In a recent Washington Post article, journalist Ruby Mellen spoke with LA Fire HEALTH Study researchers Dr. Yifang Zhu, Dr. Joe Allen, and Dr. Kari Nadeau about their work to research the health impacts of urban wildfires such as the one that struck the Los Angeles area almost one year ago.
“The unprecedented nature of a disaster like this has always revealed something that hasn’t been discovered in the past,” said Yifang Zhu, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, who is one of the authors on the air quality study. Given the scale of the tragedy, it felt important to “make something good out of it,” she said of the large-scale research efforts.
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Researchers from more than 10 universities across the country — from Harvard to the University of Texas at Austin — descended on the burn zones as part of the LA Fire Health Study, hoping to answer the difficult questions of what is in the air, water, soil and dust — and what effect is it having on residents?
“I’ve never seen the scientific community mobilize so fast just behind the scenes,” said Joseph G. Allen, a professor of exposure assessment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and one of the LA Fire Health Study leads. “People were borrowing equipment. We were asking, ‘What’s the best lab that does this? Who can get a truck out and sample the air?’”