wildfires

February 6, 2025

Postcard from California: The long-term public health toll of the LA fires

By Bill Walker

The horrific fires that incinerated more than 40,000 acres in Southern California last month were still burning when newly-inaugurated President Trump flew in to view the devastation. At a Jan. 24 press briefing with local officials, he groused that he had heard people who lost their homes would not be allowed to rebuild for up to 18 months.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass pointed out that, first, burned lots had to be cleared of hazardous waste. “The most important thing is for people to be safe,” she said.

“What’s hazardous waste?” Trump retorted. “You’re going to have to define that. Are we going to go through a whole series of questions on determining what’s hazardous waste? I just think you have to allow people to go on their site and start the [cleanup] process tonight.”

Despite what Trump may think, federal regulators have established clear definitions of hazardous waste. When the Palisades and Eaton fires consumed more than 16,000 homes and other structures in the Los Angeles area, they left behind over 4.25 million tons of it. While the fires have been contained, exposure to dangerous toxins in that lingering waste and in the smoke that choked the region for more than three weeks will, over time, claim many more victims than the 29 lives lost in the flames.

Heat, drought and the Santa Ana winds were the fires’ direct causes, but scientists say conditions were made worse by climate change. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, told NPR: “These fires are very likely more intense and dangerous … because of global warming.”

US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers in hazmat gear are racing against a Trump-ordered Feb. 25 deadline to inspect each burn site and perform an initial cleanup. “We have to move five times the speed based on the directives we are getting,” an EPA official told Reuters. “Normally, this takes months.”

November 20, 2024

A call for EPA action on climate risks to hazardous waste facilities

By Dana Drugmand

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be doing more to help address potential climate change-related risks to hundreds of hazardous waste facilities across the country, according to a recent government watchdog report.

The Nov. 14 report, issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), examined the risks to hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs) from flooding, storm surge, sea level rise, and wildfires, events expected to intensify and/or become more frequent with climate change.

More than 700 out of 1,091 federally regulated facilities, or about 68%, are located in areas vulnerable to these weather-related events, the report found. Roughly half of these facilities could be at risk of flooding and more than one-third are in areas vulnerable to wildfire, while almost 200, or 17%, , are in coastal areas at risk of inundation from storm surge.

Chemical waste drums, petroleum storage tanks, toxic landfills and other facilities that treat, store, or dispose of hazardous waste are regulated by EPA under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976. While EPA sets national standards, states implement the regulations and provide enforcement. But, according to the GAO, states currently lack clear direction from EPA on how to assess or manage climate-related risks to hazardous waste facilities, particularly during inspections.

“People at EPA know about the risks, but there has not been real forward-leadership on this,” said Judith Enck, who served as a regional administrator for EPA during the Obama administration. “I can’t tell you how many times I would flag something and was told, ‘well we don’t have the resources and we really can’t do that until headquarters tells us to do something.’”

The EPA has started to take steps to address climate change risks at hazardous waste facilities. In June, for example, it issued guidance on how states can require management of these risks when facilities are permitted. But the GAO said the agency should take additional actions to clarify requirements for climate risk management and to improve and help states implement the guidance.

GAO made nine recommendations to the EPA, including offering training and technical assistance to states to help them understand and manage climate-related risks at hazardous waste facilities.

But as the agency prepares to transition to new leadership under the incoming Trump administration, there are questions around whether it will ultimately act upon the GAO recommendations, or if it will even have the resources to do so. The GAO report identified resource constraints as one of several challenges for addressing climate change risks to hazardous waste facilities.

October 31, 2024

High levels of hazardous heavy metals found in products used to fight wildfires

By Douglas Main

A new study shows that sprays and retardants used to fight wildfires contain surprisingly high levels of toxic heavy metals, a “disturbing” finding at a time when wildfires are generally getting worse.

The paper, published October 30 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, found that each of 14 fire suppression products examined contained at least eight of the ten heavy metals tested for, including chromium, cadmium, lead, and arsenic. Most of these metals or their derivatives are highly toxic, and known to cause a long list of diseases, including cancer.

All have been approved for use by the US Forest Service, which did not respond to a request for comment.

The findings raise questions about the ecological and human health impact of spraying large quantities of these materials over huge tracts of land in the western United States, according to study lead author Daniel McCurry, an environmental chemist at the University of Southern California.

McCurry and colleagues became interested in investigating these products’ chemistry as wildfire severity has increased in recent years and news reports showed these being used widely throughout California and other western states.

Wildfires have generally become more intense and widespread in recent years and decades, an expected outcome of human-caused climate change and land management practices. A total of just under 8 million acres have burned so far this year in the United States, a 24% increase over the 10 year average. Research suggests wildfires will get more severe and burn more acres in coming decades.

August 22, 2024

Climate change may be driving extreme fires far ahead of schedule, study warns

By Dana Drugmand

Last year’s record-shattering Canadian wildfire season was directly linked to human-caused climate change, according to a new study, which warns that the climate crisis may be fueling extreme fires decades earlier than previously expected.

This is the largest assessment specifically of Canada’s 2023 fire season, which was unprecedented in its scope and intensity, and adds to a wider body of evidence showing that climate change is fueling dangerous fires around the world at a rapidly growing pace.

“What was unusual is the amount of activity across the country,” said Piyush Jain, a research scientist with Natural Resources Canada’s Canadian Forest Service and a lead author of the study, which published this week in the journal Nature Communications. “Already we saw a year which would be as extreme as what we would expect to see in 2050.”

Fires burned across much of Canada from April through October 2023, torching an area roughly the size of Illinois – seven times more land than has historically been burned during the country’s wildfire season, on average. The extent of last year’s fire activity, stretching from British Columbia all the way east to Nova Scotia in a single season, had not been anticipated until later this century under current climate projections, according to researchers.

The wildfires in Canada last June also affected major cities on the East Coast of the US, turning skies a hazy orange and bringing alarming air pollution levels to New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Toxic particulates carried on the wildfire smoke raised risks of premature death from North Carolina to California and threatened $36 billion in annual US economic losses, one study found.

Climate change more than doubled the chances for the extreme fire weather conditions that led to the 2023 blazes, according to an August 2023 study. Another study examining global wildfire activity in 2023, published last week, reported that climate change both increased the chance of “high fire weather” last year in Canada and increased the burned area by up to 40 percent.

June 20, 2024

Postcard from California: The human cost of living with wildfires

By Bill Walker

The toll of wildfire in California is staggering: In the last 10 years, wildfires have burned more than 13.6 million acres of the state and taken the lives of 144 people, including 15 firefighters. The state estimates property damages from the more than 93,000 wildfires in those years at nearly $250 billion.

But sobering as those statistics are, they don’t measure the full cost to Californians from living with increasingly deadly and destructive wildfires.

A new study, led by researchers from the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), calculated that from 52,480 to 57,710 Californians died prematurely from exposure to wildfire smoke between 2008 and 2018. The study, published June 7 in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, estimated the economic impact of those lost lives at between $432 billion and $456 billion.

“Climate change, forest mismanagement and an expansion of the wildland-urban interface have led to worsening wildfires across California, and with those fires come smoke pollution and increasing health impacts from air pollution exposure,” Rachael Connolly, a staff researcher at the UCLA Fielding School and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “This is the first research exploring how that chronic, long-term smoke exposure affects people across the state.”

The wildland-urban interface refers to zones where people live near forests or other undeveloped areas at greater risk of wildfire. The high cost and scarcity of housing in coastal cities is pushing more and more Californians to move inland, swelling the population in areas more likely to burn.

August 14, 2023

Youth win historic climate lawsuit against Montana

By Dana Drugmand

A group of young people who sued Montana officials for failing to adequately address climate change have prevailed in what observers say is a historic legal challenge.

On Monday, Lewis and Clark District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that the plaintiffs in the case, Held v. State of Montana, have a fundamental right to a clean and healthful environment, including a stable climate system, under the Montana constitution. The judge found that the state was contributing to environmental degradation and climate harm in violation of this right.

The case is the first-ever constitutional climate trial in the country, pitting youth inheriting climate problems against the government leaders they blame for the dire legacy. The plaintiffs in the case contended that Montana officials have been turning a blind eye to climate pollution by continuing to issue permits for fossil fuel projects, including expansion of coal mining.

“If this decision is upheld by the Montana Supreme Court it will be a landmark in US climate litigation,” said Patrick Parenteau, Senior Fellow for Climate Policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School. The trial judge’s ruling in itself is “extremely important,” he said, since it represents the first time in the US that a court has recognized a constitutional right to a healthy environment that encompasses climate.

The ruling came after a little more than a month after the conclusion of the trial in the state capital of Helena in which college students and other young people testified about the harm climate changing is having on their lives, including the impacts of wildfires that have been raging through the western US. Climate scientists and other expert witnesses substantiated youth plaintiffs’ testimony at trial, explaining how the climate crisis poses severe threats to children’s physical and mental health.

Judge Seeley acknowledged the plaintiffs’ claims in her ruling, writing that the state’s “[greenhouse gas] emissions and climate change have been proven to be a substantial factor in causing climate impacts to Montana’s environment and harm and injury to the Youth Plaintiffs.”

Fountaingrove_after_the_October_2017_Northern_California_wildfires

June 27, 2023

Postcard from California: The climate crisis has become a home insurance crisis

By Bill Walker

It’s an ominous sign of how the climate crisis is hitting ever closer to home: Because of the heightened risk of catastrophic wildfires, the two leading U.S. homeowners insurance companies no longer offer new policies in California.

Last month, State Farm, which insures 1 in 5 California homes, announced it would immediately stop selling new home and business property and casualty policies to avoid “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” Days later, Allstate, the fourth-largest insurer in the state, confirmed it had quietly stopped writing new California policies last year, because wildfires had driven the cost of insuring and rebuilding homes “far higher” than it could recoup from customers.

Current State Farm and Allstate policyholders are still covered – at least for now. State data show that since 2017, insurers have cancelled or declined to renew almost 1 million homeowner policies, most in areas at high risk of wildfire. Some companies that specialize in insurance for high-end, multimillion-dollar homes have pulled out of the California market altogether.

Californians have always lived with the ever-present threat of wildfire, but the eight worst wildfires in the state’s history have all burned in the last five years. In that period, wildfires have burned more than 11 million acres in California, destroying or damaging more than 50,000 homes and other buildings. Insurance industry researchers say that in 2017 and 2018, two of the worst fire years, combined insured property losses totaled $33 billion.

The risk is only going to get worse.

June 22, 2023

In Montana, a landmark legal challenge over climate change

By Dana Drugmand

For 20-year-old college student Olivia Vesovich, climate change is not a future concern. It’s a current and near-daily crisis.

“Climate change has impacted my ability to breathe,” Vesovich testified from the witness stand of a Montana courtroom last week.

The college student, who suffers from asthma, is one of more than a dozen young people who have undertaken a landmark legal challenge against the state of Montana over the state’s support for industries that contribute to harmful climate change and related impacts on human health.

Smoky conditions stemming from wildfires that have been raging through the western US trigger have direct and frightening consequences, Vesovich told a packed courtroom in Helena.

“It feels like it’s suffocating me if I’m outside for too long,” Vesovich said.

Personal stories such as Vesovich’s were spotlighted over the last week in the case of Held v. Montana, which was filed by sixteen children and young adults who contend that Montana officials are turning a blind eye to climate pollution when issuing permits for fossil fuel projects, including expansion of coal mining.

The case is the first-ever constitutional climate trial in the country, pitting youth inheriting climate problems against the government leaders they blame for the dire legacy.

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June 11, 2023

As wildfire smoke clears, scientists warn air quality impacts aren’t over

By Shannon Kelleher

On Tuesday morning, Austin Channell was starting his day at home in Hudson, New York when he discovered the rays of sunlight on his wall were an odd orangey pink. As the day progressed, the sky grew stranger.

“By the afternoon we couldn’t see the sun at all,” said Channell, who works as the events director for an aviation museum.

The rest of the week, Channell described feeling a sense of helplessness as smoke from Canadian wildfires enveloped the northeastern US, bringing hazardously high air pollution levels to millions of people. On Wednesday, New York City’s air quality index (AQI) reached a staggering 460 – the highest level of air pollution recorded in the city since measurements began in 1999 and more than an order of magnitude higher than the safe daily average of 35 set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Dangerous air pollution levels were also detected in Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

Channell mostly stayed indoors, making coffee and sending emails under an Armageddon orange sky, his air purifier running nonstop. When he tried to go for a walk, he quickly found it hard to breathe.

As the smoke blotted out the sun in Brooklyn, Jes Lyons, a publicist who suffers from asthma, decided to wear a mask even while in her apartment. She feared her drafty apartment windows would not provide sufficient protection from the toxins wafting through the air.

August 3, 2022

Interview: Wildfire smoke pollution poses far-reaching danger

Driven by climate change, forests laden with fuel, historic drought and heat waves, wildfires in the US West are spreading smoky air to millions of people, even those who live far from where the fires burn. The problem is becoming so pronounced that some television weather forecasters in California now include “smoke casts,” in their reports, displaying models that predict, like a weather forecast, where smoky air from a wildfire will travel days into the future.

Wildfires in 2015, 2017 and 2020 burned more than 10 million acres each, mostly in the western United States, releasing plumes of smoke that experts say now account for half of the air pollution in western states. Burned area from wildfires is about four times what it was forty years ago, researchers say, and the problem of the polluted air resulting from fires is growing.

Scientists warn that current health policies are not effectively protecting people against smoke inhalation dangers , and a new study published in July underscored how dangerous levels of tiny pollution particles in wildfire smoke travel into households not threatened by the fire itself.