Coming Soon: Be You Own Air Monitoring Station
When the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster struck Japan last year, there was a lot of gaps in information about radiation levels, and a lot of public distrust with official pronouncements about those levels.
As a way of getting around this, some entrepreneurs teamed up with software and hardware engineers and started building small portable Geiger counters that could be used by members of the public themselves. That's how the company Safecast was born. To date, the company's monitoring equipment has generated 4 million data points in Japan – reading that helped generate confidence about contamination levels.
After Fukushima, the company looked at other opportunities in the marketplace to fill a gap in consumer environmental health information. It decided that air quality reporting in the US and elsewhere suffered from a lot of the same problems as radiation reporting in Japan. The data is often licensed, unavailable, or just too slow to do much good. For example, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issues its "red" day ozone or smog alerts fully 2-3 hours after the first dangerous ozone readings are recorded at a local air monitor. You cannot get this information in real time – when it might do you and your children much more good.
Safecast plans to launch an effort that will more or less crowdsource air quality and fix that problem by giving real time, instantaneous information to users. It's a DIY approach to air pollution using the latest micro technology. The company hopes to create an international citizen-operated network of air quality monitors. It just received $400,000 from the Knight Foundation to work on prototypes and testing. All of the companies schematics will be available at no charge for easier distribution to citizens. Los Angeles is the first US city to get to use the new devices, but we'll be following their progress closely, hoping to bring this new grassroots effort to DFW, where we still suffer one of the nation's most serious and chronic smog problems.