Project involves Brownsville students in environmental monitoring

BROWNSVILLE — A group of Rio Grande Valley schoolchildren soon will become field researchers for a national air and water monitoring campaign.

The National Alliance for Hispanic Health announced Thursday the official launch of the Health Environment Action Network, a program supplying students and local volunteers with high-tech equipment to monitor local air and water quality.

Brownsville is one of four sites participating in the project, which is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The other sites are Brooklyn, N.Y., Detroit and Watsonville, Calif.

Brownsville was selected because of its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, explained Jane Delgado, president of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health.

“We tried to get a balance of different sites where the air or water might be compromised,” she said.

Local organizers plan to involve elementary and middle school students in the project, training them to use the monitoring equipment and teaching them about the environment’s role in health, said Alix Flores, special projects director for the Brownsville Community Health Center. The clinic is in charge of the project’s Brownsville arm.

Each participating student will use a “mobile monitor” that tests for levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen and sulfur in the air and also tests dissolved-oxygen and pH levels in water. The students also will use GPS, or global positioning system, devices to pinpoint where the data was obtained. The data will then be mapped and tracked using a computer program, Flores said.

Students also will record their experiences using video cameras, and those videos will be available on a project Web site, he said.

By involving students and community members, the project’s organizers want the community to take more responsibility and feel more in control of their environmental circumstances, Delgado said.

“It’s a community empowerment activity,” Delgado said. “This way, (residents) can decide how to make their area a healthier place to live.”

Environmental advocates have long expressed concern about drinking water quality along the border, and some portions of the Rio Grande and other water bodies are considered “endangered” or contaminated.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has reported few problems with air pollution in the Valley, however. And the American Lung Association has in the past named the Brownsville-Harlingen area one of the cleanest-air regions in the nation.

Still, state and federal monitoring might not catch the pollutants community members might encounter in everyday life, Delgado said.

“Air monitoring stations, for example, are positioned away from where people live,” she said.

Although the data obtained in the three-year project might help fuel future research into air and water quality along the border, Flores believes the bigger goal is community education.

“We hope they will learn an awareness of their environment … and awareness that we need to have clean air and water,” he said.

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Melissa McEver covers health and environment issues for Valley Freedom Newspapers. She is based in Harlingen and you can reach her at (956) 430-6252.