During “Bridgegate,” Air Monitors Saw a Spike in Pollution

February 12, 2014- One night before local lanes to New Jersey’s George Washington Bridge were closed last fall in a suspected act of political retribution, an air-quality monitor run by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton stopped collecting data.

USA Today reports that the monitor started measuring air pollution again two-and-a-half days later – just as a key pollution indicator was starting to decline. It is the closest state-run monitor to the bridge with its data posted online.“You might see a monitor go offline for a day because they're cleaning it or doing maintenance or calibration, but for it go down for this many days is intriguing,” said Ann Marie Carlton, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who studies air quality.

“Bridgegate" has been a headache for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who insists he was not aware of plans for the gridlock.

Last fall was not the first time the monitor went down. It stopped transmitting data for several hours in June, and it went offline for nearly a week at a time in March and November 2012. But data collected just as the Jersey monitor came back online, supplemented by another monitor in Newark, suggest that air pollution reached potentially dangerous levels during at least part of the lane-closure period from Sept. 9 to 12, as thousands of cars, trucks and buses waited for up to four hours to cross the bridge.

At the Newark station 5 miles away, there were 40.4 micrograms per cubic meter in the air – 5 micrograms higher than federal guidelines. As a comparison, if someone were in a home where a spouse smokes a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes per day, exposure would be about 35 micrograms per cubic meter.

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