A decade earlier, about 200,000 Californians a year lived in areas where they were exposed to extreme smoke days.
The findings suggest that, for people living around the state, once-rare smoke has become almost routine. On the federal air quality index, or AQI, these extreme smoke days reach a level of around 175, the middle of the "unhealthy" range.Īs a fire year, 2020 is both extreme and part of a broader shift.ĭuring that year, particulate pollution from wildfires was, on average, twice the yearly average of the previous decade, according to an analysis of the paper's data by The California Newsroom, MuckRock and Columbia University's Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
In children, the consequences to their immune systems can be irreversible.Ĭhilds and her colleagues found that in 2020, when five of the largest fires in recorded history burned uncontrolled for many weeks, over 12 million Californians were exposed to at least one day of air so choked with smoke that anyone, including healthy adults, who spent time outside would feel its negative effects. Breathed in, they aggravate health problems including asthma, lung and cardiac illnesses. Wildland fires spew tiny particles of pollution into the air, one-thirtieth the width of a human hair. "We were shocked by this," said Marissa Childs, lead author of a paper published this month in Environmental Science and Technology. That includes 21 times more Californians than a decade ago, scattered among vulnerable communities from the Oregon border to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and down through the Central Valley. As wildfires have choked skies in the western United States, turning them vivid orange or sickly ochre, millions of people now live where smoke regularly makes breathing unhealthy, according to new estimates from a team based at Stanford University.
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