What happened to the air quality?

When I launched The Dumpster Fire Project, I expected things to stay relatively decent. Sure, we'd see some occasional spikes here and there, but as long as there wasn't another massive wild fire or a volcano, the air quality in Quincy, IL should stay acceptable enough.

To borrow from Hank Hill for a moment.. The air quality is shit right now, I tell you what.

I actually didn't realize how bad it was initially; A few weeks ago, the sensor I typically use went offline, and I didn't notice. After a bit of feeling like absolute garbage and my lungs itching like hell, I decided to check the database, and saw that I wasn't getting updates from the sensor.

Sure enough, the sensor was offline, but another just a few blocks away from the old one was up, so I grabbed it's ID and fed it into the tracker..

..And holy shit, what a dumpster fire.

I can't fully fathom why the air quality has been so bad here lately; Sure, we're having some general construction, but nothing at a scale that should cause the PM2.5 AQI to hover around 270.

That's fucking insane for a small city/large town, my friends. We're talking an air quality on-par with some of the peak AQI values in China, which isn't exactly known for it's pristine skies and tasteless air.

I'm just blown away at how bad things have gotten here.

I've actually found myself frequently wearing a mask just so I can go outside for brief moments.. And have also had to buy a new air purifier for my house because it's bad enough to easily make my house less than ideal for safe breathing.

You may think I'm being a little overzealous here, but folks like me HAVE to be concerned about the air quality: I've got respiratory issues out the wazoo, my friends. I've had asthma since I was a little kid, and pretty severe allergies on top of it.

Breathing bad air for me is dangerous.

Anyway, I'm still going to keep tracking data here, and in about 7 months will probably put together an analysis of the air quality over an entire year.

Wanna build your own Dumpster Fire tracker for your area? You can fork the source code for the Dumpster Fire project if you'd like.