CORVALLIS — Researchers are studying the impacts of smoke that linger long after Montana's fire season.
Researchers and high school teachers across the state are teaming up to bring much-needed air quality monitors, and their important health data, to rural Montanans.
Science teacher Brock Hammill attached a little white device to the wall of his Corvallis High School classroom 18 months ago.
“You just take it up, plug it in, screw it into the wall,” Hammill said.
He put another one next to the speaker system in the crow’s nest above the school’s football field.
The devices look like bits of plumbing protruding out of the walls, more like something that belongs under a sink than in a school.
They are actually a new type of hall monitor for Corvallis and other Montana high schools, monitoring the air for a dangerous pollutant.
Researchers from the University of Montana and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) teamed up to put low-cost, user-friendly monitors — made by PurpleAir — in high schools across the state.
“We think we live in Montana where it's just nature and great air all the time. But, I think it's becoming clear to everybody that lives here that there's a lot of smoke that we deal with a lot of the time," Hammill said. “We're one of the worst communities in America as far as how much smoke pollution we deal with on a yearly basis.”
Whether from summer wildfires or winter wood stoves, Montanans are constantly exposed to PM 2.5, fine particulate matter about 30 times smaller than the width of human hair.
Their size helps them invade deep into the lungs, causing short-term problems, like runny noses and worse flu seasons, and lingering issues, especially for people with asthma or other diseases.
“Smoke is a really interesting beast to work with and, since that's the carrier of most PM, that's the thing we pay attention to,” said David Jones, a researcher with the University of Montana Center for Population Health Research.
For decades, monitoring projects have studied air across the country with expensive equipment at federal sites.
While pollutants pose a risk to the whole state, in Montana these sites are mainly clustered in urban areas, leaving rural areas guessing about their air quality.
“There's just huge parts of the state that have no data at all to use to see what's actually going on,” Jones said. “So, schools who are trying to figure out whether or not they should be doing a football practice outside or run across country race outside, they were looking at monitors that were maybe a hundred miles away.”
To fill in the map with a new monitoring network, the research team’s “PurpleAirs in Schools” project started sending sensors out to schools in February of 2022.
Each school gets one monitor to put inside, funded by the university, and one to put outside, funded by the DEQ.
“It allows us to kinda see the trends. Is the air clearing? Is the air getting worse? Um, and so this fall we were reading that sensor for weeks to see what the air was doing,” said Hammill.
Putting the monitors at schools gives communities access to the data while providing a great way for students to get involved.
“It's kind of what you see outside, the sensor now puts a number on what you see and you're able to kind of mentally calibrate what the air quality's like, which I think is really important to kids that live in Montana, live in Western Montana,” said Hammill, who has worked the monitor into his curriculum.
Monitors provided by the project are already closing the data gap, majorly contributing to a growing number of both private and public sensors that help people know what they are breathing.
The team is well on their way to their goal of 183 schools, with monitors set up or in the works at over 100 schools.
“Hamilton is pretty close, but oftentimes depending on the wind, depending on what fires are doing, we can have pretty different numbers,” said Hammill. “A big piece of public health is just: get information to people and when people have information they can make good decisions about what they want to do, knowing the air quality.”
