Hello, Temperature readers! Parker Yamasaki here, stepping in for your dear friend Mike. It seems an appropriate time to take on something new. What has this week been marked by if not lively and intense changeovers? I, however, promise not to undo all the hard work that Mike has put into this newsletter over the past years.
I also wouldn’t have nearly enough time for that. Mike will in a mercifully short couple of months so that I can get back to writing about people taking naps and reading books. But until then, I certainly don’t mind getting my hands dirty — starting with air contaminants and toxic soil. Let’s dig in.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
WILDFIRE
Scientists want to act faster on fire
When fire breaks out, time is of the essence. Firefighters barrel through the streets flashing lights and blaring sirens; evacuation orders move people out in droves. Urgency is, of course, essential for the safety of people, their pets and livestock, and their homes.
But there’s another group on the periphery who might want in on the action: scientists.
Especially when it comes to fires that ignite in the wildland-urban interface, where burning cars and structures can create a complicated — and under researched — mix of toxic contaminants.
A paper published in Environmental Science and Technology by researchers at the University of Colorado and Colorado State University highlights some of the challenges of studying fires in urban areas, an increasingly urgent task.
“We’ve seen a lot of research related to wildfires‚ you know, the world is on fire, so we have been doing research on that for a long time. But isn’t it only within the last five years really we have thought about these big city and structure fires?” said Thomas Borch, chemist and researcher at CSU. “The Camp fire, the Marshall fire, the fire in Maui, in Los Angeles. I haven’t read about that many structure fires — and I’ve been a professor for 20 years here at CSU — I just haven’t seen the frequency we see now.”
One of the major challenges for studying these fires is monitoring soil and air contaminants during and directly after fires, not in the typical weeks, or sometimes months, that it takes to get positioned.
“What we found, for example, from the Marshall fire, after waiting to get permission to do all the samples, was the wind!” Borch said. “Wind erosion is significant, and if wind takes away all the ashes, and the ashes are spread all over the place, most likely you’re not going to find a lot of pollution in the soil. That doesn’t mean the contamination is disappearing, it’s being mobilized over greater areas.”
Rain can also dilute contamination measurements, and so can topography. The fires burning through Los Angeles are happening on hillsides, and a lot of that soil will “mobilize,” according to Borch, ending up in the gulleys, valleys and streams below, and making its way into the ocean.
Borch has also been working with a team of Colorado researchers to quickly collect air and soil samples from the Los Angeles fires. They received “rapid” funding from the National Science Foundation just moments before talking to The Colorado Sun. But by then they’d already sent a researcher out to Los Angeles to collect air data on their own dime, and just hoped that funding would come through.
“We took a chance — just sent a professor on an airplane, and tried to work with people nearby,” Borch said.
Early data from the Los Angeles fires showed atmospheric concentrations of lead — a well-known neurotoxin — reached 100 times their average level in Pico Rivera, roughly a dozen miles south of the Eaton fire, which has burned thousands of structures in Altadena, reporting by The New York Times shows.
“What I thought was interesting is that it showed a three-day window during which people are exposed to extremely high levels of lead, but after that it goes down to background levels,” Borch said. “And if you don’t capture that window, you’re out of luck. That’s why we got funding from the National Science Foundation now, not in two weeks when it’s all over.”
Even with rapid funding there are still access and permission limitations when it comes to collecting samples. Police and firefighters don’t allow access until the area is safe, and scientists still must wait for permission from homeowners before sampling their property.
“So how do we mobilize? How do we work with first responders, getting in there and getting access, maybe even escorted access. The population, millions of people want to know what are the health implications for me and my pets? They want answers, I’m telling you,” Borch said.
“I think we know there’s risk here, and we need to quantify that risk, and we need to do that fast.”
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
AIR POLLUTION
One very rotten egg
Since we’re talking toxins, Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission met last week to pass regulation 30, a new rule that designates five “priority toxic air contaminants” to focus research and regulations on over the course of the year.
The regulation is one step in a process that the Colorado legislature set in motion in 2022 with the passage of House Bill 1244 to reduce air toxins that pose a health risk.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency already oversees regulation of a number of greenhouse gases and ozone pollutants in Colorado, but the air toxics program has its sights set lower — at the street level — targeting contaminants that affect community health more locally, and controlling harmful contaminants that the federal framework leaves out.
One of those gaps is the regulation of hydrogen sulfide, a potent, colorless gas known for its rotten egg smell. Hydrogen sulfide is the only compound on the state’s new priority list that is not an EPA designated hazardous air pollutant, which raised questions and concerns from a handful of parties who gave testimonies at last week’s hearings.
Since the compound doesn’t get attention from the EPA, its monitoring sites in Colorado are limited — as opposed to the more well-known, federally regulated toxins like benzene and ethylene oxide, both of which made the list.
To fill in some of the gaps, the Air Pollution Control Division used data collected by Cultivando, an advocacy group that ran an air monitoring program in Commerce City until summer 2023 with monitors provided by Boulder AIR.
One point of contention was the use of a single dataset — the Air Pollution Control Division backed up Cultivando’s data with modeling — and representatives from the Colorado Petroleum Association expressed concerns that the levels collected by Cultivando were either anomalous or too hyper-specific to the area.
“Communities face a double standard. Without data, their experiences are dismissed. With data, they’re called unreliable,” said Spencer Lewis, a student attorney representing a coalition of community organizations, including Cultivando.
The division found that waste disposal — which includes landfills and wastewater treatment — makes up almost half of human-caused hydrogen sulfide emissions.
Metro Water Recovery, the wastewater treatment center servicing five Front Range counties and part of Denver, argued that it lacked a realistic way to control hydrogen sulfide emissions, a byproduct released from their massive anaerobic digesting tanks.
One of the driving forces behind creating a new air toxics program, though, is to explore what federal monitoring data is missing, and to imagine what can be done. And, ultimately, hydrogen sulfide made the cut.
Learn more about the top five toxins at ColoradoSun.com.
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
MORE ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
We talk a lot about the way water flows west from Colorado, especially as the deadline for the seven-state Colorado River Compact comes and goes and comes back up. But Colorado’s east-flowing rivers are also under contract, with our neighbors in Kansas and Nebraska, and the time has come for the state to pay up, water wise.
Ranchers in northeastern Colorado using water from the Republican River basin must retire 25,000 acres of irrigated agricultural land by 2029, according to Deb Daniel, general manager of the Republican River Water Conservation District. The deal is the result of a compact resolution signed in 2016, as part of the larger Republican River Compact of 1943.
As of this month, ranchers have retired 10,000 acres under the program, and are poised to add another 17,000 acres with the help of $30 million in state and federal funding for one of the largest dry-ups in the West. Jerd Smith of Fresh Water News wrote about the latest funding infusion that will help ranchers reach the water goal.
Read more about how farms from Julesburg down to Burlington are on the hook at ColoradoSun.com.
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
Thanks for joining us this week!
— Parker & John
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