Downwind of Wildfires, There’s a Breath of Risk

Life has been bad for Blenda Baty since Colorado’s wildfires began.

A severe and chronic asthma sufferer, the 46-year-old Denver resident first noticed smoke June 9, a day when it hung thick over the city. She fought for breath on the short walk home from church.

“I felt like my lungs were going to burst,” she said. “It was really, really rough--it was scary.”

Since then she has been holed up in her home, venturing out only when she must. Before the Hayman fire, she could walk a few blocks without labored breathing. Now she wheezes just moving from one room to the next. She’s taking more medications to help her breathe, including one that her doctors had weaned her from because it weakens her bones.

“They’re scared to take me off because they want me to breathe, but they’re scared to leave me on because of the osteoporosis,” Baty said.

For people like Baty, smoke from the wildfires raging across Colorado and Arizona has brought a new kind of discomfort and fear. Smoke and ash might seem merely a nuisance to most people, causing at most itching eyes, coughing, sore throats and nosebleeds.

But the fallout from a fire can be a serious health hazard to people with asthma, emphysema, chronic bronchitis or heart disease.

Others who are particularly sensitive to smoke include children and infants, the elderly, people with allergies, pregnant women and virtually anyone who leads a vigorous outdoor life.

Health Alerts Go Out

In recent days, state health departments in Arizona and New Mexico have issued health advisories to several communities downwind of several fires, including Winslow and Holbrook, Ariz., and Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M.

About 90% of the pollutants in smoke are microscopic particles, including tar, soot and chemicals. They are so tiny that they easily glide down the throat and lodge deep in the lungs, clogging airways and triggering allergic reactions. Other particles form when superheated gases driven from trees and shrubs condense in the atmosphere and fall to the ground.

With big wildfires scorching the West, new medical studies show that the smoke contains a host of potent lung irritants.

Major wildfires in 2000 produced 19 million tons of carbon monoxide nationwide, nearly one-fifth the amount emitted by smokestacks and tailpipes that year, and 3 million tons of tiny particles, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

“Smoke from forest fires has a lot of respiratory irritants and toxic chemicals in it. It’s a witch’s brew of all kinds of things,” said Dr. Michael Lipsett of the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

“Smoke is more complicated than you believe,” said Tom Cahill, atmospheric scientist at UC Davis. A lot of what looks like smoke, Cahill said, are pyrolytic gases and vapors driven off plants that aren’t fully combusted.

Other chemicals are present too, including formaldehyde, acids and a class of cancer-causing compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

There has been one death attributed to smoke pollution. Ann Dow, 50, of Teller County, Colo., died of a smoke-induced asthma attack shortly after the Hayman fire broke out. She collapsed after telling her husband she couldn’t breathe and was pronounced dead at a Colorado Springs hospital.

At Kaiser Permanente, which serves 400,000 patients in Colorado, calls from people suffering from asthma attacks and emphysema tripled about the time Dow died, said Dr. Gray Houlton, who manages a call center where patients report problems and get advice.

In Arizona, about 15 people with severe respiratory problems have been given oxygen treatments at Winslow Memorial Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Anita Warboys. The White Mountain Medical Center in Springerville, 50 miles from the evacuated town of Show Low, also has treated patients for asthma attacks and other respiratory problems, as well as for heart problems like angina that could be related to the smoke, hospital spokeswoman Linda Martin said.

Studies done in other states show a pattern of respiratory injury during wildfires. In Florida, emergency room visits for asthma and bronchitis doubled, while reports of chest pains jumped 37% from previous years in one fire-ravaged county, according to a study by Florida health officials. About half a million acres were charred in the summer of 1998 in some of the worst fires in the state’s history.

During an October 1999 forest fire in Northern California, smoke blowing down canyons to the Hoopa Indian Reservation north of Eureka reached concentrations 45% above the level deemed hazardous. While no one died of smoke inhalation, emergency room visits for respiratory problems jumped 52%, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Sometimes environmental conditions minimize the danger. Many wildfires burn in sparsely populated areas, and heat often floats smoke thousands of feet into the sky, away from towns. Winds that inundate towns with smoke can shift suddenly, limiting the duration of exposure.

“It’s a transient exposure and it’s hard to measure. One day it’s significant, the next day the winds change,” said Joshua A. Mott, a CDC epidemiologist. “The longer smoke stays toward ground, you have higher readings, and that’s when you tend to see respiratory effects.”

Avoidance Is Best Bet

Prudent avoidance is key to keeping safe during a fire, said Michael Volz, a Denver physician specializing in allergic and respiratory conditions and spokesman for the local American Lung Assn. chapter. He said people with asthma and other chronic lung problems play it safe by avoiding smoke and limiting activity as much as possible.

Experts urge people at risk to consider other protective measures, such as keeping a five-day supply of groceries and medication on hand, avoiding stove-top cooking to reduce indoor air pollution, weather-sealing to keep out pollutants; running an air conditioner on recycled air mode, using a large high-efficiency particulate air filter and designating one room a “clean air” shelter.

Don’t, however, rely on paper masks, because “they don’t filter out the small particles and won’t take care of gases,” Lipsett said.

Baty has heeded health advisories and continues to restrict her activities, even as the smoke subsides.

“Mentally and physically, it’s been bad,” Baty said. “I am concerned about people who have lost their houses and when is it going to stop.... I worry about other people, like my mom, who also has asthma. And then I’m concerned about myself.”