A recent feature by Nina Dietz in Inside Climate News showed an in-depth look at how researchers are collecting data at homes in the Eaton and Palisades burn areas.

Nicole Byrne watched anxiously from across the small kitchen in her home as Parham Azimi, a Harvard University researcher, lined up sample bottles next to the running tap.

As his phone timer chimed, indicating the water pipes had been flushed for the required five minutes, Azimi began filling collection bottles and packing them to be mailed to a lab in San Diego later that day. 

Byrne knew it would take weeks to get results back for most of the samples, but she was finally one step closer to answers. 

Although her home is nearly two miles from Altadena, one of two communities devastated by the wildfires that broke out in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, the rented bungalow on Loma Vista Street in Pasadena was located downwind of the burn zone. 

….

Azimi was there gathering water samples as part of an unprecedented academic collaboration led by health, environmental, data and wildfire risk assessment researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, the University of California, Davis and the University of Texas at Austin.

Read the full article here.