It was still winter break for the Claremont Colleges when the Palisades, Eaton and other wildfires broke out across Los Angeles County. Still, a small group of students, staff and locals teamed up on a project to provide relief for those impacted by the related poor air quality. On Sunday, Jan. 12, Clean Air Claremont, which had formed just one day prior, held its first build session as 14 people gathered to make 20 air purifiers to be distributed to people impacted by smoke and ash from the Eaton Fire in Altadena.
And then the group kept building.
"Personally, it had been an idea in the back of my mind for a bit," says Samson Zhang, referring to the air purifiers. Zhang is a Pomona College senior studying policy analysis and physics. They've been involved in local, mutual aid efforts before the Eaton Fire and had previously thought about air purifiers in response to COVID and general air pollution concerns.
But in the earliest days of the wildfires, air quality became an immediate issue. On January 10, Los Angeles County's public health department declared a local health emergency as a result of the wildfires, with hazardous conditions, including air quality, impacted by both smoke and particulate matter from the fires. Concerns grew across the Southland as homes, buildings and other signs of urban life burned, which could increase toxic chemicals in the air.
Meanwhile, Angelenos quickly came together to help those in need. Maga Miranda, a faculty member in the ethnic studies department at Pomona College, had been doing supply runs in L.A. "But it was very clear that there was an oversaturation of supplies and volunteers in L.A. proper," she says. "So the question for us was: How can we best utilize our resources that we have here?"
As it turns out, there was a growing need for air purifiers among those still living within the vicinity of the Eaton Fire. "Even people whose homes were not burned down by the wildfires are still impacted differently by them," says Miranda. "There are a lot of people who live in the surrounding areas, who are suffering from poor air quality. We wanted to support that and that's where Clean Air Claremont came about."
The upstart group had links to mutual benefit networks, as well as the COVID-conscious community, which has been involved in making and modifying air purifiers for the past few years. "We had some folks who know how to build the purifiers," says Zhang. "That's a contribution we can make ... to build a bunch of these purifiers and try to get them out to folks who need them."
Miranda notes that they were also able to connect with a professor at Harvey Mudd to check information and informally consult with engineers on the design of the purifiers.
In 2020, Dr. Richard Corsi, dean of the College of Engineering at UC Davis, and Jim Rosenthal, chairman and CEO of Tex-Air Filters, developed what would become known as the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, an air purifier design that could be built at home with a fan, five MERV 13 air filters and duct tape. They made the design open-source, and since then others have developed variations of their work.
Because of demand and the immediacy of the situation, Clean Air Claremont needed purifier designs that they could build quickly and affordably. They opted to use a design that used one MERV 13 filter, plus a modification to incorporate a cardboard shroud that would improve the airflow.
"For sourcing, we started off getting some from Home Depot," says Zhang. "It was a little bit of a challenge to find the right size of a filter and enough fans that were in stock. We were running around to different locations to see where they were in stock."
Eventually, they were able to get a bulk deal on the MERV 13 filters, bringing the cost of parts per unit to $35.49, and raised money through their social networks.
Because Miranda went to grad school at UCLA and has done a lot of community organizing, she's played a crucial role in getting the air purifiers out to people. "We've had the best luck so far connecting with individuals who live or are connected to families in the affected areas," she says.
For example, she says, about 40 of the air purifiers were distributed via two people she knew, one in Pasadena and one in Altadena, who were able to hand deliver them to those in their communities who needed them. "Rather than going through these overwhelmed community centers that are doing as much as they can to collect donations, we've had a lot of success going through some of these less visible networks," she says.
Miranda describes their current actions as "acute triage work," but she notes that the group is now looking at longer-term goals.
"We're already making plans to, in the following builds, dedicate some resources to refills on the filters," she says. "The filters that we're making are good, in normal circumstances, about 90 days, but in these acute circumstances, they need to be swapped out sooner than that."
The group is also improving its own efficiency with each build session. "We were really surprised because we were able to make 40 purifiers in one hour," says Miranda of the group's most recent effort. "A week ago, we built 20 in three hours. We're learning the best practices of this design. We've created templates for the shroud and how to attach the filters. We're teaching more and more people every time how to build more."