Urban wildfires bring lingering worries about what's in the ash and air - PBS, scary
For weeks, smoky, unhealthy air from large wildfires has plagued much of the West Coast and beyond. What's the public health impact of an increase of urban wildfires, in which homes and other structures burn? Special correspondent Cat Wise meets some of the researchers studying the risks for people from smoke and ash.
Last October, this was Santa Rosa, California’s Coffey Park neighborhood. Today, nearly a year later, it looks like this. Crews of busy construction workers are rebuilding hundreds of homes. Nail by nail, communities around the region are rising from the ash. But there are questions about what was in that ash and in the air above that could impact residents long after the rebuilding is done.
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The wildfires that I sampled from Napa and Sonoma were this off-white, tannish color that I had never, ever seen before. When you have new situations like this, these urban wildfires, now you’re just — any consumer product, cars, paint, cleaners, construction materials, you name it, it’s all going up in flames.
Then all of those emissions are going to be very different both chemically and most likely toxicologically, compared to what we normally study as very isolated wildfires.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/urban-wildfires-bring-lingering-worries-about-whats-in-the-ash-and-air
