As wildfire smoke becomes a part of life on thewest Coast, so do its health risks
SAN FRANCISCO » Every morning for the past few weeks, Joellen Depakakibo has had a new kind of morning routine. She sets her alarm for 6 and opens the Environmental Protection Agency’s Airnow site on her phone. Newly fluent in the numbers of the air quality indexes, or the AQI, she checks the pollution levels compulsively throughout the day, waiting tomake a difficult call.
If the number passes 150, called “unhealthy” by the EPA, Depakakibo has her employees shut the main door and turn on a medical- grade air purifier inside Pinhole Coffee Shop, the cafe she opened here six years ago. If it passes 200, they close the cafe. She’s had to shut five times in recent weeks because of the smoke that has stubbornly settled over the city.
“I always check in with my staff tomake sure they feel good about coming in. If they say they don’t, we won’t open,” Depakakibo said from her home in Oakland, where she and her wife had the windows closed and two air filters running to protect their newborn baby.
As record-setting wildfires continue to burn up and down thewest Coast, the numbers are still hard to comprehend. More than 5 million acres burned. At least 33 dead. One month of destruction.
Stemming fromclimate change and land management practices, the fires are also having a massive impact on people far from any actual flames. Massive plumes of smoke have converged and covered almost the entire western edge of the United States. It has drifted into the neighboring states of Nevada and Arizona, lowering air quality in some parts. And smoke even blotted out the sun thousands of miles away in the District of Columbia.
The haze along thewest Coast has created themost polluted air in the world over the past week, forcing millions of residents indoors. The Bay Area has had a record runof bad air days, with residents being advised to avoid generating additional pollution for nearly a month. Air filters and purifiers have largely been sold out, and some people are buying personal air- quality devices to use in their homes. Some have put towels around their door frames and windows. Going outdoors is dangerous for even healthy lungs, and exercising has largely been out of the question.
Even if residents follow all precautions — a task made all the more difficult by coronavirus- related limitations on indoor activities — the smoke is still creating short- and long-term health risks for everyone exposed, health experts say.
The particles from wildfires are dangerously small, less than a micron wide, or 10 to 30 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Their size lets them slip past the body’s usual defenses and lodge deep inside the lungs, passing into the blood stream and reaching the heart and the brain. The fires aren’t just burning trees but is also destroying houses, power lines and other infrastructure. The smoke is a complex mixture of volatile organic chemicals, ozone, nitrogen oxides and trace minerals, but it is the particulates under 2.5 microns in size that worry experts the most.