4/13/2017 Citizen Engineers at the Fenceline | Issues in Science and Technology http://issues.org/322/citizenengineersatthefenceline/ 1/9 Citizen Engineers at the Fenceline by Gwen Ottinger Environmental regulators would do a better job protecting air quality and public health if they worked with local communities. On August 22, 1994, the Unocal renery in Rodeo, California, along the north end of the San Francisco Bay, began to leak a solution of Catacarb through a small hole in a processing unit. While the prevailing winds blew the toxic gas (used by the renery to separate carbon dioxide from other gases) over the neighboring community of Crockett, Unocal workers were instructed to contain the release by hosing down the unit, but to keep operating. Unaware of the ever-expanding leak, Crockett residents began to experience sore throats, nausea, headaches, dizziness, and other problems, their symptoms worsening over the next two weeks. Unocal nally shut down the unit on September 6, when a neighboring industrial facility, the Wickland Oil Terminal, complained that the renery’s expanding leak was sickening its workers. The 16-day release made the shortcomings of ambient air monitoring, which residents of Rodeo, Crockett, and other so-called “fenceline communities” had been complaining about for years, suddenly very visible. If there had been regular air monitoring in the area, or even if residents had had the capacity to test the air once they started to suspect that their symptoms stemmed from chemical exposures, the release likely would have been detected sooner, and the damage to workers’ and community members’ health—which in many cases seems to have been permanent—would have been mitigated. Community-led innovation The release galvanized residents of Crockett and Rodeo, who until that point had largely been complacent about the renery’s presence. As a result of their activism, two new community-centered monitoring techniques emerged. Residents’ lawyers commissioned an engineering rm to develop an inexpensive, easy- to-use air sampler to give them a way to quantify chemical levels when air quality seemed particularly bad. The device, known as the “bucket,” was subsequently adapted by engineers and organizers with the nonprot Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) for widespread dissemination, and it is currently used by fenceline communities around the world. Beyond helping neighborhoods closest to reneries know what they’re breathing, the bucket has become a cornerstone of advocacy for more comprehensive air monitoring: users take each bucket sample as an occasion to point out the lack of information being generated in their