The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Wildfire haze reignites health concerns in Connecticut
The smog from western wildfires that hung over much of Connecticut last week may have lifted, but its arrival reignited fears that poor air quality in a state — dubbed by some as the “nation’s tailpipe” — could worsen due to impacts from climate change, posing increased health risks, particularly for residents of color and those living in low-income areas.
Experts expect climate change will trigger more frequent wildfires in the western United States in the coming years, which means residents in the Northeast should adjust to seeing more hazy days.
The problem extends beyond poor visibility and smokysmelling air. Wildfire fumes wafting across the country and lingering in Connecticut worsen people’s health, especially in poorer communities and among some racial and ethnic groups where subpar air quality and chronic respiratory conditions are more common.
Parts of Connecticut are already home to some of the most polluted air on the East Coast, and the addition of smoke from fires thousands of miles away exacerbates symptoms for people who suffer from deadly lung diseases, such as asthma.
“This is a far reaching problem that needs some sort of resolution,” said Gary Lessor, chief meteorologist at the Western Connecticut State University Weather Center.
As of Friday, the Bootleg fire in Oregon had consumed 414,000 acres and was 53 percent contained. It started after a lightning strike on July 6.
Poor air quality conditions in Connecticut began July 20 and continued through last week, hitting high points again last Monday and Tuesday. The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection issued an air quality alert Tuesday afternoon for all of Connecticut, save for Litchfield County, which covers the northwestern corner of the state.
Lessor said the wildfirerelated haze seemed to last longer than it has in past years. Residents of Connecticut should get used to the effects, he said, given the accelerating impacts of climate change and more frequent fires.
While western cities generally have worse air quality, according to the American Lung Association, Connecticut has the highest levels of ozone pollution in New England. Fairfield County has the highest ozone measures in all of the eastern part of the United States, a Lung Association report states, “in part because of pollution transported from other states,” including being downwind from sizable emission sources in the New YorkNewark metro area.
Connecticut was among a group of states Thursday that announced an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency that would commit the federal government to address pollution that blows into Connecticut and creates unhealthy ground-level ozone. Research
ers have previously found many air-quality-related deaths nationwide are caused by emissions that originated out of state.
Kevin Stewart, director of environmental health at the Lung Association, said wildfires can lead to higher levels of ozone pollution. But the most problematic pollutant in the smoke that arrived in Connecticut last week were tiny particles suspended in the air.
Some amount of those particles are always present in the air we breathe. But during a wildfire, they are spread in high concentrations, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency .
The smaller of these particles, called PM 2.5, have been shown to cause serious health problems. And their levels spiked in Connecticut in recent days. Measurements hit high points on July 26 and 27, EPA data shows.
“It easily enters the lungs, and affects the lungs’ capacity to extract oxygen from the air,” Lessor, the meteorologist, said.
Over the years, the concentration of these troublesome particles in Connecticut’s air have been improving. In fact, the Connecticut Council on Environmental Quality says the state had 347 “good air days” in 2020, up from 343 the year before.
But that is “not a guarantee of future performance,” Stewart said.
“The risk of climate-changeexacerbated wildfires has been increasing over recent years and is expected to continue to worsen,” he said.
Last week’s persistent smog was also due to the specific meteorological conditions, said Paul Farrell, a director at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Air Management. Those conditions aren’t the same during every major wildfire, so Connecticut won’t always get the same haze.
But as wildfires become more frequent, there is a greater likelihood of air pollution problems like what Connecticut saw last week happening more often.
“Unfortunately, DEEP believes we will continue to see smoke impacts in Connecticut related to wildfire smoke throughout the United States and Canada,” Farrell said.
That spells trouble for the roughly 300,000 adults - about one in every 10 - living in Connecticut with asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as those living with other conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Long-term exposure to air pollution has even been associated with an increased likelihood of death and other poor outcomes for people infected with COVID-19, according to recent studies.
Exacerbating existing inequities
In Connecticut, as elsewhere, asthma is far more common in the largest cities, including Stamford, New Haven, Waterbury and Hartford. Residents of the state’s five large cities were nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized than the rest of Connecticut, according to the state Department of Health.
But geography isn’t the only factor at play.
Dr. Chris Carroll, a pediatrician at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford and a researcher focusing on asthma in children, said many, if not most, of his patients come from communities of color.
“There is a higher incidence of Black and Hispanic children who come in with a variety of respiratory diseases,” he said. “That’s largely due to health inequities in those populations.”
According to state Department of Public Health data analyzed by the Connecticut Health Foundation, Black children are almost five times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than white children. Hispanic children are about three times more likely to be hospitalized with asthma than white children.
Black residents in Connecticut, of any age, are three times more likely to die from asthma than their white neighbors. LatinX residents are twice as likely to die from an asthma attack.
Tiffany Donelson, president and CEO of the Connecticut Health Foundation, said air quality is among many factors causing that inequity.
“One thing that we know for sure is that a condition like asthma is really driven by social determinants of health,” she said. “It really is driven by where you work, where you live, where you go to school, where you play.”
Carroll said tiny particulates in the air can cause asthma attacks in both children and adults.
“Asthma can be triggered by infections, or it can be triggered by allergens,” he said. “So things that irritate your airway, things like cigarette smoke, things like particulates from dust or from smoke in the air, particulates from diesel fuel, all those things can irritate your airways and trigger an asthma exacerbation.”
“People who live in some of these cities are exposed to more allergens that might be triggering for their asthma because of dust and other particulates,” he said.
Particulates from wildfires out west are only exacerbating existing inequities, Carroll said.
Donelson said healthcare disparities also contribute to the problem.
Children of color, she said, are “less likely to get an asthma action plan,” and less likely to see physician follow-up after discharge from the hospital. She described it as “a broken system that does not support the needs of the BIPOC [black, indigenous, and other people of color] community in general.”
Carroll said that while the incidence of asthma has levelled off over the last decade, severe cases have continued to rise, the reasons for which he said have not yet been identified. Still, outcomes have improved, in part because of the development of new and better asthma treatments.
Carroll said many more kids are now surviving asthma attacks than when he started 20 years ago.
“We're very fortunate in that, in Connecticut, our outcomes for asthma are very good, meaning we have relatively few deaths, we have relatively few kids who need to be put on life support for asthma, really only a handful a year in the whole state,” he said.