This post is a little long (1000 words), but if you (or your family) are one of the 40% of Californians living in, adjacent to, or “downwind” of a wilderness or fire-prone zone..please keep reading.

Many more, new housing tracts are built in wildfire-prone areas. Inevitably, wildfires break out, wreak havoc and death upon communities, cause fire insurance premiums to skyrocket, and destroy real estate values for communities far-flung from the actual fire zone.

It appears the effects are more far-reaching than could have ever been conceived.

“Aerosolized, microbes, spores, or fungal conidia … have the potential to travel hundreds of miles, depending on fire behavior and atmospheric conditions, and are eventually deposited or inhaled downwind of a fire,”  these studies suggest.

Pre-plan your Emergency Response to Disasters
Download Your Free Emergency Personal Disaster 16 page Handbook  

If these studies are borne out, the contamination caused by these microbes and pollutants may preclude ANY future rebuilding of the fire-ravaged communities as the toxins will poison residents for years (and possibly generations) to come.

These studies parallel other studies of similar nature, such as the long term health consequences of New York City firefighters who fought blazes and managed downtown Manhattan’s cleanup.

It took years of studies to validate (and compensate the firefighters) for lung diseases caused by the fires at “Ground Zero” in New York.

Wildfire smoke may carry ‘mind-bending”

amounts of fungi and bacteria, scientists say

By Joseph Serna

When wildfires roar through a forest and bulldozers dig into the earth to stop advancing flames, they may be churning more into the air than just clouds of dust and smoke, scientists say.

Those dark, billowing plumes of smoke that rise on waves of heat during the day and sink into valleys as the night air cools may be transporting countless living microbes that can seep into our lungs or cling to our skin and clothing, according to research published recently in Science.

In some cases, researchers fear that airborne pathogens could sicken firefighters or downwind residents.

“We were inspired to write this because we recognize that there are many trillions of microbes in smoke that haven’t been incorporated in an understanding … of human health,” said Leda Kobziar, a University of Idaho associate professor in wildland fire science.

As this recent fire season suggests, the need to understand what’s in the wildfire smoke we can’t help but breathe and how it may affect us has never been more pronounced, but scientists say we are seriously behind the curve.

Wildfires burned across more than 10.2 million acres of the United States in 2020, federal statistics show, including some 4.2 million acres in California, where a more significant number of residents were exposed to smoke for a more extended period than ever before.

Wildfire smoke now accounts for up to half of all fine-particle pollution in the Western U.S., researchers say.

Although there are many studies on the long-term impacts to human health from urban air pollution and short-term effects from wildfire smoke, there’s little known about the ways the latter can hurt us over a lifetime.

“Frankly, we don’t know about the long-term effects of wildfire smoke because community exposures haven’t been long-term before,” said Dr. John Balmes, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and a member of the California Air Resources Board.

But humans — and Californians in particular — should expect to inhale more wildfire smoke in the future.

Scientists say the planet will continue warming for decades, even if humans suddenly stop climate change. This warming, and other factors, are contributing to more destructive wildfires.

Meanwhile, the state’s forests are struggling to adapt, and native plants are being displaced by faster-burning invasive species.

They wonder whether microbes in wildfire smoke could make cancer patients more vulnerable to infections or make children with asthma more prone to pneumonia.

Scientists believe some microbes survive and even proliferate in a wildfire, where heat scorches the ground and leaves behind a layer of carbon that shields microbes within the earth from intense heat.

Others survive in the air because wildfire particulates can absorb the sun’s otherwise lethal ultraviolet radiation, the scientists said.

And still, other spores are likely spread on wind currents caused by fire.

Kobziar and study co-author George Thompson III, an associate professor of medicine at UC Davis, said that up until now, the connection between microbes and wildfires has been anecdotal — such as the tendency for wildland firefighters to get sick with Valley fever after working on an incident.

The illness is contracted by inhaling spores of the fungi genus  Coccidioides. “We have more questions than answers at this point,” Thompson said. “Our lungs are exposed to pathogens every day we don’t think much of.

But [what] if we increase the number of microbes in there with fire?”

In 2018, for example, the Kern County Fire Department sought a $100,000 grant to get assistance in cutting fuel breaks — which disturb the soil — because their firefighters would get sick after doing the work.

Data show that Valley fever cases spike on the county’s valley floor every fall, just as fire season is underway in the surrounding hills.

Yet, determining what pathogens exist in wildfire smoke has been difficult.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and a team of chemists, physicists, biologists, and forest and fire ecologists from many universities have been collaborating for years to study wildfire smoke around the country, the assumption that nobody will be immune to its effects in the future.

“As the climate changes, as the temperature warms up, as we build houses in places that are surrounded by human populations and housing development expands into regions susceptible to fires, it’s a matter of time,” said Berry Lefero, manager of NASA’s Tropospheric Composition Program, which includes a DC-8 jetliner that circles the globe studying wildfire smoke, ozone and aerosols in the atmosphere’s lower layer.

Through the combined work of these researchers, scientists hope, the public and healthcare workers will one day be able to receive timely, accurate forecasts on where wildfire smoke will go, what specific health hazards it poses, and what people in its path should do to prepare beyond the boilerplate advice to stay indoors.

To solve the riddle of what microbes are in the smoke and why, Kobziar and Thompson need to understand what type of fuel is burning, like a grass, shrub, or tree; how much of it there was initially; how severely it was burned (was it just scorched black or completely reduced to ash or something in between?); and where the smoke originated.

Once those variables are determined, there’s the complicated task of actually capturing the smoke, which is by no means uniform, Kobziar said.

In September, Kobziar used a drone to capture samples of the air over Idaho when it was inundated with smoke from fires in Eastern Washington and Oregon.

She then placed the samples in a petri dish, added some food that microbes like to eat, and waited to see what would happen.

“Even a couple of hundred miles away from the source of the smoke, it was still significant,” Kobziar said. “We’re still trying to isolate all the things we found.”

Tim Edwards, president of the firefighters union Local 2881, which represents thousands in the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, hopes the scientists’ work can boost his efforts to get wildland firefighters respirators since they typically rely on face masks or bandanas — unlike their urban firefighting counterparts.

It’s not only the dust kicked up in a fire that gets crews sick, but Edwards also said.”Now, in a wildland conflagration, you have 1,000 homes burning,” he said. “You burn the house, you don’t know what chemicals they have in that house, all that is on fire, and that’s going in your lungs.”