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By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

The Resilience Action Plan Team got a grant from the Kresge Foundation's Climate Resilience and Urban Opportunity Initiative and they have the support of the city of Newark to enable their work and possibly shape their way of thinking about disaster and health. 

Since Newark is a major port for all transportation methods, it indirectly produces a lot of air pollution because of most of these vehicles in result people living in areas close to the ports suffer more from air pollution in terms of health. 

In this article, it is comparing how polluted Newark is compared to the country mentioning facts such as Newark residents face the nation's second greatest risk due to diesel emissions, the city being the nation's largest trash incinerator in the Northeast, and 25% of the school children in Newark face asthma which is double compared to the nation's average rate. 

According to the article, Hurricane Sandy has caused severe damage in Newark and with the public health and safety in mind, the organization wants to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases in Newark and help reduce climate change and make Newark more resilient. 

In this article, the researchers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came up with a portable air sensor that can measure the levels of the particulate matter and nitrogen oxide in order to get data from the areas that are directly being affected by air pollution. 

In this case, the hazard is distributed differently in the sense of geography because areas near the Eastern shore have had much greater damage rather than ones far away from the Eastern shore.

The organization called Resilience Action Plan (RAP) team is a newly formed organization so they did not get a chance to do something yet from looking in the article. 

Air pollution causes many eye and skin irritation in addition with lung problems resulting in asthma and even cancer. These risks would affect people who live in communities that have high pollution, severely. 

According to the article, officials were trying to evacuate the areas that they predict to have the most damage, move people to higher ground, tell people to stay indoors, and close all public transportation systems.