When the catastrophic Los Angeles fires broke out, John Volckens suspected firefighters and residents were breathing toxic air from the burning homes, buildings, and cars, but it was unclear how much risk the public faced. So, the professor of environmental health at Colorado State University devised a plan to get answers.
Volckens shipped 10 air pollution detectors to Los Angeles to measure the amounts of heavy metals, benzene, and other chemicals released by the flames, which burned more than 16,000 homes, businesses, and other structures, making it one of the country’s costliest natural disasters.
“These disaster events keep happening. They release pollution into the environment and to the surrounding community,” said Volckens, who shared his results with local air regulators. “We have this kind of traumatic experience, and then we’re left with: Well, what did we just breathe in?”
A small air quality monitoring sensor can help people understand what’s in the air after disasters like wildfires. This AirPen device was one that John Volckens dispatched to Los Angeles during the January fires.(Katharine Gammon for KFF Health News)
Scientists and public health officials have long tracked the pollutants that cause smog, acid rain, and other environmental health hazards and shared them with the public through the local Air Quality Index. But the monitoring system misses hundreds of harmful chemicals released in urban fires, and the Los Angeles fires have led to a renewed push for state and federal regulators to do more as climate change drives up the frequency of these natural disasters.
It’s questionable whether the Trump administration will act, however. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what he described as the “biggest deregulatory” action in history, which critics warn will lead to a rollback of environmental health regulations.
While Air Quality Index values are a good starting place for knowing what’s in the air, they don’t provide a full picture of pollutants, especially during disasters, said Yifang Zhu, a professor of environmental health sciences at UCLA. In fact, the AQI could be in a healthy range, “but you could still be exposed to higher air toxins from the fires,” she added.
In February, nearly a dozen lawmakers from California called on the EPA to create a task force of local and federal authorities to better monitor what’s in the air and inform the public. Locals are “unsure of the actual risks they face and confused by conflicting reports about how safe it is to breathe the air outside, which may lead to families not taking adequate protective measures,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to James Payne, who was then the acting EPA administrator. The EPA press office declined to comment in an e-mail to KFF Health News.
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Lawmakers have also introduced bills in Congress and in the California legislature to address the gap. A measure by U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) would direct the EPA to allocate grant money to local air pollution agencies to communicate the risks of wildfire smoke, including deploying air monitors. Meanwhile, a bill by Democratic state Assembly member Lisa Calderon would create a “Wildfire Smoke Research and Ed …