For almost two weeks last year during the Camp Fire , which killed 85 people and destroyed 14,000 homes in Paradise, California, smoke from the blaze inundated the San Francisco neighborhood where Montoya lives with her husband, Trevor McNeil, and their three children.<\/p>\n
Lines formed outside hardware stores as people rushed to buy face masks and indoor air purifiers. The city\u2019s famous open air cable cars shut down. Schools kept children inside or canceled classes, and a church soup kitchen sheltered homeless people from the smoke.<\/p>\n
Montoya\u2019s three children have respiratory problems that their doctor says is likely a precursor to asthma, she said. That would put them among those most at-risk from being harmed by wildfire smoke, but the family was unable to find child-sized face masks or an adequate air filter. Both were sold out everywhere they looked.<\/p>\n
In desperation, her family ended up fleeing to a relative\u2019s vacation home in Lake Tahoe. The children were delighted that they could go outside again.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really needed our kids to be able to breathe,\u201d Montoya said.<\/p>\n
Smoke from wildfires was once considered a fleeting nuisance except for the most vulnerable populations. But it\u2019s now seen in some regions as a recurring and increasing public health threat, said James Crooks, a health investigator at National Jewish Health, a Denver medical center that specializes in respiratory ailments.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are so many fires, so many places upwind of you that you\u2019re getting increased particle levels and increased ozone from the fires for weeks and weeks,\u201d Crooks said.<\/p>\n
One such place is Ashland, Oregon, a city of about 21,000 known for its summer-long Oregon Shakespeare Festival.<\/p>\n
During each of the past two summers, Ashland had about 40 days of smoke-filled air, said Chris Chambers, wildfire division chief for the fire department. Last year, that forced cancellation of more than two-dozen outdoor performances. Family physician Justin Adams said the smoke was hardest on his patients with asthma and other breathing problems and he expects some to see long-term health effects.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was essentially like they\u2019d started smoking again for two months,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Voters in 2018 approved a bond measure that includes money to retrofit Ashland schools with \u201cscrubbers\u201d to filter smoke. Other public buildings and businesses already have them. A community alert system allows 6,500 people to receive emails and text messages when the National Weather Service issues smoke alerts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really feel like we\u2019ve made a conscious effort to adapt to climate change,\u201d Chambers said. \u201cBut you can\u2019t just live your whole life inside.\u201d<\/p>\n
The direct damage from conflagrations that regularly erupt in the West is stark. In California alone, wildfires over the past two years torched more than 33,000 houses, outbuildings and other structures and killed 146 people.<\/p>\n
Harder to grasp are health impacts from microscopic particles in the smoke that can trigger heart attacks, breathing problems and other maladies. The particles, about 1\/30th of the diameter of a human hair, penetrate deeply into the lungs to cause coughing, chest pain and asthma attacks. Children, the elderly and people with lung diseases or heart trouble are most at risk.<\/p>\n Death can occur within days or weeks among the most vulnerable following heavy smoke exposure, said Linda Smith, chief of the California Air Resources Board\u2019s health branch.<\/p>\n Over the past decade as many as 2,500 people annually died prematurely in the U.S. from short-term wildfire smoke exposure, according to Environmental Protection Agency scientists.<\/p>\n The long-term effects have only recently come into focus, with estimates that chronic smoke exposure causes about 20,000 premature deaths per year, said Jeff Pierce, an associate professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University.<\/p>\n That figure could double by the end of this century due to hotter, drier conditions and much longer fire seasons, said Pierce. His research team compared known health impacts from air pollution against future climate scenarios to derive its projections.<\/p>\n Even among wildfire experts, understanding of health impacts from smoke was elusive until recently. But attitudes shifted as growing awareness of climate change ushered in research examining wildfire\u2019s potential consequences.<\/p>\n Residents of Northern California, western Oregon, Washington state and the Northern Rockies are projected to suffer the worst increases in smoke exposure, according to Loretta Mickley, a senior climate research fellow at Harvard University.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really incredible how much the U.S. has managed to clean up the air from other (pollution) sources like power plants and industry and cars,\u201d Mickley said. \u201cClimate change is throwing a new variable into the mix and increasing smoke, and that will work against our other efforts to clear the air through regulations. This is kind of an unexpected source of pollution and health hazard.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Westerners prepare for another summer of sooty skies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,84],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-65857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-wildfire"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65857"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=65857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}