Yukon fires have left skies over the Lynn Canal looking hazy. (photo by Henry Leasia)
Klondike Goldrush National Historical Park plans to install a set of air quality monitors at various locations across Skagway.
There are a few factors that can degrade air quality in Skagway. Sometimes on a clear day, emissions from cruise ships can be seen hanging in wispy clouds above the Taiya Inlet. This summer, forest fires in the Yukon created a smokey haze that blanketed the community.
Jason Taylor is the superintendent for the Klondike Goldrush National Historical Park. He says despite these visual signs, it’s hard to determine when reduced air quality poses a health risk.
“Especially during the fires this summer. I started to worry about both employees and visitors. Because of what I could see out the window and what I could feel and what I could smell, I started asking the question should we be asking park staff to work indoors only? Do I need to close down backcountry operations and bring people off the trail? At what point does the air quality become a concern where I need to make specific management decisions?” Taylor says.
There are models to try to determine what the air quality is like based on visibility. Taylor says those models aren’t specific enough to figure out if there is a legitimate health concern.
That is why he wants to set up sensors around Skagway that monitor air quality. The sensors, developed by PurpleAir, measure three different sizes of particulate matter.
“Small bits of particles floating around in the air. It could come from any number of sources, whether it is local pollution or wildfires. In some sense it doesn’t matter from a human health and safety perspective it’s just is the pollution there. So the PurpleAir sensors it’s just kind of an aggregate of the pollution that’s in the air,” Taylor says.
The sensors use wifi to report air quality index scores online in real time. The scores can be judged by EPA standards for air quality to help the National Park Service decide if it needs to take health precautions.
Taylor says that the park service purchased 10 sensors for Skagway and Dyea. He says they will be placed on structures owned by the National Park Service, and he recently approached the borough manager and mayor to see if sensors could be installed on municipal buildings.
“The parks service puts out five and the city puts out four or five that gives us ten sensors around town and really well covers geographic extent of town and gives us a reasonably dense sampling network so we can see what our pollution is at any given time of the day,” Taylor says.
The parks service has studied air quality in Skagway before. 10 years ago they conducted a baseline study examining the levels of contaminants such as sulfur and nitrogen. Taylor says this helps park staff understand the environmental health of the region.
“It happens to be that one of the vital signs for the southeast area network is air quality. Kind of like with humans you think about blood pressure or pulse. So the vital signs are the vital signs of the ecosystems,” Taylor says.
Last spring the parks service repeated some of the air quality sampling that was carried out 10 years ago to see if the level of contaminants had changed. The report from that data collection will be available in 6 months to a year.
