EOS - Gale Sinatra and her husband fled their Altadena, Calif., home on 7 January with little more than overnight bags, taking just one of their two cars.
“We thought we were going to be gone overnight,” Sinatra said. “We thought they’d get the fire under control and we’d get back in.”
When the couple did return, weeks later, it was to dig through the rubble of their former home, burned to the ground by the Eaton Fire.
Though they escaped with their lives, health hazards were not behind Sinatra, her husband (who chose not to be named for this story), and others from their neighborhood. The Eaton and nearby Palisades fires filled the Los Angeles Basin with a toxic haze for days, and cleanup efforts threatened to loft charred particles long after the fires were out.
Teams of scientists from across the country, along with community members, monitored air quality in the weeks following the fire, seeking to learn more about respiratory health risks and inform community members about how to protect themselves.
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“From mattresses to carpets to paint to electronics, everything like that burns,” said Roya Bahreini, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Bahreini is also co–principal investigator of the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry Measurement Network (ASCENT), a long-term air quality monitoring project led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, UCR, and the University of California, Davis (UC Davis).
ASCENT, which launched in 2021, has stations across the country, including three in Southern California. During the January fires in Los Angeles, which tore through not only Altadena (an unincorporated inland community) but also neighborhoods along the coast, these stations detected levels of lead, chlorine, and bromine at orders of magnitude higher than usual.