Mobile news broadcast vans chase stories, and ice cream vans sell cones, but Natalie Johnson’s Mobile Responding to Air Pollution in Disasters—or mRAPiD—van is after something a bit more prolific than that: the literal air we breathe. Or, rather, what’s in the air.
Plus, arming a van with a hypersensitive mass spectrometer so it can be driven to disaster areas for sample collection is one of the cooler vehicle applications—and further proof that vans are the GOATed body style.
A Toxicologist and a Mom
Johnson is an associate professor and chair of the toxicology interdisciplinary program at Texas A&M University, where she also earned her Ph.D. in toxicology. Her research focuses on negative health effects in pregnant people, children, and other disproportionately vulnerable populations from exposure to air pollutants. As a mom, she saw the rising rates of childhood asthma across the United States and wanted to help kids control their asthma and prevent them from going to the emergency room.
“As a toxicologist, I really wanted to understand what was making that rise in the first place,” Johnson told MotorTrend. “You can’t turn on the news today without seeing what’s happening with the wildfires in California, hurricanes and floods being more frequent, and—just holistically—the commonality of these environmental disasters. [They] can pose a significant risk for short-term exposure. What does that mean for long-term respiratory disease risk?”
Disaster frequency is what led Johnson and her team to mobile monitoring. There’s collaboration with the EPA and other state-level governments, but without knowing when or where a disaster will strike, “a stationary network may not always be adequate for evaluation,” Johnson explained. For example, in the case of a hurricane, maybe equipment has to be turned off or sheltered so it won’t get damaged.
As part of a superfund research center, Johnson realized they needed something both mobile and nimble to assess ambient air. “There are different handheld units, and we even have a backpack that has a specific technology to look at volatile organic compounds,” she said, “but not to the level of sensitivity that you can get with the mass spectrometer we have.”
A van, then, was the logical choice.
Meet the mRAPiD Van
Texas A&M’s mRAPiD van is a highly specialized piece of equipment that can detect chemical air pollutants in real time and provide residents with hyperlocal information on the quality of their air that might not yet be largely available elsewhere.
From the outside, the van looks like a white Ford E-350 with some extra rigging on its roof. The university acquired it from a nonprofit in the Houston area that had been doing some mobile monitoring but stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson said. To help power onboard equipment, the E-350 originally had a strengthened alternator, a power inverter, and two deep-cycle marine batteries.
“We learned a lot in our first year of what we needed,” Johnson said. “We recently upgrade[d] our system [to now have] a dual alternator that provides ample power to multiple types of equipment at the same time. And we have these new lithium-ion phosphate batteries that allow us to hold power so we can continue to operate when needed.”
Eventually, Johnson wants to get an EV for the job. “That’s our dream,” she said. “This is our 1.0 getting into it. In the future, we’re definitely going to expand, and we’d love to go all electric.”
Inside, the mRAPiD van carries a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer cradled in a custom gimbal (made by Johnson’s father, no less). There’s also a Magellan weather sensor that provides meteorological data, GPS so the team can track where they’re detecting the emission event in real time, the sampling boom on the roof, and a pump under the van that pulls in air. The van also had its shocks newly redone to help protect everything, “because [there’s] nearly half a million dollars’ worth of equipment on board,” Johnson said.
“We typically stay between 30 to 20 mph and are very mindful of bumps or rough roads,” Navada Harvey, a laboratory operations manager at Texas A&M and a member of Johnson’s “pit crew,” told MotorTrend in an email. “However, many of our sampling areas are underserved and the roads are just rough, unfortunately. In these cases, we keep it around 20 mph. Dr. Johnson’s father lowered our sampling boom a couple years back because our drivers had been colliding with trees in suburban and rural neighborhoods.”
Throughout the year, the van undergoes standard maintenance like oil changes and battery checks. When it’s not being used, the team keeps it plugged into shore power so “it’s ready to deploy at a moment’s notice,” Harvey went on. “I make sure the van is driven every few weeks if there is a lull in deployments or projects.” She also keeps the calibration gases (zero air, O2, and various volatile organic compounds) stocked.
The Van in Action
There are two ways the van collects data. The first is by sitting stationary and reading different ranges, sometimes right outside of an evacuation zone to ensure the air is safe. The other is by being, well, mobile and testing air quality levels as you move closer to or further from the disaster. And a van is truly the ideal vehicle because it’s nimble and fits places that bigger vehicles like buses and trucks cannot.
“We’re very cognizant of [what people might think] if you’re seeing a white van driving around your neighborhood,” Johnson said. “Since [putting together] the video, we have new branding, updated paint, and we usually try and work with local organizations on talking about what we’re doing there and then always reporting back. By and large, people are usually glad to have data. They want to know what’s in their air and what it means. We try to help put people at ease, especially after a disaster event, which can cause a lot of stress on its own regardless of any potential environmental exposure that may be occurring.”
“It’s amazing to directly meet the folks that we are helping with our data collection,” Harvey added.
In addition to the routine sampling performed in Houston and Dallas neighborhoods, the mRAPiD van doesn’t just stay in Texas. After the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment disaster in February 2023, Johnson and her team had it shipped to the area (to avoid undue wear and tear). In order to collect complementary data to assist the EPA, they measured the air immediately after the disaster as well as over time so they could establish a normal background. Eventually, the findings were published in a study Johnson co-authored, which you can read here.
When it comes to deciding whether to deploy the van, the team follows a “go or no go” procedure—literally a flowchart that you can see below:
In the case of a fire that broke out at an Indiana plastics facility while the van was in East Palestine, the team was able to relocate it four hours away. (The findings appear in another study Johnson co-authored.) “After we did that, we realized, gosh, these things are catching fire very frequently,” Johnson said. “I think it’s been harder and harder for us to export our plastic waste. Those have been prone to fires.”
This past September, the team responded to another fire at a tire recycling facility in Jackson, Mississippi. “It was a training exercise for our students and an opportunity to respond to a community,” Johnson said. “They reached out to the National Institutes of Health Disaster Response Network, and that’s how we got involved with doing some sampling there. We definitely saw very characteristic profiles at each one of these sites, which is really interesting and adds to the literature of unknown compounds that we should be measuring.”
Mobile monitoring is a popular method of gathering data. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has a large fleet, Johnson said while noting they don’t have the same equipment. “Some of their equipment might be in the parts per million or low parts per billion range, which is typically adequate for the safety and regulatory limits,” she said. “Our equipment is pretty unique in that it can get down into the very low parts per trillion range. Parts per trillion is basically a drop of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, so that’s an extremely low level. Most things at that level are not going to be of major health concerns, especially at the acute short-term exposure limit. We have one of the very few super-sensitive breathalyzer-type machines on board.”
The Effect of EVs on the Environment
As an aside, Johnson definitely sees positive effects on public air quality as we trend toward more EV ownership.
“I have done a lot of collaborative work with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute—they have a center that’s focused on looking at the whole pipeline, energy and emissions,” Johnson said. “Overall, I think we’re seeing improvements in air quality as we move toward electrification.”
Of course, there are other aspects to more EVs on our roads that need to be studied. “For instance,” Johnson continued, “with heavier vehicles, wear and tear, things like brake dust, and maybe potential specific metals that would be absorbed may be of concern. So, as we improve one area (ambient air quality and decreasing what’s coming out of the tailpipe), we’re still conscious about what other potential emerging exposures may occur. That’s one area we’re just now getting into looking at: the non-tailpipe emissions and what that means for toxicity of specific pollutants.”
Environmental toxicology is a small but highly collaborative industry, an ideal situation, as science for the improvement of public health is everyone’s business. And as cool as the mRAPiD van is, a tool is only as good as its wielder. We’re all lucky to have Natalie Johnson and her dedicated team at the literal and figurative wheel.
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