This story is part of our Clearing the Air series about citizens monitoring air quality near shale gas drilling in Pennsylvania. PublicSource conducted its own citizen-science project outside the first shale gas pad in Penn Township, Westmoreland County. Read what we found.

Rebecca Roter’s Christmas 2014 was a doozy. On Christmas Eve, she got a rip-roaring nosebleed and then Ray, her 1-year-old dog, got sick on Christmas morning and died the next day.

At the time, Roter, 56, lived within a mile of the Williams Central Compressor Station and several shale gas well pads in Brooklyn Township, Pa., in Susquehanna County. She believes pollution from the surrounding activity made her sick. ( Compressor stations are facilities that pressurize natural gas for transport through pipelines.)

An air quality monitor she had on her porch showed high levels of particle pollution over four hours that Christmas Eve. Elevated levels regularly occurred over seven months. Roter had the monitor because she was participating in a citizen science project to test the air near her home.

Related stories Inside the fight to frack Penn Township This is not the first community to experience shale drilling, and it won’t be the last. But its exposure to the tumult of first-time drilling and the controversies it brings provides a window into what it’s like for people on all sides of the debate.

Are cheap sensors and concerned citizens leading to a shift in air monitoring? It wouldn’t have happened five or 10 years ago. That’s what one expert said about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) helping regular citizens — or “citizen scientists” — collect their own air quality data.

“I realized early on that the only thing I could do was document my experience,” said Roter, who is chairperson of the environmental group Breathe Easy Susquehanna County.

She monitored for seven months using Specks — low-cost air monitors that measure fine particulate matter called PM 2.5 — as part of Citizen Sense , a project led by University of London researchers. PM 2.5 exposure has been linked to many health issues, including respiratory, heart and neurological problems.

With the hope of spurring action from regulators, she sent her data to state and federal environmental and public health officials.

“That's the whole idea of citizen science, right?” said Roter, whose group tries to engage with the gas industry and state officials to improve air quality policy. “You get your data and you put it under the nose and on the desks of people who can drive discussions about policies and what to do.”

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It worked.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) followed up and monitored the quality of air in her vicinity for 18 days in August and September 2015 using more precise air monitors. The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) analyzed the EPA data and found that short-term exposures to PM 2.5 near the compressor station could be harmful to sensitive populations and estimated that annual average levels of PM 2.5 could be harmful to the general population.

A springboard for further action

Roter’s story is an exemplary tale of how newly developed low-cost sensor technology is helping citizens living near industrial activity.

Traditional air quality monitoring by regulators is done using expensive stationary equipment that takes averages of pollutants, like ozone and particulate matter, across a broad region. These methods weren’t designed to assess local impacts at homes near shale gas activities.

Recently there’s been a rise in popularity for easy-to-use, affordable sensors to monitor air quality. But these sensors — like the Speck — are met with skepticism from some regulators and industry officials who say that because the devices don’t meet regulatory standards their data can’t be trusted.

But federal researchers and air quality experts say this kind of technology is rapidly advancing and could one day be used for regulatory purposes. Until that happens, researchers and people living near industrial activity are finding new and beneficial ways to use these devices.

In Roter’s case, her data was a springboard for federal officials to conduct follow-up monitoring.

ATSDR officials couldn’t definitively say it was the compressor station causing elevated PM 2.5 levels near Roter’s house, because of data limitations such as not using regulatory-grade monitoring methods and not accounting for all nearby air pollution sources. However, the report recommended a “more robust assessment” of air quality, including seasonal monitoring near the Williams Central Compressor Station in Brooklyn.