Beside the entrance to the Champlain Heights School in east Saint John, there’s a white building that would pass for a large tool shed except for the wooden platform on the roof with a small antenna supported by a tripod.
It’s the New Brunswick government’s air-quality monitoring station, which measures ambient emissions for volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, a few streets away from the fenceline of the Irving Oil Refinery.
For years, environmentalists like Gordon Dalzell have been concerned about benzene levels, a volatile organic compound deemed cancer-causing by the World Health Organization.
Benzene is a colourless liquid hydrocarbon found in crude oil.
“People can’t taste VOCs,” said Dalzell, who lives in the neighbourhood and has been watching benzene levels for more than two decades.
“You can’t smell them. You can’t see them, of course, and they are just invisible, but they are there.
“Remember, this ambient air is the actual air that we breathe.”
The Champlain Heights air-quality monitoring station is located in a residential neighbourhood close to the oil refinery. (Mark Leger/CBC News)
According to the 2024 air quality monitoring results published by the province, the benzene levels at the Champlain Heights station were the highest they’ve been since 2000, at 0.528 parts per billion annual average concentration. In the report it references the Ontario benchmark is 0.14 ppb.
Benzene isn’t one of the pollutants that New Brunswick regulates through the Clean Air Act,
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