Smoke from wildfire poses a host of health concerns, but when fires burn through urban areas, like the ongoing inferno in Los Angeles, U.S., the health risks increase dramatically.
“This is an entirely different situation because the wildfire smoke is bad enough, but when synthetic materials burn, they’re going to give off more toxics, not only in the air, but also in the ash where the burned-down structures remain,” Judith Enck, a former regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and founder of NGO Beyond Plastics, told Mongabay by phone.
According to the EPA, at least 85,000 different synthetic chemicals are used daily in common household products including clothing, packaging, carpets, computers and paint.
For David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, the biggest concerns during a fire are highly toxic chemicals like dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and asbestos — all known carcinogens.
One major source of dioxins, for example, is plastic material containing chlorine, such as polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. “So that’s flooring in kitchens, that’s vinyl siding on houses, that’s PVC piping that moves drinking water,” Enck said.
A 2022 study found people living in areas prone to wildfire had a 5% elevated risk for lung cancer and 10% higher risk for brain cancer. “If you add plastic and burn plastic that really makes huge amounts of dioxin formation,” Carpenter said. Dioxins are long-lived in the environment with a half-life of roughly a decade. “So, it’s going to be a problem, really for a long period of time,” he added.
A 2021 EPA study found PVC water pipes exposed to high temperatures in an earlier California fire released benzene, another known carcinogen, into drinking water. Several water utilities in Southern California recently warned residents against drinking tap water until it was tested for contaminants.
Fire-related pollution puts children, pregnant women, the elderly and firefighters at particularly high risk.
“The population I’m most concerned about are the firefighters. They have enormous exposure,” Carpenter said.
Both Enck and Carpenter drew parallels between the firefighters tackling the L.A. fires and the first responders at the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.
Those first responders have high rates of cancer, asthma and lung disease after being exposed to many of the very same chemicals and carcinogens that firefighters in California now face, Carpenter said.
“There are lessons from 9/11 that need to be applied here in California,” Enck added.
Carpenter said he’s talked to people who question the safety of returning to L.A. with fire-related pollution and climate change making California’s fire season longer.
“But do you leave California for the fires to move to Florida with the hurricanes or Louisiana with the rising oceans? It’s just impossible to envision any place that’s going to escape climate change,” he said.
Banner image of air pollution amid the L.A. fires. Image courtesy California governor’s office.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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