Citizen Science: Do Try This At Home

In November 2015, several hundred people gathered for a meeting in Ben Avon, a neighborhood of around 2,000 people nestled along the Ohio River northwest of Pittsburgh. As with previous assemblies of this kind, residents had come to learn the latest about an unwelcome neighbor.

- Michelle Z. Donahue

That neighbor was the Shenango Coke Works, a coal processing plant straddling one end of an island directly opposite Ben Avon. Residents had long suspected the plant’s emissions were regularly polluting the air to such a degree that living there was a hazard. They blamed the bad air for asthma, nausea, headaches, and myriad other illnesses they and their families had suffered. But in the past, they had lacked definitive evidence, outside of their own experiences.

So, they found some.

Not long after the meeting began, with a representative from the US Environmental Protection Agency sitting in the front row, Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Randy Sargent got up and started reeling through time-lapse videos from cameras he’d helped the neighborhood point toward Shenango. Taking frames every 5 seconds, 24 hours a day, the cameras made it easier to do what the community had been trying to do over the years: to watch the smoke.

Distinguishing toxic clouds from mere steam is tricky business, so the community had turned to Sargent, who works out of CMU’s CREATE Lab (Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment). He and colleague Yen-Chia Hsu developed a computer-vision algorithm to pick out bad smoke types in each picture.

Stitched together from hundreds of frames, the resulting video showed a looping reel of black, brown, blue, and orange clouds from a single month. Paired with federal, local, and community sensor data gathered from corresponding days, Ben Avon’s suspicions finally seemed to find some footing: Shenango was releasing permit-busting amounts of toxic substances into the air five out of every seven days.

One month later, DTE Energy announced it would close its Shenango facility, citing a weak steel market and lack of customers. By January, the plant had baked its last batch of coal and is slated for demolition.