The last comprehensive study of air quality during the summer in downtown Juneau was done about 17 years ago. Now the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation is planning to start tracking air quality again to learn more about the impact of cruise ship emissions.
They shared details about the program at a public meeting Tuesday.
Juneau resident Sarah Davidson said she’s been concerned about pollution coming from cruise ships.
“I was affected by the air quality this past summer. My eyes burned on some days, I got headaches on other days, especially when there wasn’t any wind,” she said Tuesday at a learning session hosted by the Juneau Commission on Sustainability.
Davidson and about 40 other Juneau residents attended the session to learn more about what the state is doing to monitor cruise ship emissions.
Ed White manages the DEC’s cruise ship monitoring program. He said the 2018 season saw a big uptick in the number of public complaints about cruise ship emissions.
The department sent out nine violation notices to ships in five different coastal communities last year.
But White also admits that the system for monitoring those emissions is limited.
The DEC’s monitoring program is done by an in-person team not using any fancy equipment — just their eyes to see how thick the plumes of smoke coming out of the ship’s stacks are.
“The cruise ship monitoring just monitors for compliance, but we don’t really look into what is in that,” White said after Tuesday’s session.
That means his department’s job is just to see if the smoke coming out of the ships is too thick — not to determine what’s in the smoke or what the effect is on residents.
That’s why they’re working with the Division of Air Quality this summer to take a closer look at air quality downtown.
The division is planning to place 20 sensors around town to measure particulate pollution. They’ll also have 10 mobile sensors at additional sites on days with more ships.
At the end of the meeting, the public was invited to place markers on a map of downtown Juneau to help the team decide where to place the electronic monitors.
Barbara Trost from the division said they’re also looking for local volunteers to help. She said the volunteers would be powering and hosting the air quality sensors on their property for the summer.
The outcome of the project will help the division determine if more sophisticated studies are needed.
But air quality isn’t the only concern Juneau residents have.
Davidson is also the water program manager for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.
She said she called the DEC twice last summer, but not about air quality. She called to report water pollution from cruise ships in Gastineau Channel.
Davidson thinks that pollution was caused by scrubbers. That’s the system ships use to remove sulphur dioxide emissions from exhaust.
That material has to go somewhere, and in some case it ends up in Southeast waters.
“It’s an attempt at solving an air quality issue, but it’s creating a water quality problem,” Davidson said. “I think that needs more attention, more studying, more science.”
The air sensors will be placed by the start of this summer’s cruise season and operate until October.
