Air quality, fire officials to team up; guidelines designed to help manage smoke from wildfires
By Ryan SabalowRedding Record-Searchlight
Posted August 11, 2011 at 11:36 p.m.
In an effort to try to keep sooty air out of residents' lungs, local air quality managers will now have a direct role in determining how a fire will be fought if it erupts on federal land in California.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and the California Air Resources Board released a set of guidelines that encourage fire managers and air quality officials to work together to plan how to manage fires once they ignite.
The guidelines, posted last week on the California Air Resources Board website, require fire officials to create smoke-management plans for any fire larger than 10 acres, have daily discussions with local air-quality managers and choose firefighting tactics that limit smoke on days when weather conditions create air quality that threatens communities.
The guidelines apply only to the 18 national forests in California and don't extend outside the state.
The officials who drafted them say the guidelines are designed to let a wildfire — something nearly universally agreed to be helpful for an overgrown forest — run its course without putting the public's respiratory health in danger.
"If we don't have healthy, fire-resistant forests then you end up with something like 2008 when you're exacerbating air quality throughout the state," Dar Mims, an air pollution specialist with the Air Resources Board, said Wednesday.
Mims was referring to the summer of 2008 when thousands of lightning strikes ignited more than 800,000 acres north of Sacramento. There were 136 wildfires in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest alone.
The fires killed 13 people, smothered a recreational season in smoke and forced widespread evacuations.
The following year, the Record Searchlight and the nonprofit Center for California Health Care Journalism found that the fires also had long-term health effects. Reporters found 10 doctor-verified cases in Trinity County in which residents — many of whom had never been seriously ill before — grew sick during the 2008 fires and remained chronically ill long after the blazes were extinguished.
The newspaper also reported that smoke from wildfires was a secondary consideration when fire managers made their daily firefighting decisions.
Mims said that in early 2009, before the stories came out, fire managers and air quality officials already had begun discussing ways to deal with smoke, as part of changes to the way fire managers were fighting fires on their lands.
"We all get it loud and clear: many repeated days of smoke, whether it's (exposure) all day long or certain times a day, there are health concerns," said Rob Griffith, the assistant fire director at the Forest Service's Region 5, which includes California's national forests.
Griffith said the new guidelines came about because of changes to how the nation's Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy was interpreted.
<SNIP>View entire article here: http://www.redding.com/news/2011/aug/11/air-quality-fire-officials-to-team/
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