Abdul El-Sayed — As Health Director I worked with JustAir to put up air quality monitors across Wayne County

I'm here in River Rouge. [music] This is one of the top 10 most polluted communities in Wayne County according to the air quality monitors [music] that we put up. See here this mural, the skunk is probably the right animal >> [music] >> cuz that's what it smells like here because of sulfur dioxide. I've been going crazy over the last couple of weeks because of the historically bad air quality we've been experiencing. And we worked with Just Air to put 100 air quality monitors all over Wayne County. >> All right, air is here, right? >> So right here we have a air quality uh sensor uh or monitor if that's uh getting samples of our air that we breathe. Air quality doesn't discriminate, doesn't care about boundaries, doesn't care about your skin color. Air quality is really um it uh where you are with the source is we're going to you're going to be the most impacted. >> Let's head out to Kemeny Recreation Center in Southwest Detroit, one of the most historically polluted parts of the entire state. >> [music] >> Marathon Petroleum right here. >> [music] >> Biggest polluter in the most polluted zip code in the state we're we're sitting in right now. >> And I moved to Detroit 2016 uh with the idea that I wanted to make an impact on what on my technology experience and how do we use technology as a way to alleviate some of the system systemic issues that happened to my family and my community I come up from, right? >> You had a flare event at uh at Marathon. You had the wildfire smoke. And then DTE was in the middle of a power outage. So you live in this community and you're trying to figure out how to protect yourself from poor air quality. Your AC is off so now you have to turn on the air the open the windows. And you're being exposed to two poor air from the wildfires. And so you're in a situation now where um you really have no escape. >> Yeah. >> [snorts] >> This monitor in particularly has been uh in the top 10 worst monitors across the county. So we're standing right now in River Rouge, Michigan uh which is kind of in the bedrock or heart of a lot of our industrial history here in Southeast Michigan. >> How could federal policy uh start to empower more communities around this. >> Local monitoring systems like this allow or could allow some of those more regulatory bodies to more uh more granularly uh understand what's going on in our communities so that they can better uh design interventions that are more tailored to towards [music] what the communities that are most impacted by these issues um really need and want. >> When I was in Wayne County, we put up these air quality monitors because we wanted to provide information to the community so that they could use that information to protect themselves and protect their lungs. But, we also got to ask whether or not we need to to go a step further. In [music] the US Senate, I think there's an opportunity to make sure that we're empowering communities with this information all over the country, but [music] also attaching that to regulation to make sure that the corporations that too often get away with this kind of pollution aren't allowed just to do it [music] because nobody should have to breathe air that stings at your throat on its way in, and we can do something