26 | The 26 | The Bulletin | Second Quarter 2021
Stanford University. Burke is lead author of a 2021 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on the evolving, multipronged threat posed by increasing U.S. wildfires. In an October 2020 policy brief, Burke and two Stanford colleagues noted that wildfire smoke likely is responsible for 5,000 to 15,000 U.S. deaths in a typical year, and that especially smoky years like 2018 or 2020 will have a much higher death toll. “Our research suggests that many more people likely perish from smoke exposure during large fire events than perish directly in the fire, and many more people are made sick,” Burke says. (Image Credit: Tiana Huddlestun/USFS)
Articles on U.S. wildfires don’t often show a photo of someone gasping in a hospital bed or felled by a heart attack. Yet an increasing body of evidence suggests that the biggest societal impacts of increasing wildland fire are happening in our own bodies, the result of tiny particulates spewed in vast amounts. Millions of people across the western U.S. coughed and hacked their way through the summer and autumn of 2020, when some of the region’s worst fires on record ripped across the landscape. It’s too soon to know the full range of health consequences from that summer’s blazes, but there’s already evidence now in peer review that more than 100 deaths may be attributable to 2020’s late-summer smoke in Washington state alone. If another early estimate is on target, the smoke may have contributed to between 1,200 and 3,000 premature deaths in California among people 65 and older. Research on wildfire smoke and health is advancing hand in hand with the threat itself. The western fires of 2020 came soon after several disastrously hot, fiery years in California, which spawned a grim bumper crop of case studies. Meanwhile, an expanding array of satellite imagery is helping pinpoint where and when smoke is being emitted and transported. That’s helping scientists determine the number of people hospitalized or killed in a given area as a consequence of smoke.“I think one of the biggest developments of the last three years has been the intense interest on the part of government, health organizations, media, and the public on the whole topic of fire smoke and health,” says Wayne Cascio, who directs EPA’s Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment. “It’s been raised to such a high level nationally and even globally that it’s motivating a lot of action to support science and to answer key questions.” Among other relevant issues, smoke appears more likely than the fires themselves to affect communities already struggling with socioeconomic and race-based health disparities. “Nearly all the media attention during wildfires focuses on the lives and property directly in harm’s way. These are important and tragic impacts, but are likely only a very small portion of the overall societal impacts of wildfire,” says Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science at
(Photo credit: Christopher Michel / CC BY 2.0)
By Bob Henson
Firefighters in California September 2020 The interagency firefighting group, Lassen Hotshots, holds the line on September 24, 2020, against California’s largest fire by far in 89 years of modern record keeping: the one-million-acre August Complex.
Fine particulates: minuscule and merciless The most concerning byproducts of wildland fire are the smallest particulates routinely tracked by EPA: PM2.5, those no larger than 2.5 microns in diameter. These have long been linked to increased risk of illness and death, as they’re small enough to enter lungs and also the bloodstream, thus affectwww.sccma.org
