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Where there's fire, there's smoke – Daily Montanan

['Arren Kimbel-Sannit', 'More From Author', '- January']

Date: 2022-01-26 00:00:00

A severe 2021 fire season across the West yielded some of the longest stretches of diminished air quality in Montana in recent memory, officials and experts told a legislative panel Tuesday, a trend they expect to continue amid historic drought and expanding wildfire seasons.

Between June and October, the state Department of Environmental Quality’s 20 monitoring stations across flagged moderate air quality or worse on more days than any year in the last decade, even the especially devastating fire seasons of 2012 and 2017. Those years had more days under the highest-danger air quality levels, “Very Unhealthy” and “Hazardous,” but data show that particulate pollution from the 2021 season was a factor especially early in the year and for an especially long time across almost all of the state, according to DEQ.

“There are good years and bad years, but over the long term, we’re seeing a greater number of days impacted by smoke, and there are more days with severe impacts,” said Bo Wilkins, air quality bureau chief with DEQ, at the Jan. 25 meeting of the Environmental Quality Council, a legislative interim committee. Part of the committee’s work this year includes examining the air quality impacts of the last fire season.

“Almost half of our days from June to September were impacted by wildfire smoke last summer,” he said.

As most Montanans who’ve experienced headaches and asthma attacks during the summer months doubtless understand, smoke means more than diminished visibility. It brings about toxic gases as well as tiny organic compounds, metals and other materials that can cause respiratory distress. It’s the concentration of these particles in the air — especially those smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, smaller than a pollen particle — that form the basis of the five health effect categories that air quality regulators use to explain risk to the public: Good, Moderate, Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, Unhealthy and Hazardous.

In previous fire seasons, the majority of smoke-impacted days came in August and September. But in 2021, “Unhealthy” flags came up as early as July, and “Moderate” days spanned almost the whole season at some monitoring stations, reflecting a season that started earlier and lasted longer, Wilkins said. The West Wind fire, which burned 25 houses in the town of Denton in December 2021, is further testament to the idea that the fire season is much more of a fire year.

And while the body of research on the effects of wildfire smoke on the body is still emerging, it’s clear that prolonged exposure to high PM 2.5 levels is bad for human health, said Erin Landguth, a professor at the University of Montana who specializes in the intersection of air pollution and respiratory health. She led one recent study that found higher daily average PM 2.5 levels in Montana are associated with higher rates of influenza months later.

Another recent study followed a cohort of 95 individuals from around Seeley Lake to examine the impact of the 2017 fires there. The number of participants experiencing diminished lung function had doubled a year following the fire, and stayed high a year after that.

Montana is particularly ill-situated in this regard. PM 2.5 pollution rates are decreasing in most of the country, but not in the wildfire-prone inland northwest. On average, wildfire-borne PM2.5 levels are higher in Montana and Idaho than most other states, often cause more asthma-related hospital visits than in other states and indeed contribute to more deaths than in other states, Katelyn O’Dell, a postdoctoral research fellow at George Washington University, told the council.

And while the effects of air pollution in general on the body are well documented, there’s much researchers and regulators have yet to understand about the specific effects of wildfire smoke. For example, Landguth said, there have been limited studies that demonstrate a correlation between exposure to wildfire smoke and hospitalization or death from COVID-19 in certain counties, but nothing at the scale necessary to draw population-wide conclusions.

“With these population-level studies in public health, you need long term data to really see a pattern,” she said.

Even the smoke itself poses an academic challenge: “Wildfire smoke toxicity is completely different than what we’ve studied in the past, it’s burning through towns, burning different stuff — it has a completely different composition,” Landguth added.

Lawmakers on the committee urged legislative action to combat smoke toxicity in bad fire years, but didn’t say exactly what that would look like. More and more people are settling in the wildland-urban interface, areas at high risk of severe wildfires, and climate change is exacerbating what’s long been a part of life in the West. Even when Montana doesn’t have a particularly bad fire year itself, smoke from neighboring states can still blot out the big sky.

Landguth preaches the importance of public awareness, that people need to be aware of the different health categories and how measures like N95 masks and HEPA filters — though expensive — can help mitigate the impacts of smoke exposure.

“All of us can’t leave during a wildfire season, so it’s about what you do to protect yourself,” she said.

[END]

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