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 He drove the roughly 100 miles to Paradise, located in the Sierra
Nevada foothills, from his laboratory at the University of
California, Davis, only to be refused entrance under rules that
allow first responders and journalists - but not public health
researchers - to cross police lines.
It was the second time Bein says he was unable to gather
post-wildfire research in a field so new public safety agencies have
not yet developed procedures for allowing scientists into restricted
areas.
Fires like the one that razed Paradise last November burn thousands
of pounds of wiring, plastic pipes and building materials, leaving
dangerous chemicals in the air, soil and water. Lead paint, burned
asbestos and even melted refrigerators from tens of thousands of
households only add to the danger, public health experts say.
Bein’s experience highlights the difficulties in assessing the
impact of today's massive disasters, whether wildfires that burn
entire towns or flooding after major hurricanes, incidents
scientists say are becoming more common due to climate change.
"Everything that we're doing, it feels like this is a question
nobody has asked before, and we have no answers," said Irva Hertz-Picciotto,
director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center at U.C. Davis.
Researchers are examining soil tested for the presence of chemical
compounds in neighborhoods destroyed by the 2017 wildfire that swept
into Santa Rosa, located in California's Sonoma County north of the
Bay Area, and comparing it to uninhabited land nearby where only
trees had burned, Hertz-Picciotto said. In that still-uncompleted
study, researchers found nearly 2,000 more chemical compounds in the
soil than in uninhabited parkland nearby. Researchers are now
working to identify the compounds.
While scientists have studied wildfires for decades -- learning much
about the impact on air, soil and nearby ecosystems -- fires that
race from the forest into large urban communities were, until
recently, exceedingly rare.
COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH
As natural disasters increase in scope and frequency, public health
researchers across the United States are developing new lines of
inquiry with unusual speed.
Scientists, many of them funded by the National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), are studying pregnant women
exposed to polluted air and water after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston
in 2017; residents of Puerto Rico forced to live in unrepaired homes
where mold and fungi grew after Hurricane Maria in 2017; eggs from
backyard chickens that ate California wildfire ash, among other
topics.
"It's fundamentally critical that we be able to understand these
situations and the risks to populations both in the short term and
in the long term," said NIEHS senior medical adviser Aubrey Miller,
who is helping to develop quick-response disaster research cutting
across scientific specialties.
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To do that, NIEH has sped up the time it needs to fund research,
from months or years to as little as 120 days, said Gwen Collman,
who directs the agency's work with outside researchers.
At U.C. Davis, where researchers are studying eggs from backyard
chickens that may have breathed smoke and pecked at ash in areas
affected by wildfires, the work is complicated.
"In an urban fire you’re dealing with contaminants that don’t go
away – arsenic, heavy metals, copper, lead, transformer fluid, brake
fluid, fire retardant," said veterinarian Maurice Pitesky, who is
leading the study.
Any contaminants found in the eggs could stem from other factors
such as the proximity of the home to a factory, a waste disposal
site or a highway, he said.
In an as-yet-uncompleted study, researchers have tested eggs sent by
individual owners of roughly 350 backyard properties concerned about
possible contamination from wildfires and other causes, researcher
Todd Kelman said. The locations of the yards were mapped to see
which homeowners lived near wildfire areas, and the eggs were tested
to see if they have high levels of contaminants such as lead,
cadmium and other chemicals associated with human buildings and
activities.
COMBING PARADISE
One recent morning, teams from the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency in white hazmat suits combed through Paradise, loading seared
paint cans, partially melted pesticide containers and the remains of
propane tanks onto trucks to be hauled away.
Rusty Harris Bishop, a toxics expert with the EPA who worked on the
Paradise cleanup, said removal teams take away whatever contaminants
they find, including melted pipes or asbestos-laden construction
materials, going beyond the older definition of hazardous household
waste.
But cleanup protocols after such disasters are evolving along with
the public health science, he said.
That gap in knowledge concerns researchers like Bein, who plans to
train as a firefighter to get access to the burned areas in the next
big blaze.
"As these types of fires become more frequent in nature, where
instead of once every decade it's once every summer ... then we
really need to know how this is going to affect health," Bein said.
(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; editing by Bill Tarrant and Leslie
Adler)
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