smoke

2Oct

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SCIENCE

Wildfire Smoke Is Laced With Toxic Chemicals – Here’s How They Got There

When you breathe in smoke from a wildfire, you’re probably inhaling more toxic chemicals than you realize. Pollution from power plants and vehicles, pesticides, fertilizers and chemicals in waste can all make their way into trees and plants. When those trees and plants burn, chemicals are released along with health-harming particulate matter in the smoke, gas and ash. Millions of people have been breathing that smoky air this year as the western U.S. experiences another extreme fire year. More than 4 million acres had burned in the West by Oct. 1, California had nearly doubled its previous record for acreage burned, and several weeks of wildfire risk were still ahead. As an engineer and scientist who studies air pollution, I have been looking into how those chemicals compound the health...

How can smoke from West Coast fires cause red sunsets in New York?

23Sep

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

How can smoke from West Coast fires cause red sunsets in New York?

If you are one of the millions of people in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. who turned your gaze toward the sky recently, you may have noticed the Sun shining through an odd, milky haze. This widespread opaque veil was caused not by clouds, but rather by smoke from wildfires in the Western U.S. The smoke was cruising by in the middle levels of the atmosphere many thousands of feet above the ground. While far too high to smell, it caused spectacularly hued sunsets from New York to D.C. to Missouri. The thin haze, easily visible in this satellite photo over Pennsylvania and New York, is smoke that traveled over a thousand miles on air currents from the fires on the West Coast. NOAA Red sky at night Lasting for about a week from Sept. 12 to Sept. 19, the smoke could be seen in satellite images ...

Smoke from wildfires can worsen COVID-19 risk, putting firefighters in even more danger

11Sep

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

Smoke from wildfires can worsen COVID-19 risk, putting firefighters in even more danger

Two forces of nature are colliding in the western United States, and wildland firefighters are caught in the middle. Emerging research suggests that the smoke firefighters breathe on the front lines of wildfires is putting them at greater risk from the new coronavirus, with potentially lethal effects. At the same time, firefighting conditions make precautions such as social distancing and hand-washing difficult, increasing the chance that, once the virus enters a fire camp, it could quickly spread. As an environmental toxicologist, I have spent the last decade expanding our understanding of how wood smoke exposure impacts human health. Much of my current research is focused on protecting the long-term health of wildland firefighters and the communities they serve. Air pollution and ling...

The secondhand smoke you’re breathing may have come from another state

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

HEALTH & WELLNESS

The secondhand smoke you’re breathing may have come from another state

Scientists estimate that each year in the U.S., outdoor air pollution shortens the lives of about 100,000 people by one to two decades. As it turns out, much of this pollution originates not in a person’s own neighborhood, but up to hundreds or even thousands of miles away in neighboring states. And, absent strong federal regulations, there’s very little Americans can do about it. In a study published on Feb. 12, we used state-of-the-art modeling to estimate the number of air pollution-related deaths that combustion emissions – those from any kind of burning, from cook stoves to car engines to coal power plants – from each state have caused in every other state over the past 14 years. On average, 41% of these air pollution deaths in the U.S. resulted from what we call “secondhand smok...