answer the question as well. Pawel Misztal (37:11) Thanks, Kerry. And just to build on what you said, so there are different solutions. There are so many things the community could do. And we learned a lot by taking different measurements. And we can share some of that knowledge to inform communities. So the CR boxes, the filters, they are... one solution type. But another thing is just to understand when air quality is the best. So during the day the atmosphere is very well mixed. So usually the air quality, I'm saying usually because sometimes you may have a fire during the day, but usually air quality is better during the day. It's well mixed, it's turbulent and you know there's ⁓ the dilution is solution to pollution. So the wind is diluting everything and during the night this ⁓ volume of the atmosphere that is very large but it collapses, basically be like one kilometer or higher this mixing height but then can shrink to some like even like 100 meters and and these these pollutants will accumulate so suddenly communities will say ⁓ there is an odor mostly at night and there is a reason for that because like during the day maybe this molecule is still there but it's below our TxTC Staff (38:21) I had no idea. Pawel Misztal (38:39) threshold, odor threshold, so we simply cannot smell it. At night we smell those odors, they accumulate. So here's the thing, if you for example do dinner and you do cooking and it's still kind of, it's not too late, let's say it's like 5 pm, it's still kind of the atmosphere is large. If you ventilate afterwards. If you like, even if you open the windows, open the doors, you flush out this cooking smoke, then overnight when you are sleeping in the bedroom, your area under the curve, this exposure is just so much lower than if you say, ⁓ okay, I will just go to bed after cooking. So then you would be exposed to so many times more. And TxTC Staff (39:28) Interesting. Pawel Misztal (39:29) So using this knowledge plus passive solutions such as filter and CR boxes, I think it's one of the best strategies. And this sense of smell can also tell you a little bit because if you know, something is the air quality might not be very good right now, then you can maybe reduce. And when it's kind of nice, fresh air, you can ventilate. TxTC Staff (39:55) What, that's really, really helpful. But I'm also wondering what are the things that ⁓ local government officials can do, whether that's to alert folks of what's happening or are there other strategies that they can play a role in? Kerry Kinney (40:07) So. I think to that point, the air quality index is used for what we call a very subset of the regulated pollutants, the outdoor regulated pollutants. And so that gives you an idea of like the PM 2.5, the fine particle concentrations are high or ozone or NOx. It does not address those. So the AQI that, you know, TxTC Staff (40:30) Mm-hmm. Kerry Kinney (40:34) You get you can get the weather channel has it, you know they have it for the different areas because the state agencies and also the local agencies as well have, ⁓ you know, quite a few. continuous air monitoring systems that most of them do focus on these criteria pollutants they call it. And that's what this air quality index, this daily air quality index is. And so folks can look at that and say, it looks like it's going to be a good air quality thing. And that does certainly does tell you about those pollutants. What it doesn't tell you is if there is an accidental release or something else. And so I think particularly in this area, which is, you know, Got quite a few, you know, it's pretty ⁓ intense level of petrochemicals, refining and other types of manufacturing that are, you we all use these products. Right? So, but I think it's absolutely essential that the emergency alert systems. Are working really well, and that they reach everybody right? And so that's not my area of. ⁓ you know, research, but I do know that folks look at how you get the message out. If there's an emergency, I think that's something that the local governments and working with the state agency and everybody in between, it's going to be very important that if there is any, you know, releases or, you know, even the, you know, you know, a fire breaks out or whatever that they. are informed as quickly as possible so that they can take the appropriate measures, whether it's, you you need to evacuate, you need to shelter in place, whatever it is, I think having a really active and emergency notification system for, you know, all the different things that can happen, obviously hurricanes, floods, et cetera, right, ⁓ is gonna be really important. TxTC Staff (42:22) Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Kerry Kinney (42:25) for this community, for any community, honestly, but for this community that has multiple layers of different types of risks, I think that it's really important. And also it's, if I was in that community, I'd want to know that if there's an issue, I'm informed very quickly. Pawel Misztal (42:42) Yes, and just to add to that, it's also quite important that we work with modelers who can use catastrophic release model basically in an emergency situation. Let's say the tank blows up or so on. can understand thanks to those models. For example, ⁓ Professor ⁓ Sydney Lin is developing is basically you can tell how much time you have to evacuate or to take action, to take cover. And I think this modeling work is very important. And as Kerry mentioned, ⁓ a lot of air quality components ⁓ outdoors are regulated. And there are still, we don't have certain sensors that the communities could use. to... because AQI will not tell us everything. In the future, hopefully, there will be more of those. But another thing I would like to basically foresee the future, like currently indoor air is not regulated, residential indoor air basically, but it doesn't mean that the exposure to indoor air does not affect human health. Because actually... TxTC Staff (43:58) Mm-hmm. Pawel Misztal (43:59) it's probably what is most important that we should care about. And one way to potentially regulate it in the future is source control. Like basically knowing which, for example, chemical products, what compositions of those chemical products should have, just to allow compounds which are healthy. If we have appropriate source control, we would not need to worry about diluting that source, because this source would simply not be there. And another thing is basically also educating the communities about what they could do to reduce that exposure. TxTC Staff (44:44) Yeah, mean, guys mentioned a lot about ⁓ education. And I know each of our teams in our UAF are going to have one-pagers sharing some of that work. Do you guys have any other publications or any other things that are coming out to help connect community members, other researchers, other stakeholders to some of your findings? Pawel Misztal (45:05) Absolutely, the team is working on a lot of different stories and we focus on fundamental understanding. But that fundamental understanding can also teach us and not only can be helpful to Southeast Texas communities, but a lot of the knowledge that we've learned is applicable to all communities. And I want to mention that, for example, We looked also at microbial volatile organic compounds. So Kerry mentioned about that very important point. Air quality is not only chemical air quality. You also have microbial air quality. And then on top of it, not only you can inhale microbes directly or bioaerosol, those organisms, they are live organisms, so they also release compounds and sometimes we smell those compounds so we know that they are there. So we published a paper that actually showed that certain fungi can ⁓ react differently to light. so basically we are really on this discovery oriented angle and another paper we've recently published is on measuring exposure, history of exposure from human hair. So So basically human hair is long, right? And it contains really valuable information about exposure that happens over time. So this is another recent paper. But we are currently, like we'll be submitting soon a few papers, one on spatial temporal distribution of odor. TxTC Staff (46:31) fascinating. Pawel Misztal (46:41) activities and other composition, chemical fingerprinting, also there is indoor outdoor story coming up, so and a lot of other papers that we write TxTC Staff (46:50) Mm-hmm. If you could leave communities and decision makers with one key takeaway, what would it be? Kerry Kinney (47:04) I guess the takeaway from if we want to do it from an air team perspective is. The sources of air pollution outdoors and indoors are complex, but there are strategies that we can implement now to reduce both the concentrations and the exposures to community members. So the community members can play their role, but I also think the decision makers also need to be aware, you know, it's outdoor plus indoor, and we need to consider how these are. these exposures are affecting the health of the community in general. you know, some of the workshops that we've been holding in, you know, in Southeast Texas with the community members and listening to the task force members, I think it's absolutely critical for the decision makers to listen carefully to the lived experience of Community members from Port Arthur to Beaumont and beyond because that their concerns are very valid and we need to find solutions, not wait another 10 years. We need to find solutions now for the community members and to address their concerns. TxTC Staff (48:30) Thank you. That's great, Carrie. All right. Y'all are awesome. I don't know how y'all keep track of all this data and these different research questions. then that makes another hotbox. There's another question. Coffee, that's it is. Kerry Kinney (48:41) Coffee is coffee is God's gift to us. TxTC Staff (48:45) Yeah, y'all doing great work. Yeah. Thank you for taking the time. Of course. Kerry Kinney (48:49) Thank you guys Pawel Misztal (48:50) Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Bye.