The Parkland Airshed Management Zone (PAMZ) has completed an air monitoring project in the Eagle Hill and Eagle Valley areas of Mountain View County. This project was funded by a creative sentencing order from the Alberta Court of Justice following an Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act infraction. The report is available on the Alberta Energy Regulator’s (AER) Compliance and Enforcement Dashboard.
PAMZ was awarded the contract following a Request for Proposal published by the AER at the direction of the Court. A mobile monitoring station was deployed from October 2024 to April 2025. During this period, no exceedances of Alberta Ambient Air Quality Objectives were recorded.
“This means essentially there were no air quality issues identified during that timeframe,” stated PAMZ Executive Director Kevin Warren. “The levels of monitored pollutants were similar to those measured at our Caroline Monitoring Site during the same period and consistent with the historical levels we’ve observed at other rural locations through our Ambient Air Monitoring Program.”
Warren noted that air quality in both Eagle Valley and Eagle Hill was classified as very good.
“We observed extremely low ambient levels of sulphur gases, and the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) registered a Low Health Risk 99.5 percent of the time,” he added.
The monitoring results will be shared with residents at a future presentation for the Eagle Valley and Eagle Hill communities.
This project was championed by Mountain View County following a PAMZ Community Information Session held in Olds in July 2024, where several air monitoring opportunities in the County were identified by members of the public.
PAMZ submitted a winning bid to the AER to employ its Dr. Martha Kostuch portable Air Quality Monitoring Station to either address a specific air quality issue identified in the Mountain View County region or collect data to enhance the organization’s knowledge base on the air quality in the area.
The Parkland Airshed Management Zone Assoc. (PAMZ) is a multi-stakeholder non-profit organization consisting of industry, government, environmental organizations and the general public. It was formed in 1997 to monitor and manage air quality within the Parkland Region. The area it encompasses includes communities within the central Alberta region, running from Three Hills in the east to the BC border in the west and from just north of Crossfield in the south to just north of Ponoka in the north. See map at www.pamz.org.