By Brad Haire
University of Georgia
All across the United States, prescribed fires are set to promote
forests’ health. But nobody can say how the air pollution from
them affects the people in homes downwind from them and the
firefighters who set and control the fires. A University of
Georgia expert is finding out.
A prescribed fire is any fire intentionally set to meet
land-management objectives, such as reducing fuels on the forest
floor or helping restore ecosystem health.
Each year about 80,000 firefighters with the U.S. Forest Service
do about 70,000 prescribed burns on about 2 million acres, said
Luke Naeher, an environmental health scientist with the UGA
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. He wants to
know the health risks of these fires.
Health risks
“There are several pieces to our study,” he said. “But what we
want to determine are the short- and long-term health risks
associated with exposure to the smoke of these fires … if the
health-related problems are reversible.”
Naeher focuses on particulate matter, or the dust and unburned
organic matter in the air during a fire. It’s well established,
he said, that particulate matter can cause severe and chronic
health problems in humans’ respiratory systems.
“We’re most concerned with fine (particles), the size of human
hair or smaller,” he said. “They penetrate the deepest into the
lungs and are believed to have the most impact on health.”
In this year’s prescribed-fire season, January through April,
Naeher and his team monitored the respiratory systems of
firefighters doing prescribed burns at the Savannah River Site in
South Carolina. (The SRS was built in the 1950s to produce
materials for nuclear weapons. It became a national environmental
research park in 1972.)
Smoke’s effects
Naeher checked the fighters before and after their fire shifts.
He wanted to know how the smoke affected their respiratory
functions, including their lung capacity and how quickly they
could empty their lungs, he said.
Data from the study will help fire-crew chiefs come up with
better ways to protect firefighters. In the coming years, Naeher
hopes to develop and use less intrusive monitoring equipment and
techniques. Biomarkers could be used to test urine and blood for
exposure levels.
Fire managers must coordinate carefully with the state and
federal agencies that monitor smoke and air pollution in an area
for prescribed burns. But smoke management isn’t an exact
science. A slight shift in the wind could cause major problems
for communities downwind.
Effects downwind
Naeher is also monitoring carbon monoxide and particulate levels
downwind from the burns. He wants to better understand how
forest-fire smoke affects people a half-mile and six miles
away.
This will help fire managers plan safer fires. It will shed
light, too, on the health risk of wildfires, like the ones that
often hit the western United States in summer.
“We’re studying the issues related to forest fires and related
worker and community smoke exposure through a number of studies,”
Naeher said. “All of (them) are aimed at filling existing data
gaps.”
The U.S. Forest Service funds this study. Both the firefighter
and the community parts of it will continue for several more
years.
(Brad Haire is a news editor with the University of Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
