Natalia Sevilla and Jack Haworth, students in SDSU’s sensor journalism class, explore the air quality in four neighborhoods — Barrio Logan, Logan Heights, Chollas Creek and Bankers Hill — in San Diego that are the focus of the “What’s in the Air” project.
These four were among neighborhoods identified in a recent state report as having a relatively unhealthy combination of environmental pollution and sensitive populations in the years 2009 and 2010. That was determined based on a specific CES score produced as part of the CalEnviroScreen 2.0 Report.
A neighborhood’s CES score is a combination of the environmental pollution in the area, plus information about the people living there. For example, a neighborhood with a lot of children or elderly, a lot of emergency visits related to asthma or even high unemployment would have a worse CES score than a neighborhood with the same pollution but with a less sensitive population.
(For more information on this overall initiative, click here and to download the report, click here.)
The CalEnviroScreen report also provides information on particle pollution known as PM2.5 by specific census tracts for annual mean of years 2009-2011.
(More on the EPA federal standard here.)
This video was produced by students Patrick Carr, Ryan Posner, Torrey Bailey, and Yareli Parga. It is part of a series of explanatory videos about air quality in San Diego created by “What’s in the Air,” a collaboration between San Diego State University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies, and inewsource, an independent, non-profit news organization.