This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
PASADENA, Calif.—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 January 7, the rented bungalow on Loma Vista Street in Pasadena was located downwind of the burn zone.
Byrne, a therapist and mother of two preschoolers, and her husband, Jonathan Hull, a Ph.D. chemist, knew “too much for comfort” about toxic environmental exposure, said Byrne, “but without a good way to get answers.”
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.
With support from the Spiegel Family Fund, the universities formed the LA Fire Health Study Consortium in late January after the fires killed 29 people, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, primarily in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, and exposed millions to particulate matter, gases, chemicals, heavy metals, asbestos, PFAS, microplastics and other toxic pollutants.
The consortium pledged a 10-year study but also committed to providing Los Angeles with health information in real time, which became critically important after the US Army Corps of Engineers said in early February that it wouldn’t conduct soil sampling after the fires.
