Air District Reconsidering Prescribed Burns Following Smoky Skies
After a controlled burn on Angel Island this week sent smoke into residential areas across the Bay Area — and pushed air quality along the Richmond coast above 400 on the Air Quality Index — regulators said they’re now considering changing how permits are issued for future prescribed fires.
The saga began with a planned burn of 260 acres of the state park on Sept. 8. That attempt, however, was called off the following day, after discussions with the Bay Area Air District and complaints about smoke.
In planning a second attempt on Sept. 23 with California State Parks and Cal Fire, Andrea Polidori, deputy executive officer of science with the Bay Area Air District, said his staff reviewed weather conditions, multiple forecasts and lessons learned the first time.
“Our meteorologists looked at conditions that are expected to minimize smoke impact in the community,” Polidori said. “The forecast on that day indicated conditions favorable for smoke to rise and disperse into the atmosphere.”
Instead, the prescribed burn on Angel Island had to be called off early for a second time, after smoke from the fires dramatically impacted air quality for residents nearby.
Wednesday began as an atypically windless early fall morning on the Bay, which was remarkably still. Fire crews started burning at 10 a.m.
But the wind shifted by the early afternoon, sending plumes of smoke to San Francisco and West Contra Costa County — the latter of which already has high rates of asthma due to chronic air pollution from the fossil fuel and other industries.
“They were wrong, and all of us were negatively impacted,” John Gioia, a Contra Costa County supervisor and member of the air district’s board, said in a post on Instagram.
Notifications on air quality apps in Richmond glowed purple and showed an avatar wearing a respiratory mask. Even a few minutes in the air without a mask left this reporter with burning nostrils and a stinging headache.
From atop the hills of Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline — known for its clear, panoramic views of the Bay — smoke blocked the view of Angel Island. By 2 p.m., Gioia posted that the Air District had called off the burn for the day and the rest of the year due to worsening air conditions.
The Air District said it received one complaint of someone with asthma needing to seek medical care due to the smoke. Polidori said the task was to minimize the impact of smoke to the community using information from weather forecasts and models.
“Of course, these models are not perfect. There is always a kind of a level of uncertainty, and so we made the best decision with what we had, and, unfortunately, the wind shifted,” Polidori said. “What was difficult to forecast and predict was the ground concentration of fine particulate matter from the smoke, and so the impact was more than we predicted.”
Smoke lingered over west Contra Costa County until the early evening hours.
Gioia said he plans to bring up the controlled burn permit review process at the air district’s Oct. 7 board meeting in San Francisco.
Prescribed burns are an important part of forest management because they prevent larger, uncontrolled wildfires from being more destructive.
Fire experts say controlled burns can only be safely done during small windows of time, while taking into consideration factors like weather conditions and predicted smoke movement, among other things.
Ryan Forbes, a spokesperson for the State Parks Department, said that though the wind shifting pushed the smoke into residential areas, it was still a better scenario than if the smoke came from a wildfire because firefighters were already on the ground and had much greater control of when the fire started and ended.
“We don’t want to diminish in any way the impacts that can happen, particularly to those in sensitive groups, and that’s another big reason … to do it as a prescribed burn,” he said. “It makes it able for people to hopefully plan around this and try and mitigate those smoke impacts to themselves, as opposed with a wildfire, where we’re not going to get much notice.”
Forbes said that crews were able to burn 147 of the 260 acres they planned.
That could help lessen damage from a future wildfire, which requires fire equipment and personnel from off the island, which Forbes said is no simple task.
“The thing with Angel Island that makes that so scary is there’s really only one landing craft in the Bay capable of moving fire trucks onto the island,” Forbes said. “In the event that we have to respond to a fire on the island, getting resources over to stop it is a very potentially concerning task because you can only move so quickly.”
Polidori apologized for any impact the smoke had on the community.
“As public servants, our role and our duty is to protect the health of the community that we serve,” he said. “This is definitely an opportunity for us to go back, reassess the process, reassess the situation, and really try to do better next time.”