Air pollution in South Baltimore’s Curtis Bay — a residential area surrounded by industrial facilities — is on par with pollution near major highways and the city’s downtown area, according to a new study by the University of Maryland and other collaborators.

The study, published last week in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association, focused on the prevalence of black carbon in Curtis Bay and other pollution hot spots in the region. Black carbon is a sootlike air pollutant emitted from gas and diesel engines, coal-fired power plants and other fossil fuel burners that — according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — is tied to asthma and other respiratory problems, heart attacks, low birth rates and lung cancer.

Researchers at the University of Maryland and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration designed a pollutant measurement tool that could be attached to the roof of a standard Chevrolet Suburban. Between March and May of 2022 and January and June of 2023, the mobile lab — nicknamed “NOAA’s ARC” — was deployed in the region spanning Baltimore and Washington, D.C., for a total of 64 days.

They found that black carbon tended to be the most concentrated in Baltimore along major highways (Interstates 95, 895 and 695), in the congested downtown area and near Curtis Bay, a community near the Patapsco River’s Curtis Bay.

“You would expect a lot of black carbon and other pollutants where you have an eight-lane highway and heavy truck traffic,” said Russell Dickerson, an atmospheric and oceanic science professor at the University of Maryland. “The residential area was a bit of a surprise.”

Dickerson was lead author on the study, which was published online Aug. 26. Other authors included researchers from NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Maryland Department of the Environment and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust.

The study adds to other research recently published about air pollution in Curtis Bay. In December, a collection of researchers from Hopkins, the University of Maryland, the state environment department and community organizations released a report that captured the toll of coal dust in the community.

Much of the coal dust is believed to be from the adjacent CSX Curtis Bay Coal Piers, which load coal brought in by train mostly from Appalachia for export. CSX has taken issue with the aspects of the report, but the state recently issued a draft of a new air quality permit for the facility that requires it to take further steps to reduce coal dust.

Coal dust can be a source of black carbon in the environment, Dickerson said. While he and his teammates certainly found levels of coal dust in Curtis Bay — “Full stop, it’s there,” he said — their instrument was designed to measure the smaller pollutant particles emitted from gas and diesel engines, not the larger, more coarse ones found in coal dust.

In the study, researchers cited advocacy efforts by Curtis Bay residents as a motivator for measuring black carbon and other pollutants in the neighborhood. The Community of Curtis Bay Association and other community-action groups want to route diesel truck traffic away from the neighborhood’s residential and small-business corridor and to end subsidies for incinerators and landfills, among other objectives listed in the study.

Angie Shaneyfelt, a Curtis Bay Association board member, has been involved in regional advocacy efforts since 2021, when an explosion at the CSX facility rattled the surrounding neighborhoods.

She acknowledged that she doesn’t read every study that comes out about pollution in the area, since they tend to be filled with scientific jargon. But she doesn’t have to be a scientist to know that there’s something wrong with the air in the neighborhood where she’s lived for 16 years.

She has wiped chunks of coal dust from the filter in her window air conditioning unit and keeps her windows shut year-round. Her 11-year-old twins have seasonal asthma — a condition she also was diagnosed with about two years ago. And her husband struggles with a perpetual cough.

“The air feels heavy,” she said. “Whether that’s the coal, whether that’s the carbon particles from the trucks, I don’t know. It’s just in the air. And you can feel it.”

The constant noise from truck traffic on Pennington Avenue — about a block away from Shaneyfelt’s home — feels like another type of pollution Curtis Bay residents have to live with, she said. When she goes to work at Hon’s Honey, a beauty shop on the busy road, she listens all day to the sound of trucks slowing for red lights, then accelerating.

Curtis Bay is likely just one of many communities around the country experiencing a black carbon pollution problem, Dickerson said. But it also presents the opportunity to create a model for mitigating the negative effects caused by truck traffic in residential neighborhoods.

In the long term, Dickerson said, heavy-duty, diesel-burning trucks need to be replaced with electric vehicles. Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration outlined a plan to boost the number of zero-emission commercial vehicles on the road and increasing access to electric vehicle recharging and hydrogen refueling along the country’s freight corridors and at truck depots.

But actions also can be taken in the shorter term, such as monitoring roads to identify heavy emitters, diverting heavy-duty trucks from residential neighborhoods, and adding more trees and green space. Additionally, Dickerson said, researchers found the concentration of black carbon on Pennington Avenue to be three times higher on average than on Curtis Avenue, which runs parallel a block away and is closer to the coal piers.

They suspect that’s because Pennington has three stop lights, causing a stop-and-go traffic pattern. Better timing of the lights on that stretch of road would lead to smoother traffic flow — and fewer emissions generated from trucks accelerating after slowing to a stop, Dickerson said.

David Jones, another Curtis Bay Association board member, works in road safety. Living on Curtis Avenue alongside the truck traffic feels “beyond dangerous,” he said. Beyond the pollution problem, he’s worried that one day a tractor-trailer will crash through his front window.

He wishes only local trucks were allowed to drive through Curtis Bay. Now, he said, commercial vehicles from all kinds of industries use roads in the neighborhood. Traffic has only worsened in the area since the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March, Jones said.

Jones has lived in Curtis Bay off and on since he was a kid, he said. It’s where he got his first apartment when he was 16. It’s always felt “off the beaten path,” which makes problems faced by the community feel easy for politicians and officials to ignore, he said. Roadway congestion is no exception.

Like a lot of problems in Curtis Bay, “it’s never gotten better,” Jones said. “It’s gotten worse.”