There are lessons to be learned about dealing with wildfire smoke

The Risk of Indoor Air Quality during Wildfires: A Case Study of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Francisco Using Indoor Air Purification Sensors

When New York City’s skyline turned an eerie orange color with smoke from widespread wildfires in Canada, it was an all-too-familiar sight for residents of the Western U.S. In recent years, record-setting wildfires have darkened the sky for weeks at a time with unhealthy air, upending life for Westerners.

The tiny particles in smoke can go deep in the lungs, increasing the risk of asthma, heart attack and stroke. One scientific study found wildfire smoke is even more dangerous than pollution from cars and trucks.

Some households had installed sensors indoors to track air quality levels. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley studied the data from 1,400 sensors in San Francisco and Los Angeles and found that even indoors, air pollution tripled during the fires.

The lesson: just going inside isn’t enough. Particles of smoke can enter through the cracks in windows and doors. In older homes and substandard housing, the infiltration can be even worse.

Still, researchers found the households that took action fared much better. The people that had air conditioners or air purifiers had a lower level of indoor pollution.

When smoke enters the air, it can be difficult to find portable indoor air purifications in a store. So, plans to build more affordable DIY air purifiers have proliferated online where all someone needs is a box fan, some air filters and duct tape.

How do schools tell kids to stay indoors? The lessons learned from the California wildfire smoke prevention campaign and how many kids are exposed to it

The effects of wildfire smoke on children are high. They’re more active, have developing lungs and take in more air than adults do relative to their body size. A few years ago there weren’t many health resources that would inform the decision to close the school.

For school administrators, the decision can be fraught. There are no other choices for parents who want to send their kids to school. Knowing when to keep kids indoors can be tricky for families, based on the official air quality index. While children are considered a “sensitive” group, there’s not much guidance about whether a yellow or orange air alert is enough to keep kids under lockdown.

As wildfire smoke became more severe in California, state officials put together an index that gives more specific advice for schools on how to deal with sports and P.E. (In the state’s version, it doesn’t mention exact air quality index numbers, though many school districts have consulted local air quality officials and created guidelines, like this version from Shasta County Office of Education.)

Creating smoke response plans ahead of time, with community input, is key for schools, according to Eric Wittmershaus, director of communications for the Sonoma County Office of Education. On the West Coast, “smoke days” are becoming the new “snow days.”

“One of the things we tell school officials to balance is whether the students will be safer and healthier if they’re in their school building, which may have a better HVAC system than what the students have at home,” Wittmershaus says. “It’s going to be a fact of life we struggle with.”

Many people don’t realize they need to protect themselves from smoke, unlike other extreme weather events. The elderly or those with health problems might struggle to get the tools and solutions to filter the air at home. Those without a home have no way to escape.

“We see individuals with access to fewer resources, who may live in substandard housing, who may desire to reduce their exposure but who are unable to do so,” says Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, assistant professor in the department of earth system science at Stanford University, who has studied how communities responded to smoke in California.

Not many people are checking the air quality index regularly and changing their behavior, according to her research. Instead, seeing how other people react to smoke is the bigger motivator.

The lesson: make sure the message is coming from those in the local community, like community groups, senior centers or faith groups. It can help to give masks, air filters and resources to groups on the ground.

“Those are populations that we really want to pay the most attention to when we’re thinking about climate impacts, because they tend to be the first line of exposure and they usually get the worst impacts,” says Kathryn Conlon, one of the authors of the paper and an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

When it comes to protecting themselves from smoke, communities with the most smoke can face disadvantages. Lower-income households might not have air purifiers, for instance. The air quality information in English isn’t always translated into all of the languages people speak in a community.

The researchers combined satellite data on smoke plumes with census data on population density and socioeconomic characteristics of the communities exposed. Their study calculates “person-days” of smoke, a measure of the magnitude of a population’s exposure to smoke. It is based on the number of people in the area and the amount of days they had to deal with the smoke.