Hazardous air quality from fires worries parents
Clarissa Carson cradled her baby girl in her arms and felt her heart drop. The ICU nurse looked out her front window, barely making out trees across the street. Dense, choking smoke — the result of nearby wildfires — had settled in her hometown of Medford, Oregon, a city of 82,000 located 27 miles north of the California border.
It was 2017, and Carson badly wanted to take her daughter, who had just started crawling, outside to their yard, to let her feel a ray of sunshine on her face, let the grass tickle her knees. She knew sensory input was critical to her development. This was the summer Carson's blue-eyed baby girl started balling up her fists and shaking her hands when she got excited, drool spilling onto her chubby cheeks.
But she also knew that with the hazardous air quality, it wasn't a good idea. Earlier this week, Carson's daughter had a meltdown — “I just wanna swing! I wanna swing high!” she bawled — when Carson wouldn't let her go outside.
Three years later, the problems persist. As cl i - mate change evolves and fire season burns hotter and longer, the West Coast is increasingly blanketed in dangerous air for long stretches. In Oregon, the Air Quality Index has regularly registered over 500 in much of the state over the past 10 days (healthy air quality is from 0-50; anything above 301 is considered hazardous).
Extremely unhealthy air isn' t unique to Oregon. Smoke has hung over the Bay Area in California and parts of Los Angeles County for most of the past month, and Washington state is dealing with similar problems.
County and state officials have repeatedly urged residents to stay inside to avoid the smoke as much as possible. But no one is completely safe from inhalation of hazardous particles, leaving Carson and other parents to wonder about the risk for young children with still-developing lungs and respiratory systems.
Should parents be concerned, they ask—and if their kid already has breathing problems, should they be thinking of leaving permanently?
“Do my kids have asthma? Not yet,” said Zach Kuhlow, 42, an ER nurse who has a 13- year- old daughter and 10-year-old son. “They're healthy right now, at their baseline, but I worry about their cardiopulmonary health. Staying here, I feel like I'm just setting them up for failure.”
The Kuhlows lost their home in the Alameda fire that destroyed the small towns of Talent and Phoenix just outside of Medford. Cooped up at a hotel, Kuhlow is all but decided that it's time for the family to leave the Pacific Northwest. Originally from Florida, he' s heard from friends that Asheville, North Carolina, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is a great place to raise a family.
“I' m putting my foot down,” he said. “We can't stay here. We have such a great community, and it's gonna be hard to leave but … if you equate the Air Quality Index to smoking cigarettes, it' s basically like you' re smoking multiple packs a day if you go outside.”
Air quality studies not common
Children inhaling polluted air in any form isn't ideal, said Dr. Holger Link, a pulmonology pediatrics expert at Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portland. But studies related to air pollution from fires, both wild land and urban, are almost non-existent.