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On the day multiple scientific organizations announced that 2024 was the warmest year on record, the Eaton fire was raging in Pasadena and Altadena, California, less than 10 kilometers from my home. That fire, along with the Palisades fire and several others that erupted across Los Angeles County on Jan. 7, spread rapidly because of extreme weather patterns that climate change has supercharged.
We’ll know in time the extent to which climate change contributed to the LA fires. I was told in a press briefing about the fires that scientists are already working on attribution studies. What we know so far is that Southern California’s abrupt shift from 2 unusually wet years to an extremely dry year created substantial fuel for the fires and subsequently dried it out.
At one point, 7 separate fires raged in the LA area, though thankfully most are now largely or fully contained. First responders have even managed to make headway on the two biggest fires: as of Jan. 21, the Eaton fire is now nearly 80% contained and the Palisades fire is 63% contained.
Those two fires will go down in history as some of California’s most destructive. Together, they have burned an area larger than San Francisco and damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 structures.
They’ve also done a number on the local air quality. When the fires were at their peak, they created thick black smoke that blanketed the region. It’s been a week, and my apartment balcony is still coated in a fine layer of soot and ash.
I’m probably not going to clean it up any time soon, either, out of an abundance of caution. Breathing in all that ash is dangerous, as is breathing any smoke that still lingers in the air. Both are composed of fine particles, which can lead to decreased lung function, heart attacks, and strokes in those exposed. And because the fires burned more than just trees, the smoke and ash also likely contains toxic chemicals like asbestos and lead. Honestly, as someone with a PhD in atmospheric chemistry, I want nothing more than to use this space to tell you everything I know about wildfire smoke. My impulse as a science journalist is to throw more facts and figures at you in the hopes that I can get across just how unprecedented these fires are.
But as someone who calls LA my home, I’m worried that focusing on science would make it easy to forget all the people, including some of your chemistry colleagues, who have been both directly and indirectly affected by these fires.
C&EN recently published a news story about some of those people—three chemists who had to evacuate their homes. Victoria Barber, one of the chemists I interviewed for the story, told me that, for her, the fires highlight just how much “doing chemistry, doing science, is a very human endeavor and disasters like this really affect us as people.”
Barber also told me that while it’s tempting for those who haven’t been affected to continue work as normal, it’s important that the scientific community takes a moment to pause. Stop teaching and stop research and prioritize making sure your community is okay.
So, if you know a chemist in LA, reach out if you haven’t already. And when another catastrophe inevitably strikes, do the same for those people. Because while science is important, so are your colleagues.
This editorial is the result of collective deliberation in C&EN. For this editorial, the lead contributor is Krystal Vasquez.
Views expressed on this page are not necessarily those of ACS.
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