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There is never any water in Strahosky's bucket, but it's not because she's absentminded. The Avalon resident doesn't put out fires. Her brigade uses its buckets to collect air samples.

Any time a neighbor smells something strange in the air, a phone call brings Strahosky or another of the brigade's half-dozen members, bucket in hand.

After 18 months of testing, the brigade says it has captured a previously undetected, potentially harmful chemical in the air where they live. Clean Water Action, a national grassroots environmental group that finances and trains the brigade, has called a news conference this morning in Avalon to release the details.

The group says it has detected acrylonitrile, a man-made chemical byproduct of the manufacture of certain chemicals and plastics. While its long-term effect on humans is not fully established, acrylonitrile has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

"I live here and I breathe this, and my kids breathe it and my friends breathe it," said Strahosky, 50. "It is something that is not going to go away unless people make noise about it."

Strahosky's bucket isn't quite standard issue. A tiny pump sucks air out of the five-gallon sealed plastic containers, creating a vacuum. To get a sample, Strahosky and her fellow testers go to the scene of the scent and open a valve on the bucket. Lower pressure draws air into a plastic bag inside, and that is sent to a California laboratory for testing.

The bucket brigade is a project of the Neville Island Good Neighbor Committee, a residents group that wants the Allegheny County Health Department to conduct more tests to look for pollutants drifting downwind from the heavily industrialized tip of Neville Island.

Several bucket samples this summer have detected unsafe levels of acrylonitrile, said Myron Arnowitt, local director of Clean Water Action.

"We started the bucket brigade to show that, guess what, there are lots of toxic chemicals in our air and it’s time for our agencies to start getting serious about it," Arnowitt said.

County health department monitoring stations regularly test the air for only about a half-dozen of some 200 known pollutants, department spokesman Guillermo Cole said. It doesn't test for acrylonitrile.

The only known source of acrylonitrile in the county is a Forward Township landfill, which emits very slight amounts. Cole said the department will review the bucket brigade's findings once they are released.

"Quite frankly, we don’t think there’s reason for alarm. Concern, maybe. But there’s a lot of stuff out there that is carcinogenic. The question is, is it carcinogenic at the levels at which people are exposed to it?" Cole said.

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