Latest news with #WildfireConservancy
Los Angeles Times
07-07-2025
- Climate
- Los Angeles Times
California fire season kicks off with a blazing bang
It's going to be a bad fire season. Even at what historically has been the start of rainy season in Southern California, we had some of our worst fires. The Eaton and Palisades fires in January caused an unprecedented level of destruction, killing at least 30 people, destroying more than 16,000 homes in L.A. County and leaving a burn zone 2½ times the size of New York's Manhattan. Two weeks into peak fire season, wildfires are spreading in California. Officials say it's just the beginning. More than a dozen fires began sparking across Riverside and San Bernardino counties last week. A fire in rural San Luis Obispo County had grown to more than 80,000 acres as of Sunday evening and was California's largest this year, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Experts warn that the latest fiery events set the stage for what is to come over the next few months as the state moves from an unusually dry winter and spring into what are expected to be a hot summer and fall. Matt Rahn, director of the Wildfire Conservancy, told The Times: 'We are on track for a pretty devastating year overall. If we get hotter and drier throughout the state, then that risk increases significantly. We're hoping that that doesn't happen, but all predictions are pointing to a much hotter, drier summer and fall.' Is the state ready for an exceptionally active wildfire season? Experts say it may not be. Sweeping changes at federal agencies that play key roles in California's wildfire preparation and response could make a challenging season even worse. The forecast comes as the Trump administration is enacting budget cuts, layoffs, office closures and restructuring at the U.S. Forest Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As my colleague Hayley Smith reports, weakening the three agencies at the start of fire season puts California at a dangerous disadvantage. Southern California fire chiefs caution that a season of devastating wildfires is all but guaranteed. 'We can never let our guard down,' said L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone, who helped lead the region through the January wildfires. Ronnie Villanueva, the Los Angeles Fire Department's interim chief, told The Times that his firefighters were on high alert for brush fires after months of light rainfall left heaps of dry vegetation ready to serve as kindling. He also encouraged residents to make their homes as fire-resistant as possible, using weed trimmers, clearing roofs of leaves and digging under decks for dead vegetation. 'We simply cannot have a fire engine in every driveway,' he warned. Wildfires can be scary to think about, but The Times is here to help. In our seven-part newsletter series, In Case of Fire, breaking news reporter Karen Garcia guides readers through preparing your home, property and loved ones for wildfires. Every week you'll get instructions and assignments. Sign up and send it to your friends and neighbors too. Today's great photo is from Times photographer Carlin Stiehl and captures the scene at the July Fourth protests in Los Angeles, where a large crowd peacefully marched to City Hall in protest of immigration raids and Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics. Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorAndrew Campa, Sunday writerKarim Doumar, head of newsletters How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
CNN
23-03-2025
- Climate
- CNN
LA firefighters put out massive blazes. Now they worry that cancer might be smoldering inside them
Pacific Palisades was burning to ash. 'As far as the eye could see, homes were on fire, everywhere,' said firefighter Joseph Field, 50, who's been with the Los Angeles Fire Department for more than 25 years. 'Nothing I've ever seen was like it was that night.' Field, manning a 10-inch hose line, dropped a curtain of water on a house that hadn't caught fire – yet. Seven feet away, the neighboring home was going up in smoke. Even with goggles, the irritants in the smoke made his eyes feel like he'd been wiping them with sandpaper. 'You're using basically a cloth hood to kind of help a little bit, but you're taking in a lot of smoke,' Field said. 'You're just eating it. You're constantly eating it.' At one point, he had to back out and find a pocket of cleaner air on a porch. 'I could not breathe, and I was trying to catch my breath and coughing,' he said. The wind was so strong that the hose water streamed only about 2 feet before blowing right back on him. 'Finally, you just start to lose it. [The fire] starts to get into the house, despite your best efforts,' he recalled. Field helped fight the fires for seven days in a row, went home for a day and then came back for eight more days. 'We're not used to getting our butts kicked on a fire,' he said. 'This fire, for the most part, kicked all our butts.' The Palisades Fire in Los Angeles in January ranks as the second-most destructive wildfire in Southern California history, with more than 23,000 acres and 5,000 structures burned. So many structures burned simultaneously, with so many unknown contents: plastics in furniture, batteries in cars. Now, Field wonders what might be smoldering inside him. 'A lot of guys say it's probably a lot – couple years off our life – with the amount of stuff we took in,' he said. 'You can only take in so much bad stuff.' Field is among 300 firefighters who are participating in a study to monitor their exposure to cancer-causing chemicals after the LA fires. Researchers with the Wildfire Conservancy and the University of Arizona have collected blood and urine samples from firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the LA Fire Department and other smaller departments. They've also collected contaminant-absorbing wristbands the firefighters wore to measure their exposures. The samples are being tested for carcinogens associated with wildfires that burn into urban areas. The first set of preliminary results from the ongoing investigation found that 42 firefighters who worked the LA fires had significantly higher concentrations of certain chemicals called PFAS in their blood. It is not clear whether these changes will be linked with health problems, according to the researchers. Also, an analysis of heavy metal exposures shows elevated levels of key metals, including chromium, arsenic and cobalt. Separately, a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in February found a brief 110-fold increase in air lead levels during the LA fires. The health effects from these exposures are not well-understood, the agency said, noting that many of the buildings affected were built before 1978, when lead paint was still commonly used. At peak, more than 6,000 firefighters worked the Palisades incident. 'These are 9/11-scale exposure events for firefighters,' said Matt Rahn, executive director of the Wildfire Conservancy. Exposure to carcinogens in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been linked to heightened risk of cancer. According to the New York City Fire Department, 3,500 firefighters have cancer related to their work in the World Trade Center. 'We need to understand better as to the air and the soil and the water contamination that are specific to LA,' Dr. Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in January during a public health discussion about the smoke. 'I don't want to say that anything is the same as LA, because LA will be LA.' Two-thirds of firefighters die from job-related cancer, according to the International Association of Firefighters. 'It's a pretty stark statistic, but it's the reality of what we deal with in the fire service as a result of our occupational exposures,' said Derek Urwin, the association's chief science adviser. 'Any exposure to products of combustion increase cancer risk, and [the Los Angeles fires] were obviously quite substantial exposures.' Wildland firefighters are also regularly exposed to carcinogens; at least 29 have been linked to this type of fire, according to a 2024 study by US Forest Service researchers. Wildland firefighters who battle blazes that spread into urban areas are exposed to even more hazardous emissions from the burning of both natural and human-made fuels. Then, after the initial incident, these firefighters encounter 'off-gassing,' the release of harmful gases from everything that combusted in the rubble, which can last days or even weeks. All of this makes the Southern California fires, with their mixture of toxicants, more complicated than either wildland or structure fires, according to Jooyeon Hwang, an associate professor and occupational health researcher at UTHealth Houston who has researched the health risks to firefighters from wildfire smoke. 'We really do not understand fully yet about the long-term effects of these exposures to the carcinogens,' she said. 'We definitely need more studies.' It can take decades for cancer to develop after exposure to carcinogens, Hwang said. 'Let's say you are exposed to these carcinogens at age 20. Then, maybe 40 or age 50, you might find those cancers,' she said. In addition to helping firefighters understand and predict their cancer risk, the Wildfire Conservancy is studying interventions that can be put in place now. It's not feasible for wildland firefighters to wear full-face respirators with filter cartridges and battery packs while hiking with 40-plus pounds of gear in terrible conditions, so they may have only a bandana or shroud to protect their airways. 'That's not a respiratory protection device. It's letting everything through except big chunks of ash,' Rahn said. Plus, the respirator cartridges aren't certified to protect against the type of smoke encountered by these firefighters. Even high-quality N95 masks become unusable very rapidly. 'All the cartridges that are out there are certified and tested against single-gas challenges,' Urwin said. 'The issue with smoke is, it's an extraordinarily complex mixture of many, many, many, many gases. And the issue with just relying on a respirator is, we don't know how effective they are against smoke exposures, if at all.' For the past year, conservancy researchers have been conducting field tests to evaluate the effectiveness and functionality of different types of respiratory devices. They want to consider firefighters with stubble and sunscreen and ash and soot and smoke and sweat. The conservancy is also investigating clothing that contains an added barrier to filter out tiny particles. In lab tests, researchers have seen up to a 95% reduction in skin contamination from firefighting with the use of these clothes. When Field came home after the first seven days of fighting the Palisades Fire, he soaked his brush coat in a bucket of water and detergent. 'It looked like oil, sludge,' he said. 'All those carcinogens, get 'em off you.' When he got some downtime recently, he took a drive through the Pacific Palisades, back to another street of homes that his team had showered with water. 'There were homes that, if we had not put a stand on those homes, they definitely would have burned down, and if those homes burned down, they would have burned a lot more homes,' he said. 'We actually did save a number of homes.' That, he said, was good to see. He's not focusing on whether the cost of saving those homes might mean cancer down the line. 'I don't try to build too much into stuff like that,' he said. 'When I'm faced with that kind of stuff, then that's another story, and I'll deal with it when that happens.'
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
LA firefighters put out massive blazes. Now they worry that cancer might be smoldering inside them
Pacific Palisades was burning to ash. 'As far as the eye could see, homes were on fire, everywhere,' said firefighter Joseph Field, 50, who's been with the Los Angeles Fire Department for more than 25 years. 'Nothing I've ever seen was like it was that night.' Field, manning a 10-inch hose line, dropped a curtain of water on a house that hadn't caught fire – yet. Seven feet away, the neighboring home was going up in smoke. Even with goggles, the irritants in the smoke made his eyes feel like he'd been wiping them with sandpaper. 'You're using basically a cloth hood to kind of help a little bit, but you're taking in a lot of smoke,' Field said. 'You're just eating it. You're constantly eating it.' At one point, he had to back out and find a pocket of cleaner air on a porch. 'I could not breathe, and I was trying to catch my breath and coughing,' he said. The wind was so strong that the hose water streamed only about 2 feet before blowing right back on him. 'Finally, you just start to lose it. [The fire] starts to get into the house, despite your best efforts,' he recalled. Field helped fight the fires for seven days in a row, went home for a day and then came back for eight more days. 'We're not used to getting our butts kicked on a fire,' he said. 'This fire, for the most part, kicked all our butts.' The Palisades Fire in Los Angeles in January ranks as the second-most destructive wildfire in Southern California history, with more than 23,000 acres and 5,000 structures burned. So many structures burned simultaneously, with so many unknown contents: plastics in furniture, batteries in cars. Now, Field wonders what might be smoldering inside him. 'A lot of guys say it's probably a lot – couple years off our life – with the amount of stuff we took in,' he said. 'You can only take in so much bad stuff.' Field is among 300 firefighters who are participating in a study to monitor their exposure to cancer-causing chemicals after the LA fires. Researchers with the Wildfire Conservancy and the University of Arizona have collected blood and urine samples from firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the LA Fire Department and other smaller departments. They've also collected contaminant-absorbing wristbands the firefighters wore to measure their exposures. The samples are being tested for carcinogens associated with wildfires that burn into urban areas. The first set of preliminary results from the ongoing investigation found that 42 firefighters who worked the LA fires had significantly higher concentrations of certain chemicals called PFAS in their blood. It is not clear whether these changes will be linked with health problems, according to the researchers. Also, an analysis of heavy metal exposures shows elevated levels of key metals, including chromium, arsenic and cobalt. Separately, a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in February found a brief 110-fold increase in air lead levels during the LA fires. The health effects from these exposures are not well-understood, the agency said, noting that many of the buildings affected were built before 1978, when lead paint was still commonly used. At peak, more than 6,000 firefighters worked the Palisades incident. 'These are 9/11-scale exposure events for firefighters,' said Matt Rahn, executive director of the Wildfire Conservancy. Exposure to carcinogens in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been linked to heightened risk of cancer. According to the New York City Fire Department, 3,500 firefighters have cancer related to their work in the World Trade Center. 'We need to understand better as to the air and the soil and the water contamination that are specific to LA,' Dr. Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in January during a public health discussion about the smoke. 'I don't want to say that anything is the same as LA, because LA will be LA.' Two-thirds of firefighters die from job-related cancer, according to the International Association of Firefighters. 'It's a pretty stark statistic, but it's the reality of what we deal with in the fire service as a result of our occupational exposures,' said Derek Urwin, the association's chief science adviser. 'Any exposure to products of combustion increase cancer risk, and [the Los Angeles fires] were obviously quite substantial exposures.' Wildland firefighters are also regularly exposed to carcinogens; at least 29 have been linked to this type of fire, according to a 2024 study by US Forest Service researchers. Wildland firefighters who battle blazes that spread into urban areas are exposed to even more hazardous emissions from the burning of both natural and human-made fuels. Then, after the initial incident, these firefighters encounter 'off-gassing,' the release of harmful gases from everything that combusted in the rubble, which can last days or even weeks. All of this makes the Southern California fires, with their mixture of toxicants, more complicated than either wildland or structure fires, according to Jooyeon Hwang, an associate professor and occupational health researcher at UTHealth Houston who has researched the health risks to firefighters from wildfire smoke. 'We really do not understand fully yet about the long-term effects of these exposures to the carcinogens,' she said. 'We definitely need more studies.' It can take decades for cancer to develop after exposure to carcinogens, Hwang said. 'Let's say you are exposed to these carcinogens at age 20. Then, maybe 40 or age 50, you might find those cancers,' she said. In addition to helping firefighters understand and predict their cancer risk, the Wildfire Conservancy is studying interventions that can be put in place now. It's not feasible for wildland firefighters to wear full-face respirators with filter cartridges and battery packs while hiking with 40-plus pounds of gear in terrible conditions, so they may have only a bandana or shroud to protect their airways. 'That's not a respiratory protection device. It's letting everything through except big chunks of ash,' Rahn said. Plus, the respirator cartridges aren't certified to protect against the type of smoke encountered by these firefighters. Even high-quality N95 masks become unusable very rapidly. 'All the cartridges that are out there are certified and tested against single-gas challenges,' Urwin said. 'The issue with smoke is, it's an extraordinarily complex mixture of many, many, many, many gases. And the issue with just relying on a respirator is, we don't know how effective they are against smoke exposures, if at all.' For the past year, conservancy researchers have been conducting field tests to evaluate the effectiveness and functionality of different types of respiratory devices. They want to consider firefighters with stubble and sunscreen and ash and soot and smoke and sweat. The conservancy is also investigating clothing that contains an added barrier to filter out tiny particles. In lab tests, researchers have seen up to a 95% reduction in skin contamination from firefighting with the use of these clothes. When Field came home after the first seven days of fighting the Palisades Fire, he soaked his brush coat in a bucket of water and detergent. 'It looked like oil, sludge,' he said. 'All those carcinogens, get 'em off you.' When he got some downtime recently, he took a drive through the Pacific Palisades, back to another street of homes that his team had showered with water. 'There were homes that, if we had not put a stand on those homes, they definitely would have burned down, and if those homes burned down, they would have burned a lot more homes,' he said. 'We actually did save a number of homes.' That, he said, was good to see. He's not focusing on whether the cost of saving those homes might mean cancer down the line. 'I don't try to build too much into stuff like that,' he said. 'When I'm faced with that kind of stuff, then that's another story, and I'll deal with it when that happens.'
CNN
23-03-2025
- Climate
- CNN
LA firefighters put out massive blazes. Now they worry that cancer might be smoldering inside them
Pacific Palisades was burning to ash. 'As far as the eye could see, homes were on fire, everywhere,' said firefighter Joseph Field, 50, who's been with the Los Angeles Fire Department for more than 25 years. 'Nothing I've ever seen was like it was that night.' Field, manning a 10-inch hose line, dropped a curtain of water on a house that hadn't caught fire – yet. Seven feet away, the neighboring home was going up in smoke. Even with goggles, the irritants in the smoke made his eyes feel like he'd been wiping them with sandpaper. 'You're using basically a cloth hood to kind of help a little bit, but you're taking in a lot of smoke,' Field said. 'You're just eating it. You're constantly eating it.' At one point, he had to back out and find a pocket of cleaner air on a porch. 'I could not breathe, and I was trying to catch my breath and coughing,' he said. The wind was so strong that the hose water streamed only about 2 feet before blowing right back on him. 'Finally, you just start to lose it. [The fire] starts to get into the house, despite your best efforts,' he recalled. Field helped fight the fires for seven days in a row, went home for a day and then came back for eight more days. 'We're not used to getting our butts kicked on a fire,' he said. 'This fire, for the most part, kicked all our butts.' The Palisades Fire in Los Angeles in January ranks as the second-most destructive wildfire in Southern California history, with more than 23,000 acres and 5,000 structures burned. So many structures burned simultaneously, with so many unknown contents: plastics in furniture, batteries in cars. Now, Field wonders what might be smoldering inside him. 'A lot of guys say it's probably a lot – couple years off our life – with the amount of stuff we took in,' he said. 'You can only take in so much bad stuff.' Field is among 300 firefighters who are participating in a study to monitor their exposure to cancer-causing chemicals after the LA fires. Researchers with the Wildfire Conservancy and the University of Arizona have collected blood and urine samples from firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the LA Fire Department and other smaller departments. They've also collected contaminant-absorbing wristbands the firefighters wore to measure their exposures. The samples are being tested for carcinogens associated with wildfires that burn into urban areas. The first set of preliminary results from the ongoing investigation found that 42 firefighters who worked the LA fires had significantly higher concentrations of certain chemicals called PFAS in their blood. It is not clear whether these changes will be linked with health problems, according to the researchers. Also, an analysis of heavy metal exposures shows elevated levels of key metals, including chromium, arsenic and cobalt. Separately, a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in February found a brief 110-fold increase in air lead levels during the LA fires. The health effects from these exposures are not well-understood, the agency said, noting that many of the buildings affected were built before 1978, when lead paint was still commonly used. At peak, more than 6,000 firefighters worked the Palisades incident. 'These are 9/11-scale exposure events for firefighters,' said Matt Rahn, executive director of the Wildfire Conservancy. Exposure to carcinogens in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been linked to heightened risk of cancer. According to the New York City Fire Department, 3,500 firefighters have cancer related to their work in the World Trade Center. 'We need to understand better as to the air and the soil and the water contamination that are specific to LA,' Dr. Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in January during a public health discussion about the smoke. 'I don't want to say that anything is the same as LA, because LA will be LA.' Two-thirds of firefighters die from job-related cancer, according to the International Association of Firefighters. 'It's a pretty stark statistic, but it's the reality of what we deal with in the fire service as a result of our occupational exposures,' said Derek Urwin, the association's chief science adviser. 'Any exposure to products of combustion increase cancer risk, and [the Los Angeles fires] were obviously quite substantial exposures.' Wildland firefighters are also regularly exposed to carcinogens; at least 29 have been linked to this type of fire, according to a 2024 study by US Forest Service researchers. Wildland firefighters who battle blazes that spread into urban areas are exposed to even more hazardous emissions from the burning of both natural and human-made fuels. Then, after the initial incident, these firefighters encounter 'off-gassing,' the release of harmful gases from everything that combusted in the rubble, which can last days or even weeks. All of this makes the Southern California fires, with their mixture of toxicants, more complicated than either wildland or structure fires, according to Jooyeon Hwang, an associate professor and occupational health researcher at UTHealth Houston who has researched the health risks to firefighters from wildfire smoke. 'We really do not understand fully yet about the long-term effects of these exposures to the carcinogens,' she said. 'We definitely need more studies.' It can take decades for cancer to develop after exposure to carcinogens, Hwang said. 'Let's say you are exposed to these carcinogens at age 20. Then, maybe 40 or age 50, you might find those cancers,' she said. In addition to helping firefighters understand and predict their cancer risk, the Wildfire Conservancy is studying interventions that can be put in place now. It's not feasible for wildland firefighters to wear full-face respirators with filter cartridges and battery packs while hiking with 40-plus pounds of gear in terrible conditions, so they may have only a bandana or shroud to protect their airways. 'That's not a respiratory protection device. It's letting everything through except big chunks of ash,' Rahn said. Plus, the respirator cartridges aren't certified to protect against the type of smoke encountered by these firefighters. Even high-quality N95 masks become unusable very rapidly. 'All the cartridges that are out there are certified and tested against single-gas challenges,' Urwin said. 'The issue with smoke is, it's an extraordinarily complex mixture of many, many, many, many gases. And the issue with just relying on a respirator is, we don't know how effective they are against smoke exposures, if at all.' For the past year, conservancy researchers have been conducting field tests to evaluate the effectiveness and functionality of different types of respiratory devices. They want to consider firefighters with stubble and sunscreen and ash and soot and smoke and sweat. The conservancy is also investigating clothing that contains an added barrier to filter out tiny particles. In lab tests, researchers have seen up to a 95% reduction in skin contamination from firefighting with the use of these clothes. When Field came home after the first seven days of fighting the Palisades Fire, he soaked his brush coat in a bucket of water and detergent. 'It looked like oil, sludge,' he said. 'All those carcinogens, get 'em off you.' When he got some downtime recently, he took a drive through the Pacific Palisades, back to another street of homes that his team had showered with water. 'There were homes that, if we had not put a stand on those homes, they definitely would have burned down, and if those homes burned down, they would have burned a lot more homes,' he said. 'We actually did save a number of homes.' That, he said, was good to see. He's not focusing on whether the cost of saving those homes might mean cancer down the line. 'I don't try to build too much into stuff like that,' he said. 'When I'm faced with that kind of stuff, then that's another story, and I'll deal with it when that happens.'
CBS News
25-02-2025
- Health
- CBS News
Experts unveil research on how to better protect health of firefighters in wake of L.A. fires
SACRAMENTO — Research is just beginning on the impacts that the Palisades and Eaton wildfires in Southern California had on the health of first responders. Those blazes are in the spotlight as wildfire scientists gather in Sacramento this week. From a standing ovation at the Grammys to shoutouts at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, crews who fought the wildfires are riding a wave of public support. "I'm glad they recognized the magnitude of this incident," said Matt Rahn, executive director of the Wildfire Conservancy. Rahn said the Los Angeles blazes show just how dangerous these types of urban infernos can be for fire crews. "The toxic, hazardous, and carcinogenic compounds that they were exposed to for days if not weeks is devastating," he said. Now, safety experts are meeting in Sacramento this week to unveil research that can help make the career a little less risky. "We found in some of our testing that, in many cases, firefighters have very high sustained peak heart rates and core body temperatures," said Kelcey Stricker, health and safety director of the Wildfire Conservancy. Their study shows that something as simple as drinking ice water can make a big difference. "We no longer have runaway core temperature if you can get firefighters ice water periodically throughout the day," Rahn said. Other ideas include using softer sounds and lighting when waking fire crews in the middle of the night for an emergency call. "They're going from 0 to 60. Their heart rate, their adrenaline, everything starts pumping," Rahn said. "There's a lot of good research that shows it can really be beneficial." Public awareness could also help sway lawmakers into passing new laws that regulate where homes in wildfire-prone areas can be built. "The devastation we're seeing is going to occur again in California," Rahn said. "We need to take that seriously. We need to protect our communities and make good decisions on planning and land use and rebuilding." The Wildfire Conservancy is also recruiting fire crews for a study on the long-term impacts of fighting the L.A. fires, similar to research done on crews that responded to the 9/11 attacks.
