Dr. Yifang Zhu, professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of public health, and a member of the LA Fire HEALTH Study Consortium, recently discussed her team’s work on the public health impacts of the 2025 LA fires in The Conversation:
Urban fires are unique in a sense that it’s not just trees and other biomass burning. When homes and vehicles catch fire, plastics, electronics, cleaning chemicals, paints, textiles, construction material and much more burns, releasing chemicals and metals into the air.
More than 16,000 buildings burned in LA. Electric vehicles burned. A dental clinic burned. All of this gets mixed into the smoke in complicated ways, creating complex mixtures that can have definite health risks.
One thing we’ve found that is especially important for people to understand is that the concentration of these chemicals and metals can actually be higher inside homes compared with outside after a fire.