How Massive Amazon Warehouses Are Straining a Vulnerable Brooklyn Neighborhood
Residents hope traffic, emissions, and noise data they are collecting will help rein in the spread of e-commerce facilities
There’s a record store on a narrow street in New York City that’s studded with sensors. Perched on the shop’s low roof, a vehicle counter tracks a stream of trucks and vans, many emblazoned with the Amazon smile, as they pass by. A solar-powered sound meter roosts in a tree out front, keeping tabs on the hum of traffic. And a pair of laser counters suspended over the shop’s door charts air pollution from trucks and other sources that can damage respiratory health, especially among children and the elderly.
The Record Shop, a squat storefront that sells vinyls and hosts concerts in its basement, is part of a sensor network deployed last fall by several residents of Red Hook, a small neighborhood on Brooklyn’s waterfront. They are using the sensors to document a transformation that started almost two years ago, when the country’s biggest online retailer began turning the largely low-income area into a major transfer hub for deliveries.
Since late 2021, Amazon has opened two large facilities in the neighborhood, and it’s set to open a third later this year. Together, the three structures comprise more than 800,000 square feet of warehousing space and parking, with one facility’s 90-foot walls now casting wintertime shadows across a neighborhood community garden.
Neighborhood advocates and legal experts say New York’s environmental and zoning laws haven’t kept up with the e-commerce boom, which has only accelerated since the start of the pandemic. In Red Hook, residents worry that as warehouses continue to open, they threaten the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, and the health of their neighbors. But until now, a lack of data has made it harder for people in Red Hook and similar communities around the country to advocate for more local control over the spread of new distribution centers. That’s because federal, state, and local governments don’t regularly collect information on air quality or traffic when e-commerce facilities open, the way they often monitor other industrial sites like power plants or factories.
Consumer Reports and the Guardian have been tracking the hidden costs of e-commerce delivery for the past two years. Our previous reporting has focused on communities in the Chicago area and east of Los Angeles in the Inland Empire, and on the lack of local air quality and traffic data near last-mile facilities around the country. To help fill that gap in one neighborhood, members of the community installed traffic, air quality, and sound sensors purchased by CR, and are now gathering data throughout the area. CR teamed up with the Guardian to analyze the first several months of that data.
The measurements we’ve gathered so far can’t say precisely how much the new distribution facilities have affected Red Hook, since the sensors were installed after they opened. However, they do show a neighborhood under stress: In the seven months the network of instruments has been gathering data, they’ve recorded outsize daily spikes in truck and van traffic on narrow two-lane streets, and logged many days with elevated particulate air pollution, which is exacerbated by gas and diesel exhaust.
Even so, several larger warehouses—including one that’s over 1 million square feet—are sprouting up in Red Hook, threatening to bring over a thousand more trucks every weekday when they open. As the new facilities begin operating, the sensors should help residents document the increasing impacts. But they aren’t waiting. Neighborhood groups are already preparing to deploy the data to advocate for new rules on how e-commerce facilities are developed throughout the city and state.
Thousands of Trucks and Vans
Delivery traffic is booming in New York City, with daily deliveries climbing from 1.8 million in 2019 to 2.25 million in 2023, according to an estimate from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
You can see signs of that growth outside the Record Shop. On an average weekday, the traffic sensor at the store counts 61 trucks and vans an hour in the period between 10 a.m. and noon, or about one per minute. Stand outside the store, and it’s clear that many of those are Amazon vehicles that rumble up Van Brunt Street in packs of a dozen or more.
“It seems to operate like clockwork,” says Scott Pfaffman, an artist who owns the building that houses the vinyl store. The city designates Van Brunt as a truck route, but its two lanes are lined with parked cars, shops, and restaurants. Sometimes, residents stop on the sidewalk to record videos of the long lines of Amazon vans, or semi trucks that have gotten stuck trying to turn from one narrow street to another, blocking traffic and occasionally side-swiping parked cars.
These morning parades are part of a new chaos throughout the neighborhood. Locals say a crush of trucks and vans now clog its streets, jostling for space with buses, plus pedestrians, bikes, and scooters.
All this activity is monitored by two additional traffic sensors, in addition to the one at the Record Shop. Read more about our methodology, below.
A second sensor looks down from atop an upholstery store about a half mile up the street. There, the morning uptick is far higher than the peak at the vinyl shop: This sensor typically sees about 105 trucks and vans an hour pass by between 10 a.m. and noon. On particularly busy days, that number can nose up above 140 trucks an hour.
On several occasions, this sensor counted more than 1,200 trucks and vans over the course of a day—and that’s likely an underestimate, because the sensors can miss vehicles when it’s dark outside.
That’s a high volume of delivery traffic for Van Brunt Street, says Brian Ketcham, who worked as a transportation engineer for New York City before consulting for neighborhood and environmental groups. “For a narrow two-way street with parking, yeah, that’s a lot of trucks and vans,” he says.
A third sensor sits on a balcony across from the Red Hook Houses, Brooklyn’s largest public housing complex and home to a large majority of the neighborhood’s residents. It sits on a residential stretch of Lorraine Street, which isn’t a designated truck route—but plenty of trucks and vans drive past nevertheless. On a typical weekday, the sensor counts just over one every two minutes between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. (Delivery vans aren’t confined to truck routes, but trucks are supposed to stay on them unless they’re making a local delivery.)
In a local news segment that aired in December, the manager of one of Amazon’s Red Hook facilities described its outsize role in the company’s delivery network. “We take pretty much every package coming into this region, and we sort them out here,” station manager James Armstrong told News12. On an average weekday tens of thousands of packages pass through this facility, which operates 24 hours a day, Amazon tells CR.
The trucks and vans that deliver these packages contribute to disruptive street noise. Every three minutes during the day since we began gathering sound data in January, there’s a sound that’s twice as loud as background noise levels, according to a sound-level meter installed at the Record Shop. And more than twice an hour, the sensor detects a noise that’s four times louder than ambient noise.
Mary Dudine, the owner of a wine and spirits shop on Van Brunt Street, says she can hear large semis hitting potholes two blocks away from her shop. Passing trucks regularly rattle the bottles on her shelves. But even more than the engine noise, she’s bothered by the beeping of trucks reversing over and over as they try to make tight right-angle turns.
“That noise is there specifically to warn and alarm us,” Dudine says. “If every place I turn, all I hear is something saying, ‘Watch out! Watch out! Watch out!’ What am I supposed to do? It’s just everywhere.”
When warehouses open near people’s homes, the increase in vehicles sends ripple effects throughout the community. “It’s a real problem putting warehouses into residential communities,” Ketcham says. “It breaks up the roads faster. Noise is higher. It slows down traffic for passenger cars.”
More distribution centers are on the way, threatening to bring over a thousand more delivery trucks to Red Hook every weekday.
Amazon’s third Red Hook warehouse will add an estimated 344 truck trips and 1,224 car trips every weekday, according to a 2020 traffic study commissioned by the company that built the warehouse. An Amazon representative told officials at a neighboring school that it is scheduled to open in September. Amazon spokesperson Simone Griffin would not confirm a timeline to Consumer Reports and the Guardian but said the facility “remains in our plans.”
In a statement, Griffin said, “We always work hard to be a good neighbor, and take into account what it might mean for a community if we locate a building there,” adding that the company is aware of traffic issues and works with the community and local policymakers on such issues “when it makes sense to do so.”
Just a few blocks away, another proposed waterfront logistics complex includes an 80-foot-tall warehouse and a 200-foot-tall warehouse, with the smaller one already under construction. The complex is being built by developers who will lease the facilities out when they’re finished—but it’s not yet clear who will operate them. This compound and the Amazon warehouse set to open later this year could together generate more than 1,350 additional truck trips every weekday, according to the same formula used in the traffic study cited above.
Worse Air Quality, Greater Health Risk
Air pollution in Red Hook regularly rises to levels the Environmental Protection Agency categorizes as concerning for people who are particularly sensitive to particle pollution, according to air quality monitors set up by community members working with CR and the Guardian.
That at-risk group includes a large number of people who live in Red Hook. In the two census tracts that contain 80 percent of Red Hook’s residents, asthma-related emergency room visits were higher than the rate for Brooklyn and New York City, according to a 2018 report from organizations including Red Hook Initiative, a longtime neighborhood nonprofit. And the ZIP code containing Red Hook has higher levels of asthma-related emergency room visits than any of the surrounding ZIP codes, according to data the New York State Department of Health gathered between 2018 and 2020. (This is the most recent data available.)
“This neighborhood already has toxic parts that have impacted health over the past few decades,” says Tevina Willis, community organizing manager at Red Hook Initiative. For example, the city closed a large park complex next to the Red Hook Houses in 2015 because the EPA found dangerous contaminants like lead in the soil. Half of the 16 fields in the complex are still closed today.
“To put more things in here that are going to impact that—that’s what has residents concerned,” Willis says.
Increasing delivery traffic will only add to the pollution burden in Red Hook. Microscopic particles from heavy vehicle emissions can settle deep in a person’s lungs, elevating their risk of asthma, heart attack, cancer, late-onset depression and dementia. Children, the elderly, and people with existing respiratory conditions are particularly vulnerable.
And the burden of that pollution isn’t evenly distributed, according to a study from TRUE Initiative, a British emissions-focused research group: People of color in New York are exposed to 15 percent more particulate emissions than white residents, on average. Zoom out to the metro area, which includes Newark and other surrounding cities, and there’s an even greater disparity, according to a 2021 research paper published in the journal Science Advances.
Despite these large exposure gaps, there’s a worrying lack of hyperlocal air quality data across the U.S., experts say. “Some of our most polluted communities in the U.S. are severely under-monitored by traditional air quality monitoring efforts,” says Dan Westervelt, PhD, a Columbia University scientist who studies air pollution. “Neighborhood-scale data leveraging consumer-grade air sensors is critical for addressing latent air quality challenges.”
Red Hook, for example, is a blind spot in New York City: None of the roughly 100 sensors in the city-run Community Air Survey program are in the neighborhood.
“What the city is collecting is inadequate,” New York City Councilmember Alexa Avilés, whose district includes Red Hook, tells CR and the Guardian. “And so community members and civic groups have decided to take that into their own hands.” She says the city needs to pick up the slack—but that e-commerce companies like Amazon should be partly responsible for monitoring air quality near their facilities, too.
Air quality monitors installed by Red Hook residents show that pollution is already at worrying levels in the neighborhood. While the sensors can’t demonstrate a direct connection between delivery traffic and elevated pollution, the particulate levels they’re detecting will only worsen if truck and van traffic increases.
Between September 2022 and April 2023, an air quality monitor on residential Lorraine Street right across from the Red Hook Houses measured 16 days with particulate pollution levels the EPA considers potentially harmful for sensitive groups. At the upholstery store and the Record Shop—which is across the street from a public school playground—each sensor counted 14 days at those levels.
To cut down on emissions, Amazon says it plans to deploy 100,000 electric delivery vans nationwide by 2030. As of now, more than 3,000 of them are on the road, Amazon tells CR, but none of them are in Red Hook. Amazon isn’t the only delivery giant moving toward electric vehicles. FedEx, which is building a large last-mile facility right next door to Red Hook in Sunset Park, says its entire delivery fleet will be electric by 2040. UPS—which in 2018 bought and later razed a huge waterfront parcel in Red Hook that has remained empty ever since—has not publicly set a target date for converting its entire delivery fleet to zero-emissions vehicles, but it has committed to purchasing 10,000 electric vehicles.
Electrifying delivery vans will cut down on a large part of their particulate emissions, but it won’t eliminate them. Electric vehicles still generate non-exhaust particulate pollution such as brake dust, tire dust and road dust—especially heavier delivery vans. Non-exhaust emissions make up an increasing share of particulate pollution from road use, and it’s projected to make up the majority of road-related particulate pollution by 2035, according to a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international forum focused on free trade.
For this reason and other safety concerns, city advocates and officials are pushing for alternatives that would decrease the number of trucks and vans on the road altogether.
Cargo bikes are one alternative to delivery vans that are already in limited use. In a small pilot program, Amazon is now making some Red Hook-area deliveries by cargo bike. Elsewhere in the city, UPS, FedEx, DHL and two other logistics companies also make deliveries by bike, all part of a New York City program to reduce traffic congestion and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Marine deliveries are being advanced as another alternative to semi truck traffic. “Red Hook is really well positioned for marine deliveries because the last-mile facilities have been put right on the water, or within a block of it,” says Carolina Salguero, founder and executive director of the Red Hook-based marine advocacy organization PortSide New York. “Marine delivery can be done with less impact than a lumbering truck.”
'A Very Special Place to Me'
On a drizzly Friday night in December, Rosana Zapata was sketching a low-slung streetscape in Sharpie and pencil. On a blank sheet of printer paper, she drew an intersection, a small parking lot, and a freestanding sign glowing with zig-zags of light, advertising fried chicken. “I have a lot of memories there,” Zapata told the small circle of young artists seated at school desks, each of whom had drawn a favorite neighborhood spot of their own.
The group had gathered at the Red Hook Art Project, a local art education nonprofit, to assemble a map of their changing neighborhood. In the last decade, Red Hook has been through a lot: cataclysmic flooding from Hurricane Sandy, consistently unhealthy conditions and years of disruptive construction in the large public housing complex—and now, the sudden buildup of e-commerce facilities.
Each wave has left an impression on the neighborhood. Some are visible, like a plaque showing the storm’s astonishing high-water mark; others, like new truck and van traffic, are harder to measure.
For 18-year-old Zapata, the delivery traffic brings a new layer of uncertainty to her neighborhood. “Red Hook can be like a second family—even a first family,” she says. “But this community is changing a lot. It’s very, very hectic—it’s just too much sometimes.”
Zapata worries about the increase in trucks and vans on Red Hook’s narrow streets, especially when they roll by the school her younger brother attends. “That’s very dangerous,” she says. “Kids play around; kids are gonna be kids. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
She’s noticed an uptick in traffic at the street corner from her drawing—the intersection of Wolcott and Dwight, across the street from the public library. Three Amazon warehouses are within a four-block radius from Zapata’s corner, two of which are operational; traffic to and from New York City’s only IKEA and several nearby school bus depots add to the mess.
The intersection may look unremarkable to an outsider, but it means a lot to Zapata. Next to the chicken spot is a bodega, and next to that is a barber shop where people often gather to hang out. “It’s a place where people can go and say hi to each other,” she says. “It’s a very special place to me.”
One of the traffic sensors in our network is just two blocks away, and it picks up more than 370 trucks and vans on an average weekday. Unlike the sensors on Red Hook’s main drag, truck and van traffic here doesn’t spike around noon and quickly die down—it starts around 7 a.m. and remains sustained throughout the day, letting up only around 4 or 5 p.m.
Zapata is one of the tens of thousands of Brooklynites living with asthma. “I know many people with asthma also,” she says. “I don’t want to be breathing in air that could possibly give me diseases or affect my body. And I don’t want the kids to have any issues or have asthma because of the trucks.”
Zapata lives with her brother, her parents and her mother’s family in the Red Hook Houses, a few blocks from the street corner she drew. She’s part of a small cohort of young adults who are leading a series of workshops at the Red Hook Art Project designed to get neighbors thinking about what’s changing in Red Hook, and how the neighborhood might respond. They’re using sensor data to help quantify the effects of the new warehouse traffic, and to prepare community members for conversations with city and state representatives.
Several organizations are gathering similar data in Red Hook. The Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, a nonprofit advocating for the development of a waterfront pedestrian and cycling path across the entire borough, installed several traffic-counting sensors in the neighborhood. And a partnership between the City University of New York and local nonprofits Red Hook Initiative and Pioneer Works has installed several air-quality monitors, one of which is right across the street from the imposing gray-and-blue Amazon facility due to open in September.
That sensor is located at the Red Hook Farms, a community project run by the Red Hook Initiative. In the winter, the farm saw an unexpected byproduct from its tall new neighbor, even before the facility has begun operating: The building casts a long shadow across the garden plot, says Brendan Parker, the farm’s assistant director, making it harder for volunteers to grow cold-weather crops like collards and kale. Parker says the shade also killed the farm’s honeybees two years ago, forcing him to relocate the hive to a sunnier corner.
The Amazon building, which Parker says the developer built without notifying the community, embodies a familiar pattern, he says.
“Red Hook has been the victim of so many things that have affected people’s health in a negative way,” Parker says. He says it can feel like developers pack last-mile warehouses into his community because they think residents “won’t care or we won’t speak up. That we don’t have political power. But it’s important to get involved in this, because Red Hook does matter.”
Curbing the Spread of New Warehouses
Large distribution centers aren’t run only by Amazon, of course—Walmart, UPS, FedEx, and other well-known companies also operate their own. Many are built by warehouse developers that then lease the property to online retailers and delivery companies. In New York City’s manufacturing zones, companies like these generally face few administrative hurdles to building new last-mile facilities.
In Red Hook, two-thirds of the land is zoned for manufacturing, allowing last-mile facilities to pop up unchecked. In these areas, warehouse developers don’t have to ask New York City for permission or solicit input from neighbors before building—they don’t generally need to do traffic studies, or get special applications.
These zoning rules date back to 1961, a time when a warehouse typically meant a moderate-sized building where goods would be stored for extended periods, generating little traffic.
Outside Red Hook, there are at least 33 other last-mile facilities in New York City, according to research from the New York attorney general’s office. Many have cropped up in Maspeth, Queens; Hunts Point in the Bronx; and in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, just across the Gowanus Canal from Red Hook.
The free pass for last-mile facilities is one of the rules city officials and local advocates are pushing to change, because it lumps together small warehouses used for long-term storage with vast complexes that create round-the-clock delivery traffic. They argue that this new breed of facility should be treated much differently from the old, and should require buy-in from neighbors before moving in.
On an unseasonably warm February morning, Councilmember Avilés and other city officials gathered in front of New York City Hall to tout a package of eight city proposals and a state bill aimed at curbing harms from last-mile facilities. The proposals would require warehouse operators in the city to get a special permit before opening up shop, and to submit estimates of how the facilities will impact traffic and air quality. They would also redraw the city’s network of truck routes, and require the city to install air quality monitors on busy city roads and nearby parks.
“I have the privilege of representing sizable manufacturing districts in New York,” said Councilmember Jennifer Gutiérrez, whose district comprises neighborhoods in North Brooklyn and Queens, at the event. “And what we have seen is that less and less has been done to retain manufacturing jobs, but more and more is being done to give passes for companies like Amazon to run wild and reckless in our community.”
Local business owners agree that the odds seem stacked in favor of warehouse developers.
Jim Tampakis owns the building on Van Brunt with the upholstery business and a sensor station. He has a plan to redevelop a pair of nearby squat brick buildings into a five-story “maker space” for small Red Hook manufacturers and food businesses.
The land under the buildings is zoned for low-lying industrial construction; getting that restriction changed to allow a taller structure required a complex city application. He finally got a key approval from the city in April—eight years after he initially proposed the project, and after spending more than $400,000 for plans, lawyers, environmental studies and other requirements, he says. By contrast, warehouse operators who buy up large industrial lots can build traffic-heavy facilities without needing any special permission at all.
Just a block from the maker space site, Tampakis runs a shop that repairs marine parts and does mechanical work for the city. His father started the business in the 1950s.
Back then, Red Hook teemed with dockyard work, Tampakis says. “You never had to leave Red Hook to build anything,” he says. “We had hydraulic companies, motor electric companies, radar companies, fuel injection companies, diesel engine repair shops—everybody was right here.”
Most of that activity dropped off after the 1950s, about when container shipping came into prominence, and ships started redirecting to a new mega-port in New Jersey for unloading. That’s also around the time the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway cut diagonally through Red Hook, cutting it off from the rest of the borough and laying the groundwork for today’s last-mile bonanza. With its main industries drained, the neighborhood lost thousands of residents in the following decades, and the working waterfront fell into disrepair.
“I feel sometimes like we’re the lost children here in this neighborhood,” Tampakis says. “Red Hook is always getting dumped on. I’m tired of getting kicked around.”
Some New York State officials have announced support for reforms to zoning laws. In January, New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote a letter warning the city that its policy to allow warehouses to be built without review or permit could potentially violate federal civil rights law, because it’s allowing last-mile facilities to cluster in neighborhoods of color. The letter cited coverage from CR and the Guardian on Red Hook’s warehouse crunch, and urged the city to require warehouse operators to apply for special permits.
The uneven distribution of delivery facilities is a nationwide problem, as our previous reporting reveals. In 2021, CR and the Guardian found that more than two-thirds of Amazon warehouses were in neighborhoods with a disproportionately high number of people of color and that 57 percent were in disproportionately low-income neighborhoods.
Under the Biden Administration, the EPA has increased its focus on the disproportionate impact of freight and transportation pollution on communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. It has issued more stringent emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks, and consults with state and local governments on air quality monitoring. But while some advocacy groups have called on the EPA to hold warehouse operators accountable for pollution resulting from their deliveries, the agency says that’s up to state governments and local agencies. A bill currently in front of the New York state legislature called the Clean Deliveries Act could make New York the first state to do so, if it passes.
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“The way the rules are now, there is a gray area when it comes to who is responsible for collecting air quality and emissions data associated with transportation to and from these warehouses,” said Dylan Jaff, sustainability policy analyst at CR. “But it should not fall on community members.” CR’s advocates support the Clean Deliveries Act in the New York state legislature.
In March, city officials updated Red Hook residents on a long-awaited neighborhood traffic study, which will include an examination of traffic coming to and from the last-mile facilities there. The presentation mentioned potential solutions such as marine shipping, incentives for overnight deliveries that would lessen truck traffic, and a network of small distribution hubs for transferring packages onto hand carts, cargo bikes or smaller, lower-emission vehicles for final delivery.
Antonio Reynoso, Brooklyn’s borough president, is working to coordinate community efforts in the borough’s many neighborhoods. “I don’t want to see these same harms of the past repeated,” Reynoso tells CR and the Guardian. “And once again, the clusters that we’re seeing pop up are mostly concentrated in neighborhoods of color like Sunset Park and Red Hook,” Reynoso says. “Our people have a right to clean air, safe streets, and policies that protect neighborhoods’ health and environment from preventable harm.”
For her part, Zapata, from the Red Hook Art Project, wishes developers would bring new and valuable things into her community, rather than building still more last-mile facilities. Many of the changes that have torn through Red Hook feel like they were imposed on the neighborhood, she says, rather than bubbled up from the community itself.
“I feel like they should be creating buildings that are going to be helpful and useful to Red Hook,” says Zapata. “I understand this is a place where a lot of trucks come in to transport stuff. But at the same time it’s a place people live in. We should also be getting places that benefit us.”
Methodology
Sensors sited in three key locations in Red Hook gather several types of data that together help chart the impact of e-commerce delivery traffic: They count trucks and vans, detect particulate pollution, and monitor sound levels.
The vehicle counts come from camera-based sensors mounted on two rooftops and one volunteer’s balcony. The devices are made by a Brooklyn-based company called Numina, and are designed to detect pedestrians, cyclists, and different types of vehicles as they pass through the sensors’ field of view. Consumer Reports purchased the instruments, which take several images a second, use computer vision software to categorize the vehicles in the images, and then immediately delete the images to preserve the privacy of passersby. We only considered trucks and vans, which Numina counts as a single category.
Pollution data comes from a network of three Purple Air monitors. These are inexpensive sensors that use lasers to measure the concentration of PM2.5, which are airborne microscopic particles. CR purchased these air-quality monitors, which were installed at the same three locations as the traffic counters. The data from our monitors, plus several others installed by community groups in Red Hook, is publicly available at map.purpleair.com. To improve the accuracy of the monitors, we applied a correction algorithm developed by Dan Westervelt, PhD, a Columbia University scientist who uses Purple Air monitors to study traffic pollution in New York City.
We converted the air quality readings from PM2.5 concentration into an easy-to-read air quality index, or AQI. The Environmental Protection Agency developed the AQI system to help people understand when the air outside is safe to breathe.
The sensor we used to chart sound levels was developed by Convergence Instruments, a Canadian firm. The sound monitor picks up loudness in decibels, but doesn’t record or store any audio. Consumer Reports purchased one sound monitor, which is installed at the Record Shop.
CR and the Guardian worked with Matías Kalwill, an artist and technologist with a studio in Red Hook, to engage with community members to combine and process the data. Kalwill helped develop relationships with sensor hosts and led the installations—which often required custom mounting hardware, electric wiring, and wireless data access. He, Juan Chimienti, and Juan Manuel Durand, two freelance software developers, built a data pipeline to gather the data streams from the sensors in all three locations, clean them up and apply the necessary corrections, and make them available to CR and the Guardian for reporting.
Historical air quality, traffic count, and sound level data are available to view on catmap.fm, a website Kalwill, Chimienti, and Durand developed for community use.
Editor’s Note: The environmental sensors for this project were purchased with support from the Energy Foundation, a philanthropic organization working for a clean and equitable energy future.
