West Virginia air quality today

Terrain decided where West Virginians live, and it decided where the emissions are too. Towns follow the river bottoms because the ridges leave no room, and industry followed the same water: chemical plants along the Kanawha, through what is still called the Chemical Valley, and coal-fired generation strung along the Ohio. On cold, still days a valley a mile or two across holds its own air, with no coastline and no open plain to flush it. Whatever shares the valley is what accumulates.

The Division of Air Quality inside the Department of Environmental Protection operates fourteen monitoring sites statewide — two each in Kanawha and Brooke counties, one each in Berkeley, Cabell, Greenbrier, Hancock, Harrison, Marion, Monongalia, Ohio and Wood — including an NCore site in Charleston. That leaves most of the fifty-five counties without one, and it leaves Institute and Belle, two Kanawha Valley plant towns, with no regulatory monitor at all. Community groups have covered part of that gap themselves: a Kanawha Valley project put up twelve PurpleAir sensors, with units in Belle, Nitro, St. Albans and Charleston’s West Side.

Coverage here is thin, and the reason is arithmetic rather than judgment: the state has few metros large enough to carry their own page. A missing city page is not a finding that the air there was checked and came back fine. In a state shaped like this one, it usually means the closest reading came from a monitor on the far side of a ridge.