I wanted to get something quick out because at least one person has asked me what is up with AQI (the EPA’s “air quality index”) and this is well within my wheelhouse. Progress on other posts and other projects is slow because I have a stupid life and a little bit of a stupid cold. (I feel fine, but it takes forever to make a million cups of black tea with orange and lemon, to keep refilling the hot water bottle, to keep myself stocked with clean spoons in a day.) So, thanks for bearing with me. Also, news of a ceasefire deal has just been announced; I haven’t posted about this because I am resolutely morally opposed to ambulance-chasing a fucking genocide for content, but I did want to at least register this. Fuck Joe Biden and free Palestine.
All air pollution is bad, but air pollution from the urban fires like those in LA recently is especially bad. This is because (duh) in these types of fires, it’s not just vegetation burning, but structures, and all the nasty building material they’re made of: paints, adhesives, asbestos in some cases, and every kind of plastic under the sun.
If you go on to websites like airnow.gov, you’ll see maps of the Air Quality Index. The Air Quality Index has five components: carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone (colloquially known as “smog”), and fine particle pollution. The first four are gases at ambient temperature; the last is an umbrella term referring to the size of particulate matter that makes up the pollution. The two particulate pollution measures you’re likely to see are PM2.5 and PM10; “PM” stands for “particulate matter” and the number refers to particle size: PM2.5 is less than or equal to 2.5 microns in diameter (a micron, sometimes denoted µm, is a millionth of a meter or 1/10,000th of a centimeter) and PM10 is ≤ 10 microns in diameter. The size matters because smaller particles can penetrate into the tiny air sacs inside your lungs and really fuck up your lung function — smaller is worse. (A respirator like a KN95 or an N95 will protect you from particulate matter, but not from gaseous material.)
These pollutants included in the AQI, plus lead, are known as “criteria pollutants.” Essentially, these are the pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act, for which “acceptable” standards of exposure have been set. I am not enough of a Law Knower to know what’s up with the Clean Air Act, but it is my impression that regulation and monitoring of many types of pollution, especially plastic pollution, are severely lagging. I feel confident saying that the AQI as it exists is not a great index of the actual air quality in the Los Angeles region at this time.
For example: this piece in the LA Times today reported that the LA County Department of Public Health issued a “windblown dust and ash" advisory for today and notes that while extremely toxic, ash particles are likely to be bigger than particulate pollution and thus will not be detected by air quality monitors or incorporated into the AQI index. Additionally and even more concerning to me, this article just went up on The Atlantic a little over an hour ago: “What happens when a plastic city burns.” I’m gonna blame it on my cold and low energy and just quote from this article at length:
A burning town takes many of the chemical hazards of a burning forest and adds in a suite of new ones, Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, an atmospheric chemist at the University of British Columbia, told me. As structure fires eat through the plethora of materials inside a home, they can release not just hydrogen-cyanide gas but also hydrochloric acid, dioxins, furans, aerosolized phthalates, and a range of other gaseous contaminants broadly known as volatile organic compounds. Some may be harmless. Others are associated with health problems. As gas-detection technology improves, “we’re discovering new molecules of incomplete combustion that we didn’t know existed,” Borduas-Dedekind said. “When you’re burning a home or an entire neighborhood, we don’t have a handle on the breadth of VOCs being emitted.” And many of these can react with one another in the atmosphere, creating yet more compounds. Whereas N95 masks are good for filtering out the fine particles associated with fire smoke, they do nothing for these gases; only a gas mask can filter them out.
When I first started my PhD, in 2016, I was working on research related to the reproductive effects of exposure to plastics (specifically phthalates; the major exposure route for these is personal care products and plastic food storage and packaging, things like that). My PI at was very concerned about that year’s round of California fires and what was in the smoke. There is a growing research literature on the health effects of exposure to urban fire smoke. There is so much that is still unknown, but what is known is bleak.
This is why public health will make you a Marxist-Leninist if it doesn’t succeed in making you a shill first. This is also why I’m increasingly uninterested in a lot of meso-level “social determinants of health” research. Sure, we can demonstrate statistically that being a member of a disadvantaged/minoritized group correlates with higher exposure to toxic pollution. But why is there so much toxic pollution in the first place? Why is everything we touch made of plastic? Because plastic is a petroleum product. Why does that matter? Because is no capitalism but petro-capitalism. Fossil fuels, petroleum and its derivatives, are the Lovecraftian monster substance spreading death all over the world. This sounds dramatic, but it’s just the truth.
It seem clear to me that we need, as a starting point, to at least try to update air quality monitoring, legislatively if need be, to capture some of these VOCs (volatile organic compounds) — even an incomplete list would be better than nothing. Since the Shell ethane cracker plant opened in Monaca, PA in 2022, the air downriver here in Pittsburgh has been consistently worse — but the worst air quality days (the ones where I get a nauseating headache, bad taste in my mouth, feel like if you slit one of my lungs open and turned it inside out it would be rainbowed like an oil slick) tend not to be the ones that register high AQI readings. Better reporting would help everyone in a situation where we’re all forced to “protect ourselves.”
But really, why the fuck should you have to wear a gas mask to breathe the air on earth? Why the fuck are a few companies allowed to pump carcinogens into the environment — the air, the water, the cheap consumables that fill our houses? (I am sitting on my plastic Costco sectional couch as I type this.) We need, quite simply, to regulate the petroleum industry — out of existence, ideally. From my own vantage point, as a powerless peon in the clinical research machine, we need public health leaders who will follow the evidence to the obvious point and attempt to influence policy in this direction. Something tends to happen to people en route to becoming public health leaders, though, where they start being reasonable and aligning their expressed values to the medium-term incentives of the grant funding cycle. But sure, let’s argue about red food dye!!
TL;DR, the air quality index doesn’t capture a lot of the pollution in the air from the wildfires. Wear a respirator outside, listen to advisories from your local public health department, and don’t get near burned structures without researching and obtaining personal protective equipment. It’s not super helpful or super hopeful, but it’s what I’ve got for today.