Air quality issues due to wildfires lead to demands for state intervention
Large canopies of wildfire smoke continue to cover more than half of California as spots registered, by one measure, the most polluted air on the planet. If this is symptomatic of what Gov. Jerry Brown calls the “new abnormal,” health advocates say the state will need to step up efforts to educate the public and protect them from harmful exposure to hazardous air.
Air already registered as “unhealthy” grew even worse Thursday in many parts of Northern California, hitting or maintaining “very unhealthy” or “hazardous” levels in regions well over 100 miles away from the weekold Camp Fire in Butte County. So many people have been regularly, obsessively checking the federal air quality monitoring site as a result of the state’s wildfires that the page had to be streamlined so it would load properly. Schools cancelled classes, parks were virtually deserted and pharmacies were refilling prescriptions for asthma inhalers and other remedies.
In Southern California, the Woolsey Fire that ravaged the Malibu area created its own acrid residue, but the impact on air quality was less severe — in part thanks to the Santa Ana winds blowing smoke away from populated areas.
Some advocates suggested the state could:
• improve warning systems to alert people to dangerous air
• require counties to distribute high-quality respiratory masks to affected areas, with a focus on at-risk populations
• insist that employers require mask use for those who work outside when the Air Quality Index reaches alarming levels
• more thoroughly research the long-term effects of fire smoke on those who live and work outside.
“Counties are the closest to the ground and run a lot of emergency management. But the counties are not going to prepare for it unless the state tells them to,” said Lucas Zucker, policy director for the social justice organization Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy.
The state has to go further than just issuing notices encouraging people to stay indoors, says health scientist Ananya Roy — noting the huge number of people displaced by the fires, as well as homeless people and the poor who are still expected to work outdoors.
“They are not going to be able to be reached by health alerts,” said Roy, a scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “There need to be better strategies to address the most vulnerable in our populations.”
A Quartz headline making the rounds on social media this week declared that breathing in parts of California was equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Drifting smoke and haze from the fires contain toxic gases and fine particles so small that, once inhaled, they can burrow into the lungs and end up in the bloodstream, triggering short- and longterm illness.
“The things you can’t see are more of a health hazard,” said Ed Avol, a professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine who specializes in respiratory issues. “Not only is there wood burning, but also homes and buildings and other structures, and in those buildings there are all kinds of chemicals.