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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Katharine Gammon in Los Angeles with photographs by Thalia Juarez

This LA neighborhood is choked by smog. The solution: a network of sensors on offices, homes and bags

A person adjusting an air sensor on a window grill
Shance Taylor makes adjustments to an air sensor in Pacoima, California, on 17 March 2026. Photograph: Thalia Juarez/The Guardian

Jose Luis Salas looks up at the ladder. “Are you ready?” he asks Shance Taylor, an environmental project manager who’s holding a white container, about the size of a shoebox, covered with wires and numbers.

Taylor nods and climbs up to reach the side of Salas’s tidy house in Pacoima, a neighborhood in Los Angeles’s north-east San Fernando valley. The curious box in their hands is known as Aeroqual sensor – part of a community air-quality monitoring program run by Pacoima Beautiful, a local environmental group.

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