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"content": "\u003cp>Passengers flying into Bay Area airports usually spot them out the window: huge, colorful ponds, hugging the shoreline of the bay. The patchwork of brown, green and pink looks like a bizarre quilt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They’re known as the “salt ponds,” and Bay Curious listener Ann Vercoutere has wondered about them since her childhood in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you’d drive by on the old Bayshore Freeway, you’d see these big piles of salt,” she says. “So, my question is: what’s the process of how they go from dirty bay water into salt that comes out white from my salt shaker?”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>143 Billion Bowls of Popcorn\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Those giant piles of salt actually hold of piece of the Bay Area’s history going back to the Gold Rush and reflect the legacy of environmental change since then.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, they also hold a lot of seasoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The salt stack is 80 feet tall and about 800 feet wide,” says Maria Alizo-Martell of Cargill, Inc., standing next to the 500,000-ton pile. By rough estimate, it would season 143 billion bowls of popcorn, give or take, depending on how salty you like it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The piles are at Cargill’s Newark facility, where the final harvest takes place. But it begins in San Francisco Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Salty water from the bay is captured in vast ponds, where it starts to evaporate because of heat from the sun and drying by the wind. At first, the ponds are green or brownish in color, like the bay itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918307\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 400px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1918307 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/SP_V05_171212.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Animation shows the movement of reddish salt brine through Cargill’s Newark ponds over the course of 2017. \u003ccite>(Images provided by Planet)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As the salt water becomes more concentrated, it’s moved into other ponds where the color becomes more yellowish. Finally, in the last stage, the “pickle” brine, as it’s known, starts turning pink.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We like pink,” says Alizo-Martell with a chuckle, walking across a shallow pond with an inch of pink water. It covers a thick layer of crusty salt and looks like a giant, raspberry snow cone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[audio src=\"https://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/bay-curious/2017/12/salt-ponds.mp3\" Image=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/12/3526386886_f2139fe9ab_o-e1513209482229.jpg\" Title=\"LISTEN: What Are Those Weird, Pink Ponds in San Francisco Bay?\" program=\"Bay Curious\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Don’t Call it a “Salt Pond”\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“This is what we call a crystallizer bed,” says Cargill’s Pat Mapelli. “This is very engineered, managed and manicured, where everything has been rolled, graded, sloped and compacted. Whereas a salt pond is essentially a diked off area that has been flooded with salt water.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The vibrant pink hue comes from a natural source: halobacterium and microscopic algae.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the water gets saltier, some microbes can’t hack it and they die off. But others are specially adapted to salty conditions and they flourish, changing the color of the water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918310\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1918310\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-240x135.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-375x211.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-520x293.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Salt-loving microbes color the water before harvest. \u003ccite>(Lauren Sommer/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When they get stressed as the salinity increases, they produce that red color,” says Alizo-Martell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The saltier the water, the redder the microbes get. That color aids in the salt-making process by absorbing sunlight and increasing evaporation. Clear water doesn’t absorb as much light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once several inches of salt form, Cargill begins the harvest, which lasts from September to December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just beautiful,” says Alizo-Martell, picking up a handful of the flaky, white cubes. “It’s so weather dependent. You had a bad year, you get not much salt.” A lot of rain slows down the process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918312\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1918312\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-240x135.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-375x211.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-520x293.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The massive salt stack in Newark holds 500,000 tons. \u003ccite>(Lauren Sommer/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In all, it takes three years and a thousand gallons of bay water to produce just one pound of salt. From here, it goes to a refinery where it’s cleaned, sized and sold as sea salt, bearing the Morton’s or Diamond Crystal brand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But only 3 percent of the salt ends up on our table. The rest supplies a huge range of industrial processes, from pharmaceuticals to food production, water treatment and road salt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Gold Rush History\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Believe it or not, the Bay Area may not be what it is today without its salt. Harvesting salt from the Bay dates back to Native American groups like the Ohlone, but demand really picked up in the 1850s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As people migrated from the east to the west, mostly around the discovery of gold, there was a need for salt,” says Mapelli. “Everybody traveled with salt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without refrigeration, salt was how people preserved food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was almost worth its weight in gold,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Salt-making boomed through the 1970s, when Cargill bought the operation. 44,000 acres of the bay were in production then, but today, it’s just 8,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s because the market for salt shifted and so did our view of what San Francisco Bay should be. The salt ponds used to be marshes, which, around the time of the Gold Rush, were seen as wasteland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918311\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1918311\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-240x135.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-375x211.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-520x293.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Only three percent ends up as table salt. The rest goes to industry. \u003ccite>(Lauren Sommer/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“There was an encouragement by both the state and federal government to put what they considered wasteland or swamp and overflow lands into economic use,” Mapelli says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the Bay has lost more than 80 percent of its marshes. So, in 2003, the federal and state governments bought thousands of acres of ponds from Cargill. In the biggest ecosystem restoration project on the West Coast, the ponds are being reconnected to the Bay and restored to their original status as marshlands to support wildlife and act as buffers against rising sea levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Bay Curious questioner Ann Vercoutere, the ponds are one of the few things that haven’t changed from her childhood in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When she was a kid in Mountain View, “there were lots of orchards around,” she says. “Some of our summer jobs were going to work picking Italian prune plums with the migrant workers. Shoreline Amphitheater was the city dump. That was always a fun Saturday to go with our dad and pick through the dump and look for stuff.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, the salt ponds border some of the most expensive real estate in the nation, not far from gleaming tech campuses. The chances of starting a large, industrial salt-making operation in the Bay today are effectively zilch, for financial and environmental reasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of the long, colorful history, Cargill still holds rights to make salt, which really, is the only way salt-harvesting has stuck around amid the intense development pressure of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Passengers flying into Bay Area airports usually spot them out the window: huge, colorful ponds, hugging the shoreline of the bay. The patchwork of brown, green and pink looks like a bizarre quilt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They’re known as the “salt ponds,” and Bay Curious listener Ann Vercoutere has wondered about them since her childhood in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you’d drive by on the old Bayshore Freeway, you’d see these big piles of salt,” she says. “So, my question is: what’s the process of how they go from dirty bay water into salt that comes out white from my salt shaker?”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>143 Billion Bowls of Popcorn\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Those giant piles of salt actually hold of piece of the Bay Area’s history going back to the Gold Rush and reflect the legacy of environmental change since then.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, they also hold a lot of seasoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The salt stack is 80 feet tall and about 800 feet wide,” says Maria Alizo-Martell of Cargill, Inc., standing next to the 500,000-ton pile. By rough estimate, it would season 143 billion bowls of popcorn, give or take, depending on how salty you like it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The piles are at Cargill’s Newark facility, where the final harvest takes place. But it begins in San Francisco Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Salty water from the bay is captured in vast ponds, where it starts to evaporate because of heat from the sun and drying by the wind. At first, the ponds are green or brownish in color, like the bay itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918307\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 400px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1918307 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/SP_V05_171212.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Animation shows the movement of reddish salt brine through Cargill’s Newark ponds over the course of 2017. \u003ccite>(Images provided by Planet)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As the salt water becomes more concentrated, it’s moved into other ponds where the color becomes more yellowish. Finally, in the last stage, the “pickle” brine, as it’s known, starts turning pink.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We like pink,” says Alizo-Martell with a chuckle, walking across a shallow pond with an inch of pink water. It covers a thick layer of crusty salt and looks like a giant, raspberry snow cone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Don’t Call it a “Salt Pond”\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>“This is what we call a crystallizer bed,” says Cargill’s Pat Mapelli. “This is very engineered, managed and manicured, where everything has been rolled, graded, sloped and compacted. Whereas a salt pond is essentially a diked off area that has been flooded with salt water.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The vibrant pink hue comes from a natural source: halobacterium and microscopic algae.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the water gets saltier, some microbes can’t hack it and they die off. But others are specially adapted to salty conditions and they flourish, changing the color of the water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918310\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1918310\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-240x135.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-375x211.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web4-520x293.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Salt-loving microbes color the water before harvest. \u003ccite>(Lauren Sommer/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When they get stressed as the salinity increases, they produce that red color,” says Alizo-Martell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The saltier the water, the redder the microbes get. That color aids in the salt-making process by absorbing sunlight and increasing evaporation. Clear water doesn’t absorb as much light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once several inches of salt form, Cargill begins the harvest, which lasts from September to December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just beautiful,” says Alizo-Martell, picking up a handful of the flaky, white cubes. “It’s so weather dependent. You had a bad year, you get not much salt.” A lot of rain slows down the process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918312\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1918312\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-240x135.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-375x211.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web3-520x293.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The massive salt stack in Newark holds 500,000 tons. \u003ccite>(Lauren Sommer/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In all, it takes three years and a thousand gallons of bay water to produce just one pound of salt. From here, it goes to a refinery where it’s cleaned, sized and sold as sea salt, bearing the Morton’s or Diamond Crystal brand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But only 3 percent of the salt ends up on our table. The rest supplies a huge range of industrial processes, from pharmaceuticals to food production, water treatment and road salt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Gold Rush History\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Believe it or not, the Bay Area may not be what it is today without its salt. Harvesting salt from the Bay dates back to Native American groups like the Ohlone, but demand really picked up in the 1850s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As people migrated from the east to the west, mostly around the discovery of gold, there was a need for salt,” says Mapelli. “Everybody traveled with salt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without refrigeration, salt was how people preserved food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was almost worth its weight in gold,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Salt-making boomed through the 1970s, when Cargill bought the operation. 44,000 acres of the bay were in production then, but today, it’s just 8,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s because the market for salt shifted and so did our view of what San Francisco Bay should be. The salt ponds used to be marshes, which, around the time of the Gold Rush, were seen as wasteland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1918311\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1918311\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-1180x664.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-240x135.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-375x211.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/12/salt-ponds-web5-520x293.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Only three percent ends up as table salt. The rest goes to industry. \u003ccite>(Lauren Sommer/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“There was an encouragement by both the state and federal government to put what they considered wasteland or swamp and overflow lands into economic use,” Mapelli says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the Bay has lost more than 80 percent of its marshes. So, in 2003, the federal and state governments bought thousands of acres of ponds from Cargill. In the biggest ecosystem restoration project on the West Coast, the ponds are being reconnected to the Bay and restored to their original status as marshlands to support wildlife and act as buffers against rising sea levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Bay Curious questioner Ann Vercoutere, the ponds are one of the few things that haven’t changed from her childhood in the South Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When she was a kid in Mountain View, “there were lots of orchards around,” she says. “Some of our summer jobs were going to work picking Italian prune plums with the migrant workers. Shoreline Amphitheater was the city dump. That was always a fun Saturday to go with our dad and pick through the dump and look for stuff.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, the salt ponds border some of the most expensive real estate in the nation, not far from gleaming tech campuses. The chances of starting a large, industrial salt-making operation in the Bay today are effectively zilch, for financial and environmental reasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of the long, colorful history, Cargill still holds rights to make salt, which really, is the only way salt-harvesting has stuck around amid the intense development pressure of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Another 27 million trees died in California last year due to the lingering effects of drought, according to new aerial survey data from the U.S. Forest Service. That brings the total number of trees killed statewide to a staggering 129 million since 2010.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a typical year, about one million trees die across California. But beginning in 2014,\u003ca href=\"http://egis.fire.ca.gov/TreeMortalityViewer/\"> that number began ticking up \u003c/a>as aerial surveyors with the U.S. Forest Service started to notice entire hillsides turning yellow, brown and orange. At the height of the drought, in 2016, \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/21/66332/scientists-offer-front-lines-look-at-california-s/\">they counted 62 million dead trees\u003c/a> in a single year (here is a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd565841.pdf\">map\u003c/a> of the mortality progression).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://giphy.com/embed/l3mZi99vRrtGLFEKk\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"100%\" frameborder=\"0\" class=\"giphy-embed\" height=\"500\" scrolling=\"yes\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adrian Das, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2017/08/01/74208/the-standing-dead-the-towering-emotional-and-finan/\">previously told KPCC\u003c/a> that he wasn’t surprised that after a single wet winter, trees were still dying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The trees have been weakened and under a lot of stress and we have these beetle populations that are doing well,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drought often kills trees indirectly. By depriving them of water, trees become weakened and unable to ward off diseases, fungus or bark beetles, which are always present in the forest but explode in numbers when trees are unable to fight them off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last winter, more rain and snow fell on parts of the Sierra Nevada than in the previous four years combined. Some trees have recovered, and the death rate is slowing down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lower rate could also be a result that so many trees have already died, so there’s just not much left to be killed, said Stephanie Gomes with the U.S. Forest Service’s tree mortality task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, this year’s data shows species with lower death rates in the past are dying in different parts of the state. Previously, \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2017/01/30/68520/new-map-ids-epicenter-of-sierra-nevada-tree-mortal/\">the hardest-hit species and regions \u003c/a>of California were pines at lower elevations in the Southern Sierra Nevada, where the highest temperatures sucked water out of soil, depriving trees of what little moisture existed. Now, Gomes said death rates are increasingly in higher elevations among fir trees in northern reaches of the mountains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of the problem, scientists say, is that forests throughout the West have too many trees. Historically, many forests used to experience fire more frequently than they do now, which resulted in saplings and small trees dying in the blazes and leaving many forests more open. In the past century, firefighters put out those fires, meaning more small trees were able to survive and forests became crowded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, climate change is forcing more trees to compete for a dwindling amount of water. As temperatures rise due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions,\u003ca href=\"http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/warming-climate-deepening-california-drought\">more water gets sucked back into the sky \u003c/a>and out of the soil and the ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gomes said the U.S. Forest Service is trying to compensate by thinning out forests either through logging or with prescribed fires so trees don’t have as much competition for water. The agency will also be prioritizing removing dead trees that may pose a safety risk, such as those growing along highways, campgrounds, and power lines. But it is difficult for the agency to do this work when more than half its budget every year goes to fighting wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As fire suppression costs continue to grow as a percentage of the Forest Service’s budget, funding is shrinking for non-fire programs that protect watersheds and restore forests, making them more resilient to wildfire and drought,” Randy Moore, Regional Forester of the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region, wrote in the news release.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Another 27 million trees died in California last year due to the lingering effects of drought, according to new aerial survey data from the U.S. Forest Service. That brings the total number of trees killed statewide to a staggering 129 million since 2010.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a typical year, about one million trees die across California. But beginning in 2014,\u003ca href=\"http://egis.fire.ca.gov/TreeMortalityViewer/\"> that number began ticking up \u003c/a>as aerial surveyors with the U.S. Forest Service started to notice entire hillsides turning yellow, brown and orange. At the height of the drought, in 2016, \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/21/66332/scientists-offer-front-lines-look-at-california-s/\">they counted 62 million dead trees\u003c/a> in a single year (here is a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd565841.pdf\">map\u003c/a> of the mortality progression).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https://giphy.com/embed/l3mZi99vRrtGLFEKk\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"100%\" frameborder=\"0\" class=\"giphy-embed\" height=\"500\" scrolling=\"yes\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adrian Das, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2017/08/01/74208/the-standing-dead-the-towering-emotional-and-finan/\">previously told KPCC\u003c/a> that he wasn’t surprised that after a single wet winter, trees were still dying.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The trees have been weakened and under a lot of stress and we have these beetle populations that are doing well,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Drought often kills trees indirectly. By depriving them of water, trees become weakened and unable to ward off diseases, fungus or bark beetles, which are always present in the forest but explode in numbers when trees are unable to fight them off.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last winter, more rain and snow fell on parts of the Sierra Nevada than in the previous four years combined. Some trees have recovered, and the death rate is slowing down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lower rate could also be a result that so many trees have already died, so there’s just not much left to be killed, said Stephanie Gomes with the U.S. Forest Service’s tree mortality task force.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, this year’s data shows species with lower death rates in the past are dying in different parts of the state. Previously, \u003ca href=\"http://www.scpr.org/news/2017/01/30/68520/new-map-ids-epicenter-of-sierra-nevada-tree-mortal/\">the hardest-hit species and regions \u003c/a>of California were pines at lower elevations in the Southern Sierra Nevada, where the highest temperatures sucked water out of soil, depriving trees of what little moisture existed. Now, Gomes said death rates are increasingly in higher elevations among fir trees in northern reaches of the mountains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of the problem, scientists say, is that forests throughout the West have too many trees. Historically, many forests used to experience fire more frequently than they do now, which resulted in saplings and small trees dying in the blazes and leaving many forests more open. In the past century, firefighters put out those fires, meaning more small trees were able to survive and forests became crowded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, climate change is forcing more trees to compete for a dwindling amount of water. As temperatures rise due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions,\u003ca href=\"http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/warming-climate-deepening-california-drought\">more water gets sucked back into the sky \u003c/a>and out of the soil and the ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gomes said the U.S. Forest Service is trying to compensate by thinning out forests either through logging or with prescribed fires so trees don’t have as much competition for water. The agency will also be prioritizing removing dead trees that may pose a safety risk, such as those growing along highways, campgrounds, and power lines. But it is difficult for the agency to do this work when more than half its budget every year goes to fighting wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As fire suppression costs continue to grow as a percentage of the Forest Service’s budget, funding is shrinking for non-fire programs that protect watersheds and restore forests, making them more resilient to wildfire and drought,” Randy Moore, Regional Forester of the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region, wrote in the news release.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>High-ranking U.S.-based Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt has been \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/business/oliver-schmidt-volkswagen.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1\">sentenced\u003c/a> to seven years in prison and ordered to pay a $400,000 fine for his part in a decade-long diesel-emissions cheating scandal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schmidt was the chief of Volkswagen’s engineering and environmental office in Michigan. In August, he \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/business/volkswagen-diesel-oliver-schmidt.html\">pleaded guilty\u003c/a> to charges of conspiracy to defraud the federal government and violation of the Clean Air Act by participating in a scheme to circumvent federal emissions tests with rigged devices in diesel cars. Federal regulators uncovered the plot in 2015.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Volkswagen already has admitted guilt to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, customs violations and obstruction of justice, as well as violation of the Clean Air Act. The German company has paid more than $20 billion in fines and settlements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a letter to U.S. District Judge Sean Cox of Detroit, Schmidt acknowledged his guilt. Reading a written \u003ca href=\"https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions/volkswagen-executive-sentenced-to-seven-years-for-u-s-emissions-fraud-idUSKBN1E01W1\">statement\u003c/a> in court, Schmidt broke down saying, “I made bad decisions and for that I am sorry.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Federal prosecutors also have charged eight other current or former Volkswagen executives, as \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em> reports:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“But most of the people suspected of taking part in a conspiracy to defraud United States regulators are out of reach of American justice in Germany, which normally does not extradite its own citizens. Mr. Schmidt may well turn out to suffer the harshest punishment for the emissions fraud even though he was not by any means the only participant or the highest ranking.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Schmidt was arrested in January while vacationing in Miami with his wife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Senior+Volkswagen+Executive+Sentenced+In+Diesel-Emissions+Scandal&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Patagonia replaced its usual home page Monday night with a stark message declaring, “The President Stole Your Land.” The message called Trump’s actions to shrink \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/visit/bears-ears-national-monument\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Bears Ears\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://utah.com/grand-staircase-escalante\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Grand Staircase-Escalante \u003c/a>national monuments “illegal” and the largest elimination of protected land in American history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outdoor retailer REI also criticized Trump but in less harsh language.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Updated at 6:30 p.m. PST\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a visit to Utah on Monday, President Trump announced his proclamations dramatically shrinking the size of the state’s two massive national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Taken together, Trump’s orders mark \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/monumentslist.htm\">the largest reversal\u003c/a> of national monument protections in U.S. history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The change has already been challenged in court by conservation groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bears Ears National Monument will go from roughly 1.3 million acres to roughly 228,000 — only about 15 percent of its original size. And Grand Staircase will be diminished by roughly half, from its nearly 1.9 million acres to about 1 million. The specific numbers were provided to reporters by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke prior to Trump’s announcement in Salt Lake City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No one values the splendor of Utah more than you do,” Trump told an enthusiastic crowd Monday, “and no one knows better how to use it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He noted that before making the decision, he had discussed it with Zinke and the state’s two GOP senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee. Both senators have been outspoken critics of the two national monuments — both protected under \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/subjects/legal/american-antiquities-act-of-1906.htm\">the 1906 Antiquities Act\u003c/a> by Democratic presidents — framing them as significant federal overreach that deprives Utahans of their own land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Trump echoed those criticisms Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These abuses of the Antiquities Act give enormous power to faraway bureaucrats at the expense of the people who actually live here, work here and make this place their home,” Trump said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His decision caps months of speculation and a controversial review of the boundaries of large national monuments that protect more than 100,000 acres of U.S. public land. The review, conducted by Zinke, originally looked at more than two dozen \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/28/525883061/photos-see-the-sweeping-american-landscapes-under-review-by-trump\">national monuments\u003c/a> designated by presidential decree since the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Utah, with its new Bears Ears monument and the Grand Staircase National Monument, has always been at the center of the debate and largely what spurred the review. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/28/507314596/obama-designates-two-new-national-monuments-in-nevada-and-utah\">created Bears Ears\u003c/a> shortly before leaving office, while the Grand Staircase monument dates to the Clinton administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And depending on which side you’re on, Monday’s announcement is either about an overreaching federal government that prevented development on large amounts of federal land with little local support or it’s the latest example of the U.S. government breaking promises with Native Americans and eroding environmental protections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The case to reduce the monuments\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Utah’s Republican congressional delegation, along with county commissions and conservative groups, pressed the administration to open up these federal lands once more for private use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“President Trump’s decision to reduce these monuments allows us to still protect those areas that need protection, while at the same time keeping the area open and accessible to locals who depend on this land for their daily lives,” said Matt Anderson of the Utah-based Sutherland Institute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anderson says large, public-land national monuments hurt rural counties. These areas already have large amounts of federal public land, he says, where cattle grazing, mining and other types of private enterprise are heavily regulated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rural Utah is still fuming from President Bill Clinton’s designation of the Grand Staircase in 1996, which grandfathered in existing cattle-grazing leases and other uses but also nixed a proposed coal mine. Clinton signed the proclamation at the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, and Utah officials at the time said they were blindsided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you designate a large national monument, you restrict access to the land and you block traditional uses of the land,” Anderson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The home of Bears Ears, rural San Juan County, is often cited as one of Utah’s poorest, and more than 60 percent of all its land is owned and managed by the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“A sad day for Indigenous people and for America”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During his speech Monday, Trump said the national monument designations also “prevent Native Americans from having their rightful voice over the sacred land where they practice their most important ancestral and religious traditions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many tribal leaders and activists are likely to deeply object to this assessment. For months, they have passionately campaigned to preserve the national monument designations — and now, upon hearing Trump’s proclamations, they are promising to sue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Navajo Nation has made repeated requests to meet with President Trump on this issue. The Bears Ears Monument is of critical importance, not only to the Navajo Nation but to many tribes in the region,” Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said in a written \u003ca href=\"https://us15.campaign-archive.com/?u=0bf367cc7bf787cb9b02b21c8&id=632dd6343f\">statement\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The decision to reduce the size of the Monument is being made with no tribal consultation,” he said. “The Navajo Nation will defend Bears Ears. The reduction in the size of the Monument leaves us no choice but to litigate this decision.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bears Ears National Monument is not just for Native Americans but for all Americans,” Vice President Jonathan Nez said. “This is a sad day for Indigenous people and for America.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bears Ears is considered some of the most culturally significant land in the American Southwest. Its famous Red Rock Canyon country is dense with ancient artifacts, cliff dwellings and sacred burial grounds. Just a couple of years ago, some of the land was proposed for additional federal protections, but a bill backed by Utah’s House Republicans stalled in Congress. Then, last year, the Obama administration held meetings in the region before declaring it a national monument in late December under the 1906 Antiquities Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tribal leaders took to the streets of Salt Lake City over the weekend to protest the president’s decision. At a rally Saturday, Ethel Branch, attorney general of the Navajo Nation, predicted the president wouldn’t even set foot on or see the land in question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want him to visit Bears Ears before he takes any action,” Branch told a cheering crowd at a rally outside the Utah Capitol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Trump did not visit Bears Ears. The monument is more than a five-hour drive from Salt Lake City, and the president’s tight schedule, which included a trip to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Welfare Square, brought him home to the White House by the end of the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Next stop: the courtroom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Navajo Nation isn’t the only group to announce its intention to sue the Trump administration over his proclamations. Conservationists have also voiced their objections — and their plans to bring those objections to court.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By late Monday, 10 conservation groups had filed a \u003ca href=\"https://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/files/TWS-v.-Trump.pdf\">lawsuit\u003c/a>, alleging that Trump’s action was “unlawful” and an abuse of his authority. The suit argues that the law “authorizes Presidents to create a national monument; it does not authorize Presidents to abolish them either in whole or in part, as President Trump’s action attempts to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think the only thing this administration understands is lawsuits,” Yvon Chouinard, founder and CEO of outdoor gear company \u003ca href=\"http://www.patagonia.com/home/\">Patagonia\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/utah-monuments-trump-weir/index.html\">told CNN\u003c/a>. “We’re losing this planet, and we have an evil government. And not just the federal government, but wacko politicians out of Utah and places. I mean, it’s evil. And I’m not going to stand back and just let evil win.” The company is not a party in the conservationists’ lawsuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans in Congress have proposed changes to the Antiquities Act, which was originally intended to protect against the looting of ancient artifacts from public land, to make it harder for presidents to use it as a means to create large national monuments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The law, as written, authorizes the president to designate these monuments — but it is gray on the matter of whether a president can actually shrink or abolish a large, already-existing monument. Sixteen presidents have used the Antiquities Act to create public-lands monuments, but legal experts say that the task of modifying public lands has historically been the role of Congress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“President Trump’s dramatic reduction of the Bears Ears National Monument is a direct attack on the Antiquities Act and America’s public lands. We intend to challenge this action in federal court,” Stephanie Meeks, president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said in a statement Monday after the announcement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Rolling back the designation of Bears Ears leaves thousands of extraordinary archaeological sites vulnerable to looting and vandalism. The President’s action also opens the remarkable Bears Ears’ landscape to incompatible oil and gas development.” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This arbitrary review and illegal action will not go unchallenged,” said Nicole Croft, executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmentalists like Croft fear the decision could set a precedent for future presidents to unravel protections on federal land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The experience of exploration, wonder and humility at the grandeur of the natural world is one our children and their children deserve, and that is what this administration is trying to rob from our future,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Trump+Orders+Largest+National+Monument+Reduction+In+U.S.+History&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Updated at 6:30 p.m. PST\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a visit to Utah on Monday, President Trump announced his proclamations dramatically shrinking the size of the state’s two massive national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Taken together, Trump’s orders mark \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/monumentslist.htm\">the largest reversal\u003c/a> of national monument protections in U.S. history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The change has already been challenged in court by conservation groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bears Ears National Monument will go from roughly 1.3 million acres to roughly 228,000 — only about 15 percent of its original size. And Grand Staircase will be diminished by roughly half, from its nearly 1.9 million acres to about 1 million. The specific numbers were provided to reporters by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke prior to Trump’s announcement in Salt Lake City.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No one values the splendor of Utah more than you do,” Trump told an enthusiastic crowd Monday, “and no one knows better how to use it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He noted that before making the decision, he had discussed it with Zinke and the state’s two GOP senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee. Both senators have been outspoken critics of the two national monuments — both protected under \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/subjects/legal/american-antiquities-act-of-1906.htm\">the 1906 Antiquities Act\u003c/a> by Democratic presidents — framing them as significant federal overreach that deprives Utahans of their own land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Trump echoed those criticisms Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These abuses of the Antiquities Act give enormous power to faraway bureaucrats at the expense of the people who actually live here, work here and make this place their home,” Trump said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His decision caps months of speculation and a controversial review of the boundaries of large national monuments that protect more than 100,000 acres of U.S. public land. The review, conducted by Zinke, originally looked at more than two dozen \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/28/525883061/photos-see-the-sweeping-american-landscapes-under-review-by-trump\">national monuments\u003c/a> designated by presidential decree since the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Utah, with its new Bears Ears monument and the Grand Staircase National Monument, has always been at the center of the debate and largely what spurred the review. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/28/507314596/obama-designates-two-new-national-monuments-in-nevada-and-utah\">created Bears Ears\u003c/a> shortly before leaving office, while the Grand Staircase monument dates to the Clinton administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And depending on which side you’re on, Monday’s announcement is either about an overreaching federal government that prevented development on large amounts of federal land with little local support or it’s the latest example of the U.S. government breaking promises with Native Americans and eroding environmental protections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The case to reduce the monuments\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Utah’s Republican congressional delegation, along with county commissions and conservative groups, pressed the administration to open up these federal lands once more for private use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“President Trump’s decision to reduce these monuments allows us to still protect those areas that need protection, while at the same time keeping the area open and accessible to locals who depend on this land for their daily lives,” said Matt Anderson of the Utah-based Sutherland Institute.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anderson says large, public-land national monuments hurt rural counties. These areas already have large amounts of federal public land, he says, where cattle grazing, mining and other types of private enterprise are heavily regulated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rural Utah is still fuming from President Bill Clinton’s designation of the Grand Staircase in 1996, which grandfathered in existing cattle-grazing leases and other uses but also nixed a proposed coal mine. Clinton signed the proclamation at the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, and Utah officials at the time said they were blindsided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you designate a large national monument, you restrict access to the land and you block traditional uses of the land,” Anderson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The home of Bears Ears, rural San Juan County, is often cited as one of Utah’s poorest, and more than 60 percent of all its land is owned and managed by the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“A sad day for Indigenous people and for America”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During his speech Monday, Trump said the national monument designations also “prevent Native Americans from having their rightful voice over the sacred land where they practice their most important ancestral and religious traditions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many tribal leaders and activists are likely to deeply object to this assessment. For months, they have passionately campaigned to preserve the national monument designations — and now, upon hearing Trump’s proclamations, they are promising to sue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Navajo Nation has made repeated requests to meet with President Trump on this issue. The Bears Ears Monument is of critical importance, not only to the Navajo Nation but to many tribes in the region,” Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said in a written \u003ca href=\"https://us15.campaign-archive.com/?u=0bf367cc7bf787cb9b02b21c8&id=632dd6343f\">statement\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The decision to reduce the size of the Monument is being made with no tribal consultation,” he said. “The Navajo Nation will defend Bears Ears. The reduction in the size of the Monument leaves us no choice but to litigate this decision.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Bears Ears National Monument is not just for Native Americans but for all Americans,” Vice President Jonathan Nez said. “This is a sad day for Indigenous people and for America.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bears Ears is considered some of the most culturally significant land in the American Southwest. Its famous Red Rock Canyon country is dense with ancient artifacts, cliff dwellings and sacred burial grounds. Just a couple of years ago, some of the land was proposed for additional federal protections, but a bill backed by Utah’s House Republicans stalled in Congress. Then, last year, the Obama administration held meetings in the region before declaring it a national monument in late December under the 1906 Antiquities Act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tribal leaders took to the streets of Salt Lake City over the weekend to protest the president’s decision. At a rally Saturday, Ethel Branch, attorney general of the Navajo Nation, predicted the president wouldn’t even set foot on or see the land in question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want him to visit Bears Ears before he takes any action,” Branch told a cheering crowd at a rally outside the Utah Capitol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Trump did not visit Bears Ears. The monument is more than a five-hour drive from Salt Lake City, and the president’s tight schedule, which included a trip to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Welfare Square, brought him home to the White House by the end of the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Next stop: the courtroom\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Navajo Nation isn’t the only group to announce its intention to sue the Trump administration over his proclamations. Conservationists have also voiced their objections — and their plans to bring those objections to court.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By late Monday, 10 conservation groups had filed a \u003ca href=\"https://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/files/TWS-v.-Trump.pdf\">lawsuit\u003c/a>, alleging that Trump’s action was “unlawful” and an abuse of his authority. The suit argues that the law “authorizes Presidents to create a national monument; it does not authorize Presidents to abolish them either in whole or in part, as President Trump’s action attempts to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think the only thing this administration understands is lawsuits,” Yvon Chouinard, founder and CEO of outdoor gear company \u003ca href=\"http://www.patagonia.com/home/\">Patagonia\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/utah-monuments-trump-weir/index.html\">told CNN\u003c/a>. “We’re losing this planet, and we have an evil government. And not just the federal government, but wacko politicians out of Utah and places. I mean, it’s evil. And I’m not going to stand back and just let evil win.” The company is not a party in the conservationists’ lawsuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Republicans in Congress have proposed changes to the Antiquities Act, which was originally intended to protect against the looting of ancient artifacts from public land, to make it harder for presidents to use it as a means to create large national monuments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The law, as written, authorizes the president to designate these monuments — but it is gray on the matter of whether a president can actually shrink or abolish a large, already-existing monument. Sixteen presidents have used the Antiquities Act to create public-lands monuments, but legal experts say that the task of modifying public lands has historically been the role of Congress.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“President Trump’s dramatic reduction of the Bears Ears National Monument is a direct attack on the Antiquities Act and America’s public lands. We intend to challenge this action in federal court,” Stephanie Meeks, president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said in a statement Monday after the announcement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Rolling back the designation of Bears Ears leaves thousands of extraordinary archaeological sites vulnerable to looting and vandalism. The President’s action also opens the remarkable Bears Ears’ landscape to incompatible oil and gas development.” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This arbitrary review and illegal action will not go unchallenged,” said Nicole Croft, executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmentalists like Croft fear the decision could set a precedent for future presidents to unravel protections on federal land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The experience of exploration, wonder and humility at the grandeur of the natural world is one our children and their children deserve, and that is what this administration is trying to rob from our future,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Trump+Orders+Largest+National+Monument+Reduction+In+U.S.+History&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Fire Retardant Use Explodes as Worries About Water, Wildlife Grow",
"headTitle": "Fire Retardant Use Explodes as Worries About Water, Wildlife Grow | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">C\u003c/span>hemical fire retardants are considered a vital wildland firefighting tool, helping to slow the spread of flames while ground crews move into position. But as their use increases, the harmful side effects of these chemicals are coming under increasing scrutiny.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The chemicals, usually dropped from low-flying aircraft, largely consist of ammonia compounds, which are known toxins to fish and other aquatic life. Studies have shown retardants can kill fish, alter soil chemistry, feed harmful algae blooms and even encourage the spread of invasive plants. Yet there is little regulation of their use, and no safer alternatives on the market.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”AhBsf9clDWFWhb35p0dJW2ufu4gD5guq”]In California, state firefighting crews have applied \u003cspan class=\"caps\">15.3\u003c/span> million gallons of chemical fire retardants so far this year, according to data provided by CalFire, the state’s wildland firefighting agency. That’s a new record, and double the amount used just three years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">CalFire applied \u003cspan class=\"caps\">2.7\u003c/span> million gallons of retardant in a single one-week period starting October 9 – also a record. Of that amount, about 2 million gallons were used on the North Bay wildfires, which killed 43 people and burned more than 8,000 structures in October as they swept across several counties north of the San Francisco Bay Area, including Sonoma and Napa.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The growth of retardant use in California has outpaced federal firefighting: In 2016, the United States Forest Service \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/fire/retardant/2016_Aerial%20Retardant%20Use%20on%20NFS%20lands_%201_17_2017.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">applied\u003c/span>\u003c/a> 19 million gallons of retardant on all National Forest system lands in the nation, an increase of 55 percent compared to three years earlier.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fusee.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, said chemical fire retardants are overused. They are intended only to slow a fire down so that ground crews have time to reach a fire front and build containment lines. Instead, retardants are being used in place of ground crews, he said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">In many cases where people and structures are not threatened, Ingalsbee said, fires should be allowed to burn rather than spending money on retardants and putting pilots at risk.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“It looks good on \u003cspan class=\"caps\">TV\u003c/span> – ‘\u003cspan class=\"caps\">CNN\u003c/span> Drops’ is a term firefighters use,” Ingalsbee said. “Eventually, the fire burns through that stuff and keeps on trucking. The worst concern is, they cause some significant impacts, particularly to water quality.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">In 2014, scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service published a \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24880550\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">study\u003c/span>\u003c/a> showing that two fire-retardant formulations are deadly to Chinook salmon, even when heavily diluted in streams.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The chemicals killed salmon at concentrations well below 1 percent of the strength at which the retardants are applied. And the study found the chemicals had lasting effects: Even salmon that survived initially could be killed weeks later when they migrated to salt water, apparently because the chemicals damaged their gills.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“They are sensitive at low amounts compared to what is applied,” said Joseph Dietrich, an ecotoxicologist with \u003cspan class=\"caps\">NOAA\u003c/span>’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the study. “It’s a very low concentration compared to what is in the stock solution that’s in a helicopter during a firefighting event.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The retardants evaluated in the study, known by the trade names 259-F and \u003cspan class=\"caps\">LC\u003c/span>–\u003cspan class=\"caps\">95A\u003c/span>, are made by \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://phoschek.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Phos-Chek\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> subsidiary of an Israel-based company called \u003cspan class=\"caps\">ICL\u003c/span> Performance Products. Both retardants are still in use by both the Forest Service and CalFire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">However, CalFire spokesperson Scott McLean said the agency this year has mainly used a different Phos-Chek formulation known as \u003cspan class=\"caps\">MVP\u003c/span>-F. It is advertised as being a safer product, though it has not yet been subjected to similar studies.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">CalFire takes its lead in retardant selection from the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> Forest Service, which produces a so-called “qualified products list” after testing the chemicals.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Most retardants are delivered as a powder, then mixed with water before being loaded onto aircraft. The water is merely a delivery mechanism.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The primary ingredient in retardants is an ammonium phosphate or sulfate solution – essentially a type of fertilizer. Other ingredients are exempt from public disclosure under federal law as trade secrets. But one is a gelling agent that allows the ammonia solution to cling to plants, temporarily insulating them from heat and flame to deprive an advancing fire of fuel.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">McLean said retardants are a vital firefighting tool, and defended their use.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“Aerial application of retardant provides support to firefighters on the fire line that could not be otherwise immediately supported by a vehicle, [a] fire engine,” McLean said. “At present, there is no other long-term fire retardant that has met the requirements of the [Forest Service] qualified products list.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Dietrich said it’s likely that \u003cspan class=\"caps\">MVP\u003c/span>-F will also be deadly to salmon. The concentration known to be toxic to fish, as reported by the manufacturer, is still less than 1 percent of the concentration at which the retardant is released by aircraft. This means, again, that it can be heavily diluted in the environment and still remain deadly to fish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The unknown proprietary ingredients in retardants may play a role in this, he said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“They’re definitely enhancing toxicity,” Dietrich said. “\u003c/span>\u003cspan class=\"s3\">Whether they are working with ammonia or just causing separate effects that are accumulating, I couldn’t say. \u003c/span>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">There is some other source of toxicity that comes into play.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Not much is known about how long retardants linger in the environment. But the compounds most often used are known as “long-term” retardants, because they are designed to cling to plants and remain effective for weeks – until they are either burned off or washed away by heavy rain. In the latter case, the chemicals will then flow into streams and lakes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">A team at the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> Geological Survey is engaged in a large \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.cerc.usgs.gov/ScienceTopics.aspx?ScienceTopicId=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">research effort\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to analyze the longevity of these chemicals once applied. The results have not yet been published, and the team leader did not respond to a request for comment.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The Forest Service used fire retardants for decades without analyzing their environmental effects. Then, in 2009, \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fseee.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, a nonprofit group, sued the agency, blaming retardants for killing 50 endangered steelhead during a fire near Santa Barbara, California.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The lawsuit resulted in a court order requiring the Forest Service to prepare an environmental impact study, which was \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/fire/retardant/eis_info.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">completed\u003c/span>\u003c/a> in 2011. The study concluded retardants are potentially harmful to wildlife and water quality, and set parameters on their use to minimize these effects. These included mapping sensitive \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=1920b5b8884643dfb1b391453bbbe998\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">exclusion zones\u003c/span>\u003c/a> where retardants may not be used.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Also, fire crews are now trained not to drop retardant within 300ft of water bodies if using an airplane, and within 100ft if applied from a helicopter or fire engine. Fire crews can, however, deviate from these guidelines when life or property are threatened.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Earlier this year, the Forest Service prepared a \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/fire/wfcs/ras.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">risk assessment\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to evaluate the ecological effects of the latest retardant chemicals. It reviewed the same products analyzed in Dietrich’s study, as well as others, and acknowledged that toxic effects to fish and plants are possible. But it minimized these concerns by reporting, in the case of fish, that long-term exposure is unlikely in flowing-water environments, and stated that plants would be worse off if they were allowed to burn.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Ingalsbee said even a 300ft buffer may not be enough to protect water and wildlife. Unpredictable fire-fed winds may spread retardant into a stream or lake from much greater distances, he said. Pilot error is also common.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">In addition, retardants can alter plant communities long after a fire is extinguished.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Invasive plants are known to aggressively colonize burned areas after a fire. The ammonia in retardants is a potent fertilizer: It can become a kind of junk food for invasive plants, which can quickly crowd out native plants after a fire. As a result, in 2008 the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> Fish and Wildlife Service \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fws.gov/invasives/pdfs/USFWS_FireMgtAndInvasivesPlants_A_Handbook.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">recommended\u003c/span>\u003c/a> limiting the use of retardants.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Officials say retardants are made from “food grade” ingredients and pose no danger to people or animals if ingested.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">But in the wake of the North Bay fires, Napa County issued an \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"http://www.countyofnapa.org/Pages/Search.aspx?keywords=retardant\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">advisory\u003c/span>\u003c/a> urging residents not to consume fruits and vegetables from backyard gardens that may have been sprayed by fire retardant. Sonoma County offered \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"http://sonomacounty.ca.gov/EOC-and-PIO/Fires-October-2017/Health-Concerns-and-Resources/%23retardant\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">similar\u003c/span>\u003c/a> advice on its website. Both urged residents to wash retardants off plants and buildings “as soon as possible.” But targeting areas hit by retardant may be difficult in some cases, because a coloring agent in the compound is designed to vanish after exposure to sunlight.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Fortunately for California’s wine industry, as much as 90 percent of Napa and Sonoma county grapes had been \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" title=\"Link: http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/California-Wine-Fire-Road-Ahead\" href=\"http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/California-Wine-Fire-Road-Ahead\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">harvested\u003c/span>\u003c/a> before the fires swept through. But some vineyards did get hit by retardant drops, and winery owners have said those grapes won’t be harvested.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"fin\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“The bottom line is, it’s really not benign at all,” Ingalsbee said. “It does have negative effects on native flora and fauna. It does have impacts on water quality and soil.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"fin\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This article originally appeared on \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://mail.kqed.org/owa/redir.aspx?C=9e4bb0e1a7d74f24ba4684ef2533053d&URL=https%3a%2f%2fwww.newsdeeply.com%2fwater\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Water Deeply\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and you can find it \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/articles/2017/11/27/fire-retardant-use-explodes-as-worries-about-water-wildlife-risk-grow\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. For important news about the California drought, you can \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"http://waterdeeply.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8b78e9a34ff7443ec1e8c62c6&id=2947becb78\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">sign up\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to the Water Deeply email list.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "State and federal use of fire-retardant chemicals has grown significantly in recent years. Yet recent studies have shown the toxins are deadly to fish and may contribute to permanent changes in plant communities.",
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"description": "State and federal use of fire-retardant chemicals has grown significantly in recent years. Yet recent studies have shown the toxins are deadly to fish and may contribute to permanent changes in plant communities.",
"title": "Fire Retardant Use Explodes as Worries About Water, Wildlife Grow | KQED",
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"nprByline": "\u003ca href=\"https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/contributor/matt-weiser\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Matt Weiser\u003c/a>,\u003c/br>Water Deeply",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">C\u003c/span>hemical fire retardants are considered a vital wildland firefighting tool, helping to slow the spread of flames while ground crews move into position. But as their use increases, the harmful side effects of these chemicals are coming under increasing scrutiny.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The chemicals, usually dropped from low-flying aircraft, largely consist of ammonia compounds, which are known toxins to fish and other aquatic life. Studies have shown retardants can kill fish, alter soil chemistry, feed harmful algae blooms and even encourage the spread of invasive plants. Yet there is little regulation of their use, and no safer alternatives on the market.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>In California, state firefighting crews have applied \u003cspan class=\"caps\">15.3\u003c/span> million gallons of chemical fire retardants so far this year, according to data provided by CalFire, the state’s wildland firefighting agency. That’s a new record, and double the amount used just three years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">CalFire applied \u003cspan class=\"caps\">2.7\u003c/span> million gallons of retardant in a single one-week period starting October 9 – also a record. Of that amount, about 2 million gallons were used on the North Bay wildfires, which killed 43 people and burned more than 8,000 structures in October as they swept across several counties north of the San Francisco Bay Area, including Sonoma and Napa.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The growth of retardant use in California has outpaced federal firefighting: In 2016, the United States Forest Service \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/fire/retardant/2016_Aerial%20Retardant%20Use%20on%20NFS%20lands_%201_17_2017.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">applied\u003c/span>\u003c/a> 19 million gallons of retardant on all National Forest system lands in the nation, an increase of 55 percent compared to three years earlier.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fusee.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, said chemical fire retardants are overused. They are intended only to slow a fire down so that ground crews have time to reach a fire front and build containment lines. Instead, retardants are being used in place of ground crews, he said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">In many cases where people and structures are not threatened, Ingalsbee said, fires should be allowed to burn rather than spending money on retardants and putting pilots at risk.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“It looks good on \u003cspan class=\"caps\">TV\u003c/span> – ‘\u003cspan class=\"caps\">CNN\u003c/span> Drops’ is a term firefighters use,” Ingalsbee said. “Eventually, the fire burns through that stuff and keeps on trucking. The worst concern is, they cause some significant impacts, particularly to water quality.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">In 2014, scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service published a \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24880550\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">study\u003c/span>\u003c/a> showing that two fire-retardant formulations are deadly to Chinook salmon, even when heavily diluted in streams.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The chemicals killed salmon at concentrations well below 1 percent of the strength at which the retardants are applied. And the study found the chemicals had lasting effects: Even salmon that survived initially could be killed weeks later when they migrated to salt water, apparently because the chemicals damaged their gills.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“They are sensitive at low amounts compared to what is applied,” said Joseph Dietrich, an ecotoxicologist with \u003cspan class=\"caps\">NOAA\u003c/span>’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the study. “It’s a very low concentration compared to what is in the stock solution that’s in a helicopter during a firefighting event.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The retardants evaluated in the study, known by the trade names 259-F and \u003cspan class=\"caps\">LC\u003c/span>–\u003cspan class=\"caps\">95A\u003c/span>, are made by \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://phoschek.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Phos-Chek\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> subsidiary of an Israel-based company called \u003cspan class=\"caps\">ICL\u003c/span> Performance Products. Both retardants are still in use by both the Forest Service and CalFire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">However, CalFire spokesperson Scott McLean said the agency this year has mainly used a different Phos-Chek formulation known as \u003cspan class=\"caps\">MVP\u003c/span>-F. It is advertised as being a safer product, though it has not yet been subjected to similar studies.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">CalFire takes its lead in retardant selection from the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> Forest Service, which produces a so-called “qualified products list” after testing the chemicals.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Most retardants are delivered as a powder, then mixed with water before being loaded onto aircraft. The water is merely a delivery mechanism.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The primary ingredient in retardants is an ammonium phosphate or sulfate solution – essentially a type of fertilizer. Other ingredients are exempt from public disclosure under federal law as trade secrets. But one is a gelling agent that allows the ammonia solution to cling to plants, temporarily insulating them from heat and flame to deprive an advancing fire of fuel.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">McLean said retardants are a vital firefighting tool, and defended their use.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“Aerial application of retardant provides support to firefighters on the fire line that could not be otherwise immediately supported by a vehicle, [a] fire engine,” McLean said. “At present, there is no other long-term fire retardant that has met the requirements of the [Forest Service] qualified products list.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Dietrich said it’s likely that \u003cspan class=\"caps\">MVP\u003c/span>-F will also be deadly to salmon. The concentration known to be toxic to fish, as reported by the manufacturer, is still less than 1 percent of the concentration at which the retardant is released by aircraft. This means, again, that it can be heavily diluted in the environment and still remain deadly to fish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The unknown proprietary ingredients in retardants may play a role in this, he said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“They’re definitely enhancing toxicity,” Dietrich said. “\u003c/span>\u003cspan class=\"s3\">Whether they are working with ammonia or just causing separate effects that are accumulating, I couldn’t say. \u003c/span>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">There is some other source of toxicity that comes into play.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Not much is known about how long retardants linger in the environment. But the compounds most often used are known as “long-term” retardants, because they are designed to cling to plants and remain effective for weeks – until they are either burned off or washed away by heavy rain. In the latter case, the chemicals will then flow into streams and lakes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">A team at the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> Geological Survey is engaged in a large \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.cerc.usgs.gov/ScienceTopics.aspx?ScienceTopicId=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">research effort\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to analyze the longevity of these chemicals once applied. The results have not yet been published, and the team leader did not respond to a request for comment.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The Forest Service used fire retardants for decades without analyzing their environmental effects. Then, in 2009, \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fseee.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, a nonprofit group, sued the agency, blaming retardants for killing 50 endangered steelhead during a fire near Santa Barbara, California.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The lawsuit resulted in a court order requiring the Forest Service to prepare an environmental impact study, which was \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/fire/retardant/eis_info.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">completed\u003c/span>\u003c/a> in 2011. The study concluded retardants are potentially harmful to wildlife and water quality, and set parameters on their use to minimize these effects. These included mapping sensitive \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=1920b5b8884643dfb1b391453bbbe998\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">exclusion zones\u003c/span>\u003c/a> where retardants may not be used.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Also, fire crews are now trained not to drop retardant within 300ft of water bodies if using an airplane, and within 100ft if applied from a helicopter or fire engine. Fire crews can, however, deviate from these guidelines when life or property are threatened.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Earlier this year, the Forest Service prepared a \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/fire/wfcs/ras.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">risk assessment\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to evaluate the ecological effects of the latest retardant chemicals. It reviewed the same products analyzed in Dietrich’s study, as well as others, and acknowledged that toxic effects to fish and plants are possible. But it minimized these concerns by reporting, in the case of fish, that long-term exposure is unlikely in flowing-water environments, and stated that plants would be worse off if they were allowed to burn.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Ingalsbee said even a 300ft buffer may not be enough to protect water and wildlife. Unpredictable fire-fed winds may spread retardant into a stream or lake from much greater distances, he said. Pilot error is also common.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">In addition, retardants can alter plant communities long after a fire is extinguished.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Invasive plants are known to aggressively colonize burned areas after a fire. The ammonia in retardants is a potent fertilizer: It can become a kind of junk food for invasive plants, which can quickly crowd out native plants after a fire. As a result, in 2008 the \u003cspan class=\"caps\">U.S.\u003c/span> Fish and Wildlife Service \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"https://www.fws.gov/invasives/pdfs/USFWS_FireMgtAndInvasivesPlants_A_Handbook.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">recommended\u003c/span>\u003c/a> limiting the use of retardants.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Officials say retardants are made from “food grade” ingredients and pose no danger to people or animals if ingested.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">But in the wake of the North Bay fires, Napa County issued an \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"http://www.countyofnapa.org/Pages/Search.aspx?keywords=retardant\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">advisory\u003c/span>\u003c/a> urging residents not to consume fruits and vegetables from backyard gardens that may have been sprayed by fire retardant. Sonoma County offered \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" href=\"http://sonomacounty.ca.gov/EOC-and-PIO/Fires-October-2017/Health-Concerns-and-Resources/%23retardant\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">similar\u003c/span>\u003c/a> advice on its website. Both urged residents to wash retardants off plants and buildings “as soon as possible.” But targeting areas hit by retardant may be difficult in some cases, because a coloring agent in the compound is designed to vanish after exposure to sunlight.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Fortunately for California’s wine industry, as much as 90 percent of Napa and Sonoma county grapes had been \u003ca class=\"preview-link\" title=\"Link: http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/California-Wine-Fire-Road-Ahead\" href=\"http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/California-Wine-Fire-Road-Ahead\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">harvested\u003c/span>\u003c/a> before the fires swept through. But some vineyards did get hit by retardant drops, and winery owners have said those grapes won’t be harvested.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"fin\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“The bottom line is, it’s really not benign at all,” Ingalsbee said. “It does have negative effects on native flora and fauna. It does have impacts on water quality and soil.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"fin\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This article originally appeared on \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://mail.kqed.org/owa/redir.aspx?C=9e4bb0e1a7d74f24ba4684ef2533053d&URL=https%3a%2f%2fwww.newsdeeply.com%2fwater\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Water Deeply\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and you can find it \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/articles/2017/11/27/fire-retardant-use-explodes-as-worries-about-water-wildlife-risk-grow\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">here\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. For important news about the California drought, you can \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"http://waterdeeply.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8b78e9a34ff7443ec1e8c62c6&id=2947becb78\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">sign up\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> to the Water Deeply email list.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>For this post-Thanksgiving week, I’d like to suggest a \u003ca href=\"https://www.space.com/38806-nasa-satellites-watch-earth-breathe-video.html\">remarkable video\u003c/a> produced over two decades by NASA scientists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Satellites monitored populations of plant life on land and oceans, mapping variations of green regions of vegetation and snow cover on the North and South Poles. As seasons pass, we witness a rhythmic dance between white and green, as if the planet itself were breathing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”QNrelCvGQBrOJhBLm3a1pv67awjbGfDL”]Vegetation on land is represented on a scale from brown (low vegetation) to dark green (lots of vegetation). In the ocean, populations of microscopic phytoplankton — a type of algae that uses sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar — are indicated on a scale from purple (low) to yellow (high).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We see the Earth changing daily and with the seasons as a living planet — its plants, surface winds, and sea currents responding to the energy coming from the sun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The visualization collated data from Earth-observing satellites like the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (\u003ca href=\"https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/SeaWiFS/\">SeaWiFS\u003c/a>), which started collecting data in 1997, and the Terra, Aqua, and Suomi NPP weather satellites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The changes over the past two decades help scientists understand how the planet is responding both locally and globally to warming trends. Warming ocean temperatures, for example, slow the growth of phytoplankton and, thus, its ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Also visible is the shrinking of the polar caps as the years go by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Going out into space is not only for the purpose of looking outwards. It allows us to look back at our planet as a whole, follow its changes and rhythms, so that we can better learn how to coexist with it and protect its resources for generations to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"hr\">\n\u003chr>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer — and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://ice.dartmouth.edu/\">Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement\u003c/a>\u003cem> at Dartmouth, co-founder of 13.7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://marcelogleiser.com/books/the-simple-beauty-of-the-unexpected-a-natural-philosophers-quest-for-trout-and-the-meaning-of-everything\">The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything\u003c/a>\u003cem>. You can keep up with Marcelo on \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://goo.gl/93dHI\">Facebook\u003c/a>\u003cem> and Twitter: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/#!/mgleiser\">@mgleiser\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>For this post-Thanksgiving week, I’d like to suggest a \u003ca href=\"https://www.space.com/38806-nasa-satellites-watch-earth-breathe-video.html\">remarkable video\u003c/a> produced over two decades by NASA scientists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Satellites monitored populations of plant life on land and oceans, mapping variations of green regions of vegetation and snow cover on the North and South Poles. As seasons pass, we witness a rhythmic dance between white and green, as if the planet itself were breathing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>Vegetation on land is represented on a scale from brown (low vegetation) to dark green (lots of vegetation). In the ocean, populations of microscopic phytoplankton — a type of algae that uses sunlight to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar — are indicated on a scale from purple (low) to yellow (high).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We see the Earth changing daily and with the seasons as a living planet — its plants, surface winds, and sea currents responding to the energy coming from the sun.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The visualization collated data from Earth-observing satellites like the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (\u003ca href=\"https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/SeaWiFS/\">SeaWiFS\u003c/a>), which started collecting data in 1997, and the Terra, Aqua, and Suomi NPP weather satellites.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The changes over the past two decades help scientists understand how the planet is responding both locally and globally to warming trends. Warming ocean temperatures, for example, slow the growth of phytoplankton and, thus, its ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Also visible is the shrinking of the polar caps as the years go by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Going out into space is not only for the purpose of looking outwards. It allows us to look back at our planet as a whole, follow its changes and rhythms, so that we can better learn how to coexist with it and protect its resources for generations to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"hr\">\n\u003chr>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer — and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://ice.dartmouth.edu/\">Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement\u003c/a>\u003cem> at Dartmouth, co-founder of 13.7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://marcelogleiser.com/books/the-simple-beauty-of-the-unexpected-a-natural-philosophers-quest-for-trout-and-the-meaning-of-everything\">The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything\u003c/a>\u003cem>. You can keep up with Marcelo on \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"http://goo.gl/93dHI\">Facebook\u003c/a>\u003cem> and Twitter: \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/#!/mgleiser\">@mgleiser\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Shopping Tips to Avoid Toxic Toys",
"headTitle": "Shopping Tips to Avoid Toxic Toys | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>When you’re shopping for little ones this holiday season, be wary of toxic toys lurking on the shelves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Public Interest Research Group, a consumer watchdog organization, has released its annual \u003ca href=\"https://uspirgedfund.org/sites/pirg/files/cpn/USN-112117-A1-REPORT/trouble-in-toyland-32.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Trouble in Toyland\u003c/a> report. The survey highlights choking hazards, poisonous items and even toys that might violate privacy laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"alignright\">\n\u003ch2>Safe-proofing Your Home\u003c/h2>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Put small parts, or broken toys out of reach from children.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Subscribe to email recall updates from the Consumer Product Safety Commission and other U.S. government safety agencies, available at \u003ca href=\"https://www.recalls.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.recalls.gov\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Report unsafe toys or toy-related injuries to the CPSC at \u003ca href=\"https://www.saferproducts.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Saferproducts.gov\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Make sure any \u003ca href=\"https://www.cnet.com/how-to/buy-a-hoverboard/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">hoverboards\u003c/a> you own contain a UL2272-certification sticker from the product-testing group Underwriters Laboratories, called UL. However, that compliance cannot guarantee that a hoverboard will not overheat or catch fire.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Potentially Dangerous Toys: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Balloons \u003c/strong>are responsible for more deaths in kids than any other toy. When small children swallow or inhale flimsy plastic balloons it can cover the entire airway. CALPIRG identified several brands with misleading warning labels, and suggested avoiding balloons for children under 8 years old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lead-laced fidget spinners\u003c/strong> could severely disrupt mental and physical development. CALPIRG found \u003ca href=\"https://uspirgedfund.org/reports/usp/lead-fidget-spinners-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">two fidget spinners\u003c/a> with lead levels well over the federal legal limit. The watchdog group is pushing \u003ca href=\"http://abcnews.go.com/US/fidget-spinners-sold-target-potentially-dangerous-lead-consumer/story?id=51059463\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Target\u003c/a> and Bulls-i-Toy to remove the products from shelves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bluetooth toys \u003c/strong>could be collecting data on a child or other family member.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>For example, the interactive doll known as “My Friend Cayla” connects to the internet, and many consumer groups worry it could spy on families. There are petitions pushing the federal government to recall the doll. Germany \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/02/20/516292295/germany-bans-my-friend-cayla-doll-over-spying-concerns\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">banned\u003c/a> the doll earlier this year for privacy violations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Walkers and scooters\u003c/strong> can send toddlers tumbling down stairs or potentially plunging into an outdoor pool. An interactive play station \u003cem>without\u003c/em> wheels is a lot safer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Magnets \u003c/strong>can be very dangerous if swallowed. “Even one is dangerous when swallowed, when two or more are swallowed, they can actually attract each other and pinch the gut in between,” said UCSF emergency room Dr. Shruti Kant. “This can compromise blood supply as well as cause holes in the gut which can require surgery.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>When you’re shopping for little ones this holiday season, be wary of toxic toys lurking on the shelves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Public Interest Research Group, a consumer watchdog organization, has released its annual \u003ca href=\"https://uspirgedfund.org/sites/pirg/files/cpn/USN-112117-A1-REPORT/trouble-in-toyland-32.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Trouble in Toyland\u003c/a> report. The survey highlights choking hazards, poisonous items and even toys that might violate privacy laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"alignright\">\n\u003ch2>Safe-proofing Your Home\u003c/h2>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Put small parts, or broken toys out of reach from children.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Subscribe to email recall updates from the Consumer Product Safety Commission and other U.S. government safety agencies, available at \u003ca href=\"https://www.recalls.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.recalls.gov\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Report unsafe toys or toy-related injuries to the CPSC at \u003ca href=\"https://www.saferproducts.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Saferproducts.gov\u003c/a>.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Make sure any \u003ca href=\"https://www.cnet.com/how-to/buy-a-hoverboard/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">hoverboards\u003c/a> you own contain a UL2272-certification sticker from the product-testing group Underwriters Laboratories, called UL. However, that compliance cannot guarantee that a hoverboard will not overheat or catch fire.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Potentially Dangerous Toys: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Balloons \u003c/strong>are responsible for more deaths in kids than any other toy. When small children swallow or inhale flimsy plastic balloons it can cover the entire airway. CALPIRG identified several brands with misleading warning labels, and suggested avoiding balloons for children under 8 years old.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lead-laced fidget spinners\u003c/strong> could severely disrupt mental and physical development. CALPIRG found \u003ca href=\"https://uspirgedfund.org/reports/usp/lead-fidget-spinners-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">two fidget spinners\u003c/a> with lead levels well over the federal legal limit. The watchdog group is pushing \u003ca href=\"http://abcnews.go.com/US/fidget-spinners-sold-target-potentially-dangerous-lead-consumer/story?id=51059463\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Target\u003c/a> and Bulls-i-Toy to remove the products from shelves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bluetooth toys \u003c/strong>could be collecting data on a child or other family member.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>For example, the interactive doll known as “My Friend Cayla” connects to the internet, and many consumer groups worry it could spy on families. There are petitions pushing the federal government to recall the doll. Germany \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/02/20/516292295/germany-bans-my-friend-cayla-doll-over-spying-concerns\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">banned\u003c/a> the doll earlier this year for privacy violations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Walkers and scooters\u003c/strong> can send toddlers tumbling down stairs or potentially plunging into an outdoor pool. An interactive play station \u003cem>without\u003c/em> wheels is a lot safer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Magnets \u003c/strong>can be very dangerous if swallowed. “Even one is dangerous when swallowed, when two or more are swallowed, they can actually attract each other and pinch the gut in between,” said UCSF emergency room Dr. Shruti Kant. “This can compromise blood supply as well as cause holes in the gut which can require surgery.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Should PG&E Shut Off Power During Windstorms to Prevent Fires?",
"headTitle": "Should PG&E Shut Off Power During Windstorms to Prevent Fires? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Investigators are still sorting out what caused the North Bay fires, but \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/10/31/pge-reports-electric-safety-incidents-at-time-of-north-bay-fires/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">downed power lines\u003c/a> are certainly one of the possible culprits. That has some asking why Pacific Gas & Electric didn’t turn off the power grid ahead of time, as the extreme, warm winds started picking up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Turns out, that’s something one California utility already routinely does.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In late October, a red flag warning was issued in San Diego, as the Santa Ana winds began descending. San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) tracked it closely with their network of 170 weather stations mounted on power poles.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘It’s certainly possible [to shut down power] with adequate communications.”\u003cbr>\n\u003ccite>Rob Manning, Electric Power Research Institute\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>You start seeing some of these gusts come through some of the backcountry areas that can threaten the integrity of our system,” says Allison Torres, spokesperson for SDG&E.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>High winds have caused major fires in San Diego before. In 2007, the Witch, Guejito and Rice fires burned hundreds of homes. Investigators ruled that power lines were at fault and SDG&E hadn’t adequately maintained its facilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So in October, SDG&E shut down the power grid preemptively in the Descanso area due to high winds, high temperatures and low humidity, affecting about 87 customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If something were to come in contact with the lines, there’s no energy flowing through them that might cause an ignition,” says Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SDG&E says the customers were alerted with automated calls warning them about the outrage. Households with medical devices received more direct outreach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We reach out personally to make sure we make contact and they’ve made arrangements or have a backup plan,” says Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Power outages are never popular, but Torres says the utility usually receives only a handful of complaints.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917649\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1917649\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-800x578.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"578\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-800x578.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-160x116.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-768x555.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-1020x737.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-1180x853.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-960x694.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-240x173.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-375x271.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-520x376.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2.jpg 1273w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">PG&E works to restore power in Santa Rosa after the Tubbs Fire. \u003ccite>(Adam Grossberg/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Nobody wants to see a fire affecting their community,” she says, “so if this is going to give public safety a priority then people are pretty onboard.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2013, the utility has preemptively turn off the power 16 times, affect 1,000 customers in all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E doesn’t have a policy to proactively turn off power lines during a warm windstorm, and says doing so could pose safety risks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These actions affect first responders and the operation of critical facilities such as hospitals, schools, water pumps and other essential services needed in response to any emergency, and especially in response to wildfires,” the company said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E says it’s in compliance with current fire regulations from the California Public Utilities Commission and will comply with any future changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Proactively powering down is something that’s more common in hurricane-prone areas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Relatively routinely, the barrier islands around the coastal areas will power down as a hurricane comes through,” says Rob Manning, Vice President of Transmission and Distribution at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.epri.com/#/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Electric Power Research Institute\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”eMRvsE8BxgkuoxrbPYVMeWDQcnGiYpWr”]Manning says it’s a complex decision that requires adequate pre-planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve been involved with a couple of these,” he says, “and when you have a really robust and effective communications process, people generally agree.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far, SDG&E has not shut off power systems that include hospitals or schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s certainly possible with adequate communications,” he says, “particularly if sensitive areas have backup generation capabilities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Powering down can also help avoid damage during a storm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Damage that occurs from an energized system that is in contact with the ground is more severe than a de-energized system,” says Manning. “It does help when you recover a system not to have to deal with the effects of additional damage.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire says during a fire, crews generally treat all power lines as if they are live and are continually in contact with utilities about areas that need powering down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Cal Fire spokesman wouldn’t comment on whether proactively powering down the grid would have helped during the north Bay Area fires, because of the ongoing investigation.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Investigators are still sorting out what caused the North Bay fires, but \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/10/31/pge-reports-electric-safety-incidents-at-time-of-north-bay-fires/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">downed power lines\u003c/a> are certainly one of the possible culprits. That has some asking why Pacific Gas & Electric didn’t turn off the power grid ahead of time, as the extreme, warm winds started picking up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Turns out, that’s something one California utility already routinely does.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In late October, a red flag warning was issued in San Diego, as the Santa Ana winds began descending. San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) tracked it closely with their network of 170 weather stations mounted on power poles.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘It’s certainly possible [to shut down power] with adequate communications.”\u003cbr>\n\u003ccite>Rob Manning, Electric Power Research Institute\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>You start seeing some of these gusts come through some of the backcountry areas that can threaten the integrity of our system,” says Allison Torres, spokesperson for SDG&E.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>High winds have caused major fires in San Diego before. In 2007, the Witch, Guejito and Rice fires burned hundreds of homes. Investigators ruled that power lines were at fault and SDG&E hadn’t adequately maintained its facilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So in October, SDG&E shut down the power grid preemptively in the Descanso area due to high winds, high temperatures and low humidity, affecting about 87 customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If something were to come in contact with the lines, there’s no energy flowing through them that might cause an ignition,” says Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SDG&E says the customers were alerted with automated calls warning them about the outrage. Households with medical devices received more direct outreach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We reach out personally to make sure we make contact and they’ve made arrangements or have a backup plan,” says Torres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Power outages are never popular, but Torres says the utility usually receives only a handful of complaints.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917649\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1917649\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-800x578.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"578\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-800x578.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-160x116.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-768x555.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-1020x737.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-1180x853.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-960x694.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-240x173.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-375x271.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2-520x376.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/pge-tubbs-web2.jpg 1273w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">PG&E works to restore power in Santa Rosa after the Tubbs Fire. \u003ccite>(Adam Grossberg/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Nobody wants to see a fire affecting their community,” she says, “so if this is going to give public safety a priority then people are pretty onboard.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2013, the utility has preemptively turn off the power 16 times, affect 1,000 customers in all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E doesn’t have a policy to proactively turn off power lines during a warm windstorm, and says doing so could pose safety risks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These actions affect first responders and the operation of critical facilities such as hospitals, schools, water pumps and other essential services needed in response to any emergency, and especially in response to wildfires,” the company said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E says it’s in compliance with current fire regulations from the California Public Utilities Commission and will comply with any future changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Proactively powering down is something that’s more common in hurricane-prone areas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Relatively routinely, the barrier islands around the coastal areas will power down as a hurricane comes through,” says Rob Manning, Vice President of Transmission and Distribution at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.epri.com/#/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Electric Power Research Institute\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>Manning says it’s a complex decision that requires adequate pre-planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve been involved with a couple of these,” he says, “and when you have a really robust and effective communications process, people generally agree.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So far, SDG&E has not shut off power systems that include hospitals or schools.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s certainly possible with adequate communications,” he says, “particularly if sensitive areas have backup generation capabilities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Powering down can also help avoid damage during a storm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Damage that occurs from an energized system that is in contact with the ground is more severe than a de-energized system,” says Manning. “It does help when you recover a system not to have to deal with the effects of additional damage.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire says during a fire, crews generally treat all power lines as if they are live and are continually in contact with utilities about areas that need powering down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Cal Fire spokesman wouldn’t comment on whether proactively powering down the grid would have helped during the north Bay Area fires, because of the ongoing investigation.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Breathing Fire: Californians' Health Is a Casualty of Climate-Fueled Blazes",
"headTitle": "Breathing Fire: Californians’ Health Is a Casualty of Climate-Fueled Blazes | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">A\u003c/span>s the deadliest fires in California history swept through leafy neighborhoods in Santa Rosa, Kathleen Sarmento fled her home in the dark, drove to an evacuation center and began setting up a medical triage unit. Patients with burns and other severe injuries were dispatched to hospitals. She set about treating many people whose symptoms resulted from exposure to polluted air and heavy smoke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were coming in with headaches. I had one. My eyes were burning,” said Sarmento, the director of nursing at Santa Rosa Community Health, which provides health care for those who cannot afford it. But respiratory problems — coughs and shortness of breath — were among the biggest risks. “We made sure everyone had a mask.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than half of the evacuees at the shelter that October night were elderly, some from nursing homes who needed oxygen 24/7. Sarmento scrambled to find regulators for oxygen tanks that were otherwise useless. It was a chaotic night — but what came to worry her most were the weeks and months ahead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”Xlg0O9oyLXkaXQvm4ibSW3KwbYbGKbmz”]“It looked like it was snowing for days,” Sarmento said of the falling ash. “People really need to take the smoke seriously. You’ve got cars exploding, tires burning. There has to be some long- term effect” on people’s health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From Puget Sound to Disneyland and east over the Rockies, Americans have coughed and wheezed, rushed to emergency rooms and shut themselves indoors this year as pollution from wildfires darkened skies and rained soot across the landscape. Even to healthy people, it can make breathing a miserable, chest-heaving experience. To the elderly, the young and the frail, the pollution can be disabling or deadly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though the nation has greatly improved air quality over the last 40 years through environmental regulations and technological improvements, the increasing frequency of large wildfires now undermines that progress, releasing copious pollutants that spread far and wide through the air and linger long after the fires are extinguished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists say climate change, degraded ecosystems and the fickleness of the weather have been amplifying fires in forests, grasslands and neighborhoods throughout the West. Nine times more western forestland is burning in large fires each year on average now than 30 years ago, according to \u003ca href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770.abstract\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">calculations by two leading scientists\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917533\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 6068px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Colette-Hatch-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917533\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Colette-Hatch-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"6068\" height=\"4050\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Colette Hatch has a lung disease and uses a nebulizer daily. Three weeks after the fires started, she still won’t open her windows and sleeps with an air purifier. “I still have a dry cough, a dry throat,” she says. \u003ccite>(Heidi de Marco/KHN)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The blazes create smoke waves — pulses of pollution containing everything from charred plastic residue to soot to other small particles that lodge deep in the lungs. They can trigger short-term ailments, such as coughing; worsen chronic diseases, such as asthma; and lead to long-term damage, including cancer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effect of the fires in Northern California’s wine country, which destroyed thousands of homes and killed 43 people, went well beyond the burn zone. The smoke choked the San Francisco Bay Area, home to 7 million people in nine counties, for days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Colette Hatch, 75, of Santa Rosa, who suffers from lung disease and uses a nebulizer daily, evacuated to her daughter’s home in Sunnyvale, in Silicon Valley, when the fires came. But even nearly 100 miles away, Hatch said she struggled to breathe, coughing so hard she couldn’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wafting beyond Oakland and Livermore in the East Bay, the smoke headed into California’s agricultural heartland, the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Known collectively as the Central Valley, it stretches for hundreds of miles roughly north to south, bracketed by mountain ranges that trap some of the dirtiest air in America. Increasingly, wildfires like the ones in Northern California’s wine country funnel smoke into the chute, significantly raising the pollution levels in places as far away as Fresno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917547\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 3264px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917547\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"3264\" height=\"2448\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton.jpg 3264w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 3264px) 100vw, 3264px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Firefighter Josh Bien ignites the forest floor during a prescribed burn in Sierra National Park. \u003ccite>(John Upton/Climate Central)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Climate Central, a research and journalism nonprofit, examined air district data from California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. \u003ca href=\"http://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-wildfires-undermining-air-pollution-progress-21753\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The analysis\u003c/a> showed that while the number of heavily polluted days is falling overall each year on average — those days are occurring more frequently during the peak fire season. The researchers, who share their work with editorially independent journalists, say wildfire smoke is to blame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monitors in the San Joaquin Valley and San Francisco Bay Area showed levels spiked in October as the wine country fires sullied skies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With large wildfires on the rise, smoke and the attendant breathing ailments seemed everywhere this year. In September, smoke from fires burning in California, the Pacific Northwest and Montana pushed as far east as Pennsylvania. Smoke triggered emergency declarations in Washington state and California. The Evergreen State was experiencing few fires of its own in July when it was hit by smoke waves that poured across the Canadian border. And smoke returned to much of the northwest in August and September as fires \u003ca href=\"http://vis.ecowest.org/interactive/wildfires.php#year=2017&firekey=waowf-000351&f=all&h=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">broke out in the Cascades\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://vis.ecowest.org/interactive/wildfires.php#year=2017&firekey=ormhf-000176&f=all&h=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Columbia Gorge\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember waking up one morning and the sky was orangey-red and there was ash falling out of the sky,” said \u003ca href=\"http://deohs.washington.edu/faculty/hess_jeremy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jeremy Hess\u003c/a>, a researcher and physician at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This summer was very busy for us in the emergency department and we were often over capacity. If it wasn’t the smoke, it was the heat,” Hess said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>As World Warms, Environment and Health Suffer\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The blazes came after \u003ca href=\"http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/01/bay-area-weather-scorching-temperatures-will-produce-hottest-days-in-a-decade/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">record-breaking late summer heat\u003c/a> dried out grass that had flourished following \u003ca href=\"http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/6861398-181/just-like-that-santa-rosa?gallery=6866230&artslide=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">record-breaking winter rains\u003c/a> — both forms of extreme weather that are worsened by global warming. In addition, a high pressure system over the Pacific fanned the flames by driving unusually hot and powerful seasonal winds into Northern California from the dry highlands of Nevada.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The immediate precipitant may have been sparks from power lines, although \u003ca href=\"http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7567756-181/north-bay-fires-a-complex?artslide=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">investigations into the causes\u003c/a> are ongoing. But a changing climate helped fuel the blazes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917529\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 451px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-1917529\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"451\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton.jpg 5184w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-1920x1280.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-960x640.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 451px) 100vw, 451px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Trees killed by the effects of drought in the Sierra National Forest. \u003ccite>(John Upton/Climate Central)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Climate change was not the cause but it’s definitely an ingredient,” said \u003ca href=\"http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/user/williams\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Park Williams\u003c/a>, a climate and ecology researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. And that means worse is to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Williams said there was a clear connection between the nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit overall increase in global temperature since the late 1800s and the severity of these and other fires. (Warming in the West has been outpacing the global average in recent decades because of natural cycles.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Fire really responds strongly to even that small of a change of temperature,” said Williams, whose assessment of global warming’s role in the wine country fires is shared by other experts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmentally, the fires are a double whammy: They destroy trees that help to slow global warming by absorbing heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow. They also release carbon dioxide stored within, as well as black carbon that melts snow and ice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research \u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112715001796\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">indicated in 2015 that large fires had helped turn \u003c/a>California’s forests and other lands into polluters, releasing more carbon to the atmosphere than they suck back in. The state’s wildlands released more heat-trapping pollution from 2001 through 2010 than Vermont’s entire economy. Rising temperatures aren’t the only cause — the forests are overloaded with fuel following more than a century of aggressive firefighting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While public attention has tended to focus on other health risks from climate change such as heat stroke in summer and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases northward, the effects of smoke pollution have been gaining more attention following dramatic and widespread wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917553\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917553\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE.jpg 1024w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoky air in San Francisco during the North Bay fires. \u003ccite>(Amy Graff/SFGate)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The most dangerous pollution from wildfires is fine soot — “really small particles that we know can get into the lungs,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.colorado.edu/geography/colleen-reid-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Colleen Reid\u003c/a>, a geographer at the University of Colorado who researches climate change and human health. It’s known as PM2.5, meaning “particulate matter” that’s less than 2.5 microns wide, only visible using microscopes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It can nestle into lung tissue and pass into the bloodstream, contributing to an array of health problems including infections and, potentially, heart attacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Symptoms related to smoke waves may not be diagnosed right away, making it hard to recognize the role a fire may have played in an illness or death. Reid led an analysis \u003ca href=\"https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/14-09277/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">published a year ago\u003c/a> based on hundreds of studies into fire pollution’s health effects. The clearest links shown in the studies were between PM2.5 and asthma and other breathing problems; links to heart disease were less conclusive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers from leading American universities\u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27648592\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> examined fire pollution \u003c/a>across the West, finding that two of every three counties in the region suffered at least one smoke wave from 2004 through 2009. When they correlated those findings with medical data, they found a 7 percent jump in breathing-related hospitalizations after smoke levels were most extreme.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917531\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 6963px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917531\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"6963\" height=\"4647\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg 6963w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-1920x1281.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-1180x788.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-960x641.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 6963px) 100vw, 6963px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Remnants from the fire in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, Calif., on Oct. 27, 2017. \u003ccite>(Heidi de Marco/KHN)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“An acute fire lasting, for example, days to weeks, may not show up as an immediate problem but as health problems that may occur over a time span of weeks or months,” said Loretta Mickley, a Harvard researcher who worked on the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>This Summer in California\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elva Hernandez, 51, has lived in the San Joaquin Valley most of her life. She’s suffered from asthma since she was 10. This summer she was stuck inside her house for several weeks as smoke waves suffocated her neighborhood in the small town of Kerman, Calif., near Fresno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The smell, all the dust, the smoke, the smog, everything, it’s just — you can’t breathe,” said Hernandez, a stay-at-home mom whose husband analyzes lab samples at a hospital. “You can’t live your life normally.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The San Joaquin Valley is home to 4 million people, many of them poor. One in six children suffers from asthma. Poor people often are most affected by air pollution, partly because they tend to live in more drafty housing in more polluted neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But enforcement of federal regulations dating to the Nixon administration has been reducing air pollution from fossil fuels and fertilizers in the valley, requiring cleaner engines for trucks and the replacement of outdated equipment on farms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve been seeing a lot of positive trends,” said Jon Klassen, manager of the air monitoring team at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. At the same time, “there’s a lot more emissions coming from these fires. They’re uncontrollable. They’re very difficult to deal with.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘We’re trying to ensure that we have healthy, resilient forests that are net sinks of carbon.’\u003ccite>Russ Henly, California Natural Resources Agency\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Research looking at air pollution levels helps explain why people like Hernandez are suffering more during fire seasons. The Climate Central analysis of San Joaquin Valley air data showed that while the number of days each year on which levels of PM2.5 exceeded federal standards declined by about 45 percent overall from 2000 to 2016, they increased by almost a third during the peak summer fire season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the Sacramento Valley to the north, summer fire season pollution has been responsible for about 40 percent of the days when federal standards for PM2.5 pollution were exceeded in recent years. That’s up from less than a tenth of them earlier this century, the researchers found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wildfires also release toxic material and chemicals that react in the atmosphere to form ozone pollution, which can hang over neighborhoods as haze. Ozone irritates lungs and throats, triggers shortness of breath and aggravates diseases like bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez’s asthma doctor, Praveen Buddiga, who operates his own practice in nearby Fresno, treated patients with oxygen and medicine during September fires in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which straddle California and Nevada. He did so again following the wine country fires in October. For asthmatics, the onslaughts of fire pollution are “like pouring a little salt into the wounds,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Buddiga suggests his patients limit their time outside, drive with windows rolled up and wear masks when smoke waves hit. Better yet, he advises them to leave the area if possible until the smoke clears.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917530\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1150px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917530\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1150\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg.jpg 1150w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-960x641.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1150px) 100vw, 1150px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stands of trees killed by the 2013 Rim Fire in Stanislaus National Forest. \u003ccite>(Jason Steinberg/Climate Central)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But risks can be difficult to gauge for patients and experts who want to offer precautions. Scientists who sampled pollution from wildfires using a NASA jet \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD026315/abstract\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reported in June\u003c/a> that fire pollution is being “significantly underestimated” by the federal government. While fleets of mobile air monitors are deployed near fires to help government agencies project the movement of smoke waves, the network of permanent monitors is sparse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have no real good way of communicating to people, ‘Hey, the wildfire smoke is really bad in these spots, and this is where you take precautions,’” said Rob Carlmark, a weathercaster with ABC10 in Sacramento whose audience stretches from Bay Area cities to Lake Tahoe at the Nevada border. Absent local smoke pollution data, he tells viewers, “The best smoke detector is your nose.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lighting Up to Protect Lungs — and the Planet\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josh Bien wore a heavy pack and held a hoe in one hand. Using the other, the firefighter dripped a burning mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline on the forest floor from a spouted canister. Saplings and beds of pine needles sizzled and burned around him in a national forest in the Sierra Nevada, an hour’s drive east of Fresno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like smoke from suburban fires in the San Francisco Bay Area, that from large wildfires in the forest of this 600-mile mountain range can travel into the Central Valley. A spate of large fires in August and September created heavy smoke that suffocated foothills towns and drove people like Elva Hernandez indoors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Devastating forest fire seasons in recent years \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/53771\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">have prompted research\u003c/a> pointing to the need for more prescribed burns like this one. They’re set and managed by firefighters and foresters and guided by computer models that predict the spread of fires and their smoke. They’re aimed at removing highly flammable undergrowth and spare the mature trees.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘The challenge we still face is how to get out of decades of managing forests in ways that increase, rather than decrease, fire risk.’\u003ccite>Chris Field, ecology professor at Stanford University\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“You can either do it on your terms,” said Adam Hernandez, a prescribed fire and fuels management officer with the U.S. Forest Service, as gray smoke billowed around, “or you wait for that wildfire to come and it does it on its terms — and then you’re in a bad way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Small fires used to burn regularly through the understories of the Sierra Nevada’s forests, started by lightning and native tribes. That changed after the Native Americans were forced from the mountain range, followed by more than a century of logging and aggressive firefighting. Those activities replaced stands of large, fire-resistant trees with thickets of smaller ones, building up fuel for enormous blazes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you have some of these extreme wildfires, you’re creating more harmful emissions,” said Jonathan Long, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. Extreme fires burn larger areas and their flames jump from forest floors to incinerate canopies, producing heavy black smoke and killing mature trees. “We think taking the medicine in small doses is a lot healthier.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The excessive undergrowth amplified the impact of California’s recent drought — there was too little water for so many trees. More than 100 million trees may have died across the Sierra Nevada in recent years. The dead trees can provide nesting cavities and their logs create important habitat for wildlife, but some scientists fear they may also intensify fires after they topple into desiccated piles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal government has been striking agreements with state agencies to use more prescribed burns and take other steps to better manage forests. In January, California \u003ca href=\"http://fire.ca.gov/fcat/downloads/California%20Forest%20Carbon%20Plan%20Draft%20for%20Public%20Review_Jan17.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">released an ambitious draft plan\u003c/a> to restore forests over the decades to come — through a focus on prescribed burns — with the goal of reducing pollution from wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re trying to ensure that we have healthy, resilient forests that are net sinks of carbon so that they’re storing more carbon than they’re releasing,” said Russ Henly, a California Natural Resources Agency official who helped draft the plan. By 2020, the plan seeks to double the amount of land treated using prescribed burns to 35,000 acres a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With so many local, state and federal agencies overseeing environmental rules and owning land in California, the state says coordination will be key. For example, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District can prevent national parks and other landowners from conducting prescribed burns when pollution levels will be affected — which is most of the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mindful of the growing danger of big blazes, the air district has become more accommodating of prescribed fires. Still, finding the money to pay for the work remains a challenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of Congress have pushed logging as a way to ease forest fires, though that approach could have the opposite effect: Trees valued by loggers tend to be the largest and most fire-resistant. Troublesome small trees and dead ones have little value other than as fuel for power plants, and even then they’re generally too expensive to gather. Low natural gas prices have been forcing the closure of biomass power plants, which are fueled with wood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if the money is found to improve forest management, climate change will likely limit the progress from improved forest management, said Christopher Field, an ecology professor at Stanford University. The fire season will continue to lengthen. Landscapes will continue to dry out. “The challenge we still face is how to get out of decades of managing forests in ways that increase, rather than decrease, fire risk,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Field oversaw a survey dealing with Sierra Nevada forests completed by 75 academics, government officials and nonprofit and industry employees. While most agreed that prescribed burns and other approaches can lock carbon into the mountain’s ecosystems, they warned it will be difficult to overcome the losses from wildfires as temperatures rise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California doesn’t include carbon losses from forest fires when it tallies its progress toward reducing climate pollution. But amid the burning, logging and clearing of tropical forests from Indonesia to the Amazon and the Congo, destructive fires in the forestlands of a U.S. state that has some of the world’s most ambitious climate goals are contributing to the problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, in the process, they are making people sick.\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>\u003cbr>\nThis story was produced through a partnership between \u003ca href=\"http://www.climatecentral.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Climate Central \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://khn.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kaiser Health News\u003c/a> with support from the \u003ca href=\"https://west.stanford.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bill Lane Center for the American West \u003c/a>at Stanford University. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Large wildfires are releasing pollution that’s undermining decades of progress in cleaning the air, sickening Americans.",
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"description": "Large wildfires are releasing pollution that’s undermining decades of progress in cleaning the air, sickening Americans.",
"title": "Breathing Fire: Californians' Health Is a Casualty of Climate-Fueled Blazes | KQED",
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"headline": "Breathing Fire: Californians' Health Is a Casualty of Climate-Fueled Blazes",
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"nprByline": "\u003ca href=\"http://www.climatecentral.org/what-we-do/people/john-upton\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">John Upton\u003c/a>, Climate Central\u003c/br>\u003ca href=\"https://californiahealthline.org/news/author/barbara-feder-ostrov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Barbara Feder Ostrov\u003c/a>, California Healthline",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-size: 4.6875em;float: left;line-height: 0.733em;padding: 0.05em 0.1em 0 0;font-family: times, serif, georgia\">A\u003c/span>s the deadliest fires in California history swept through leafy neighborhoods in Santa Rosa, Kathleen Sarmento fled her home in the dark, drove to an evacuation center and began setting up a medical triage unit. Patients with burns and other severe injuries were dispatched to hospitals. She set about treating many people whose symptoms resulted from exposure to polluted air and heavy smoke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were coming in with headaches. I had one. My eyes were burning,” said Sarmento, the director of nursing at Santa Rosa Community Health, which provides health care for those who cannot afford it. But respiratory problems — coughs and shortness of breath — were among the biggest risks. “We made sure everyone had a mask.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than half of the evacuees at the shelter that October night were elderly, some from nursing homes who needed oxygen 24/7. Sarmento scrambled to find regulators for oxygen tanks that were otherwise useless. It was a chaotic night — but what came to worry her most were the weeks and months ahead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>“It looked like it was snowing for days,” Sarmento said of the falling ash. “People really need to take the smoke seriously. You’ve got cars exploding, tires burning. There has to be some long- term effect” on people’s health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From Puget Sound to Disneyland and east over the Rockies, Americans have coughed and wheezed, rushed to emergency rooms and shut themselves indoors this year as pollution from wildfires darkened skies and rained soot across the landscape. Even to healthy people, it can make breathing a miserable, chest-heaving experience. To the elderly, the young and the frail, the pollution can be disabling or deadly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though the nation has greatly improved air quality over the last 40 years through environmental regulations and technological improvements, the increasing frequency of large wildfires now undermines that progress, releasing copious pollutants that spread far and wide through the air and linger long after the fires are extinguished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists say climate change, degraded ecosystems and the fickleness of the weather have been amplifying fires in forests, grasslands and neighborhoods throughout the West. Nine times more western forestland is burning in large fires each year on average now than 30 years ago, according to \u003ca href=\"http://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770.abstract\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">calculations by two leading scientists\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917533\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 6068px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Colette-Hatch-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917533\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Colette-Hatch-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"6068\" height=\"4050\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Colette Hatch has a lung disease and uses a nebulizer daily. Three weeks after the fires started, she still won’t open her windows and sleeps with an air purifier. “I still have a dry cough, a dry throat,” she says. \u003ccite>(Heidi de Marco/KHN)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The blazes create smoke waves — pulses of pollution containing everything from charred plastic residue to soot to other small particles that lodge deep in the lungs. They can trigger short-term ailments, such as coughing; worsen chronic diseases, such as asthma; and lead to long-term damage, including cancer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The effect of the fires in Northern California’s wine country, which destroyed thousands of homes and killed 43 people, went well beyond the burn zone. The smoke choked the San Francisco Bay Area, home to 7 million people in nine counties, for days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Colette Hatch, 75, of Santa Rosa, who suffers from lung disease and uses a nebulizer daily, evacuated to her daughter’s home in Sunnyvale, in Silicon Valley, when the fires came. But even nearly 100 miles away, Hatch said she struggled to breathe, coughing so hard she couldn’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wafting beyond Oakland and Livermore in the East Bay, the smoke headed into California’s agricultural heartland, the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Known collectively as the Central Valley, it stretches for hundreds of miles roughly north to south, bracketed by mountain ranges that trap some of the dirtiest air in America. Increasingly, wildfires like the ones in Northern California’s wine country funnel smoke into the chute, significantly raising the pollution levels in places as far away as Fresno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917547\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 3264px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917547\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"3264\" height=\"2448\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton.jpg 3264w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Prescribed-Burn.John-Upton-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 3264px) 100vw, 3264px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Firefighter Josh Bien ignites the forest floor during a prescribed burn in Sierra National Park. \u003ccite>(John Upton/Climate Central)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Climate Central, a research and journalism nonprofit, examined air district data from California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. \u003ca href=\"http://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-wildfires-undermining-air-pollution-progress-21753\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The analysis\u003c/a> showed that while the number of heavily polluted days is falling overall each year on average — those days are occurring more frequently during the peak fire season. The researchers, who share their work with editorially independent journalists, say wildfire smoke is to blame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Monitors in the San Joaquin Valley and San Francisco Bay Area showed levels spiked in October as the wine country fires sullied skies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With large wildfires on the rise, smoke and the attendant breathing ailments seemed everywhere this year. In September, smoke from fires burning in California, the Pacific Northwest and Montana pushed as far east as Pennsylvania. Smoke triggered emergency declarations in Washington state and California. The Evergreen State was experiencing few fires of its own in July when it was hit by smoke waves that poured across the Canadian border. And smoke returned to much of the northwest in August and September as fires \u003ca href=\"http://vis.ecowest.org/interactive/wildfires.php#year=2017&firekey=waowf-000351&f=all&h=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">broke out in the Cascades\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://vis.ecowest.org/interactive/wildfires.php#year=2017&firekey=ormhf-000176&f=all&h=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Columbia Gorge\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember waking up one morning and the sky was orangey-red and there was ash falling out of the sky,” said \u003ca href=\"http://deohs.washington.edu/faculty/hess_jeremy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jeremy Hess\u003c/a>, a researcher and physician at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This summer was very busy for us in the emergency department and we were often over capacity. If it wasn’t the smoke, it was the heat,” Hess said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>As World Warms, Environment and Health Suffer\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The blazes came after \u003ca href=\"http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/01/bay-area-weather-scorching-temperatures-will-produce-hottest-days-in-a-decade/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">record-breaking late summer heat\u003c/a> dried out grass that had flourished following \u003ca href=\"http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/6861398-181/just-like-that-santa-rosa?gallery=6866230&artslide=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">record-breaking winter rains\u003c/a> — both forms of extreme weather that are worsened by global warming. In addition, a high pressure system over the Pacific fanned the flames by driving unusually hot and powerful seasonal winds into Northern California from the dry highlands of Nevada.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The immediate precipitant may have been sparks from power lines, although \u003ca href=\"http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7567756-181/north-bay-fires-a-complex?artslide=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">investigations into the causes\u003c/a> are ongoing. But a changing climate helped fuel the blazes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917529\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 451px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-1917529\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"451\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton.jpg 5184w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-1920x1280.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-960x640.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/Trees-killed-by-drought.John-Upton-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 451px) 100vw, 451px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Trees killed by the effects of drought in the Sierra National Forest. \u003ccite>(John Upton/Climate Central)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Climate change was not the cause but it’s definitely an ingredient,” said \u003ca href=\"http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/user/williams\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Park Williams\u003c/a>, a climate and ecology researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. And that means worse is to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Williams said there was a clear connection between the nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit overall increase in global temperature since the late 1800s and the severity of these and other fires. (Warming in the West has been outpacing the global average in recent decades because of natural cycles.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Fire really responds strongly to even that small of a change of temperature,” said Williams, whose assessment of global warming’s role in the wine country fires is shared by other experts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmentally, the fires are a double whammy: They destroy trees that help to slow global warming by absorbing heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow. They also release carbon dioxide stored within, as well as black carbon that melts snow and ice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Research \u003ca href=\"http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112715001796\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">indicated in 2015 that large fires had helped turn \u003c/a>California’s forests and other lands into polluters, releasing more carbon to the atmosphere than they suck back in. The state’s wildlands released more heat-trapping pollution from 2001 through 2010 than Vermont’s entire economy. Rising temperatures aren’t the only cause — the forests are overloaded with fuel following more than a century of aggressive firefighting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While public attention has tended to focus on other health risks from climate change such as heat stroke in summer and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases northward, the effects of smoke pollution have been gaining more attention following dramatic and widespread wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917553\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917553\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE.jpg 1024w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/San-Fran-in-Smoke.Amy-Graff-SFGATE-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoky air in San Francisco during the North Bay fires. \u003ccite>(Amy Graff/SFGate)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The most dangerous pollution from wildfires is fine soot — “really small particles that we know can get into the lungs,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.colorado.edu/geography/colleen-reid-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Colleen Reid\u003c/a>, a geographer at the University of Colorado who researches climate change and human health. It’s known as PM2.5, meaning “particulate matter” that’s less than 2.5 microns wide, only visible using microscopes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It can nestle into lung tissue and pass into the bloodstream, contributing to an array of health problems including infections and, potentially, heart attacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Symptoms related to smoke waves may not be diagnosed right away, making it hard to recognize the role a fire may have played in an illness or death. Reid led an analysis \u003ca href=\"https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/14-09277/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">published a year ago\u003c/a> based on hundreds of studies into fire pollution’s health effects. The clearest links shown in the studies were between PM2.5 and asthma and other breathing problems; links to heart disease were less conclusive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers from leading American universities\u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27648592\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> examined fire pollution \u003c/a>across the West, finding that two of every three counties in the region suffered at least one smoke wave from 2004 through 2009. When they correlated those findings with medical data, they found a 7 percent jump in breathing-related hospitalizations after smoke levels were most extreme.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917531\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 6963px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917531\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"6963\" height=\"4647\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN.jpg 6963w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-1920x1281.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-1180x788.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-960x641.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/air-pollution-9.-Coffey-Park-neighborhood-of-Santa-Rosa.Heidi-de-Marco-KHN-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 6963px) 100vw, 6963px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Remnants from the fire in the Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, Calif., on Oct. 27, 2017. \u003ccite>(Heidi de Marco/KHN)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“An acute fire lasting, for example, days to weeks, may not show up as an immediate problem but as health problems that may occur over a time span of weeks or months,” said Loretta Mickley, a Harvard researcher who worked on the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>This Summer in California\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elva Hernandez, 51, has lived in the San Joaquin Valley most of her life. She’s suffered from asthma since she was 10. This summer she was stuck inside her house for several weeks as smoke waves suffocated her neighborhood in the small town of Kerman, Calif., near Fresno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The smell, all the dust, the smoke, the smog, everything, it’s just — you can’t breathe,” said Hernandez, a stay-at-home mom whose husband analyzes lab samples at a hospital. “You can’t live your life normally.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The San Joaquin Valley is home to 4 million people, many of them poor. One in six children suffers from asthma. Poor people often are most affected by air pollution, partly because they tend to live in more drafty housing in more polluted neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But enforcement of federal regulations dating to the Nixon administration has been reducing air pollution from fossil fuels and fertilizers in the valley, requiring cleaner engines for trucks and the replacement of outdated equipment on farms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve been seeing a lot of positive trends,” said Jon Klassen, manager of the air monitoring team at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. At the same time, “there’s a lot more emissions coming from these fires. They’re uncontrollable. They’re very difficult to deal with.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘We’re trying to ensure that we have healthy, resilient forests that are net sinks of carbon.’\u003ccite>Russ Henly, California Natural Resources Agency\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Research looking at air pollution levels helps explain why people like Hernandez are suffering more during fire seasons. The Climate Central analysis of San Joaquin Valley air data showed that while the number of days each year on which levels of PM2.5 exceeded federal standards declined by about 45 percent overall from 2000 to 2016, they increased by almost a third during the peak summer fire season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the Sacramento Valley to the north, summer fire season pollution has been responsible for about 40 percent of the days when federal standards for PM2.5 pollution were exceeded in recent years. That’s up from less than a tenth of them earlier this century, the researchers found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wildfires also release toxic material and chemicals that react in the atmosphere to form ozone pollution, which can hang over neighborhoods as haze. Ozone irritates lungs and throats, triggers shortness of breath and aggravates diseases like bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez’s asthma doctor, Praveen Buddiga, who operates his own practice in nearby Fresno, treated patients with oxygen and medicine during September fires in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which straddle California and Nevada. He did so again following the wine country fires in October. For asthmatics, the onslaughts of fire pollution are “like pouring a little salt into the wounds,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Buddiga suggests his patients limit their time outside, drive with windows rolled up and wear masks when smoke waves hit. Better yet, he advises them to leave the area if possible until the smoke clears.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917530\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1150px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917530\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1150\" height=\"768\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg.jpg 1150w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-960x641.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/2016.07.11-Stanislaus-National-Forrest-still-photography-014.Jason-Steinberg-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1150px) 100vw, 1150px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Stands of trees killed by the 2013 Rim Fire in Stanislaus National Forest. \u003ccite>(Jason Steinberg/Climate Central)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But risks can be difficult to gauge for patients and experts who want to offer precautions. Scientists who sampled pollution from wildfires using a NASA jet \u003ca href=\"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016JD026315/abstract\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reported in June\u003c/a> that fire pollution is being “significantly underestimated” by the federal government. While fleets of mobile air monitors are deployed near fires to help government agencies project the movement of smoke waves, the network of permanent monitors is sparse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have no real good way of communicating to people, ‘Hey, the wildfire smoke is really bad in these spots, and this is where you take precautions,’” said Rob Carlmark, a weathercaster with ABC10 in Sacramento whose audience stretches from Bay Area cities to Lake Tahoe at the Nevada border. Absent local smoke pollution data, he tells viewers, “The best smoke detector is your nose.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lighting Up to Protect Lungs — and the Planet\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Josh Bien wore a heavy pack and held a hoe in one hand. Using the other, the firefighter dripped a burning mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline on the forest floor from a spouted canister. Saplings and beds of pine needles sizzled and burned around him in a national forest in the Sierra Nevada, an hour’s drive east of Fresno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like smoke from suburban fires in the San Francisco Bay Area, that from large wildfires in the forest of this 600-mile mountain range can travel into the Central Valley. A spate of large fires in August and September created heavy smoke that suffocated foothills towns and drove people like Elva Hernandez indoors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Devastating forest fire seasons in recent years \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/53771\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">have prompted research\u003c/a> pointing to the need for more prescribed burns like this one. They’re set and managed by firefighters and foresters and guided by computer models that predict the spread of fires and their smoke. They’re aimed at removing highly flammable undergrowth and spare the mature trees.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘The challenge we still face is how to get out of decades of managing forests in ways that increase, rather than decrease, fire risk.’\u003ccite>Chris Field, ecology professor at Stanford University\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“You can either do it on your terms,” said Adam Hernandez, a prescribed fire and fuels management officer with the U.S. Forest Service, as gray smoke billowed around, “or you wait for that wildfire to come and it does it on its terms — and then you’re in a bad way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Small fires used to burn regularly through the understories of the Sierra Nevada’s forests, started by lightning and native tribes. That changed after the Native Americans were forced from the mountain range, followed by more than a century of logging and aggressive firefighting. Those activities replaced stands of large, fire-resistant trees with thickets of smaller ones, building up fuel for enormous blazes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When you have some of these extreme wildfires, you’re creating more harmful emissions,” said Jonathan Long, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. Extreme fires burn larger areas and their flames jump from forest floors to incinerate canopies, producing heavy black smoke and killing mature trees. “We think taking the medicine in small doses is a lot healthier.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The excessive undergrowth amplified the impact of California’s recent drought — there was too little water for so many trees. More than 100 million trees may have died across the Sierra Nevada in recent years. The dead trees can provide nesting cavities and their logs create important habitat for wildlife, but some scientists fear they may also intensify fires after they topple into desiccated piles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal government has been striking agreements with state agencies to use more prescribed burns and take other steps to better manage forests. In January, California \u003ca href=\"http://fire.ca.gov/fcat/downloads/California%20Forest%20Carbon%20Plan%20Draft%20for%20Public%20Review_Jan17.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">released an ambitious draft plan\u003c/a> to restore forests over the decades to come — through a focus on prescribed burns — with the goal of reducing pollution from wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re trying to ensure that we have healthy, resilient forests that are net sinks of carbon so that they’re storing more carbon than they’re releasing,” said Russ Henly, a California Natural Resources Agency official who helped draft the plan. By 2020, the plan seeks to double the amount of land treated using prescribed burns to 35,000 acres a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With so many local, state and federal agencies overseeing environmental rules and owning land in California, the state says coordination will be key. For example, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District can prevent national parks and other landowners from conducting prescribed burns when pollution levels will be affected — which is most of the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mindful of the growing danger of big blazes, the air district has become more accommodating of prescribed fires. Still, finding the money to pay for the work remains a challenge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of Congress have pushed logging as a way to ease forest fires, though that approach could have the opposite effect: Trees valued by loggers tend to be the largest and most fire-resistant. Troublesome small trees and dead ones have little value other than as fuel for power plants, and even then they’re generally too expensive to gather. Low natural gas prices have been forcing the closure of biomass power plants, which are fueled with wood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even if the money is found to improve forest management, climate change will likely limit the progress from improved forest management, said Christopher Field, an ecology professor at Stanford University. The fire season will continue to lengthen. Landscapes will continue to dry out. “The challenge we still face is how to get out of decades of managing forests in ways that increase, rather than decrease, fire risk,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Field oversaw a survey dealing with Sierra Nevada forests completed by 75 academics, government officials and nonprofit and industry employees. While most agreed that prescribed burns and other approaches can lock carbon into the mountain’s ecosystems, they warned it will be difficult to overcome the losses from wildfires as temperatures rise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California doesn’t include carbon losses from forest fires when it tallies its progress toward reducing climate pollution. But amid the burning, logging and clearing of tropical forests from Indonesia to the Amazon and the Congo, destructive fires in the forestlands of a U.S. state that has some of the world’s most ambitious climate goals are contributing to the problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, in the process, they are making people sick.\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>\u003cbr>\nThis story was produced through a partnership between \u003ca href=\"http://www.climatecentral.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Climate Central \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://khn.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kaiser Health News\u003c/a> with support from the \u003ca href=\"https://west.stanford.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bill Lane Center for the American West \u003c/a>at Stanford University. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Amid the North Bay Fire Ruins: A Lost 'Sanctuary' for Nature's Music",
"headTitle": "Amid the North Bay Fire Ruins: A Lost ‘Sanctuary’ for Nature’s Music | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Among the casualties from last month’s North Bay fires were thousands of homes and businesses — and some cultural landmarks. One of them was the home base of legendary nature sound recordist Bernie Krause, a place he and his wife and business partner, Kat, knew as \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildsanctuary.com/\">Wild Sanctuary\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For decades the Glen Ellen retreat was an inspiration to artists and scientists alike, yet probably unknown to most of its neighbors in Sonoma County’s Valley of the Moon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only the foot-thick earthen walls of their unique “rammed-earth” construction home remain. It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago, almost exactly, I was here interviewing Bernie about his remarkable \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/2016/11/14/how-a-sound-guru-got-from-synthesizers-to-the-music-of-nature/\">50-year career\u003c/a> in music, film, and his greatest passion: nature sound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917490\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917490\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768.jpg\" alt=\"Nature sound recordist Bernie Krause examines the ruins of his home and studio in Glen Ellen.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nature sound recordist Bernie Krause examines the ruins of his home and studio in Glen Ellen. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I was with Bernie and his wife and business partner, Kat, as they had their first chance to pick through the ruins of their home, office and studio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve got 50 years worth of work here,” Bernie reflected, as he stood over the rubble in disbelief. “It’s just amazing how it can all go like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘There were so many lovely ideas floating around here that had to do with connecting people to the natural world, it became sort of a magical place.’\u003ccite>Kat Krause, Wild Sanctuary\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Bernie is a founding father in the \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2012/05/14/bernie-krause-and-the-great-animal-orchestra-2/\">emerging science of soundscape ecology. \u003c/a>Author of The Great Animal Orchestra and numerous other books, Bernie’s “niche hypothesis” brought attention to the important role that nature sound plays in healthy ecosystems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, the soundscape at Wild Sanctuary itself was reduced to the crunch of our own footsteps. No birdsong, no insects — only a light breeze in the blackened oaks and an occasional faint clang of falling debris — a cymbal crash to underscore the fragility of it all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917488\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917488\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777.jpg\" alt=\"Bernie Krause picks through the molten remains of his audio tape archive in Glen Ellen.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bernie Krause picks through the molten remains of his audio tape archive in Glen Ellen. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the office and studio, Bernie & I stood over a molten reddish-brown mound that had been his archive of reel-to-reel audio tapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are reels and reels of this stuff,” recalled Bernie. “I had over 500 reels of tape here — and it’s all gone, Craig.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fortunately, his irreplaceable nature sound archive — thousands of hours — was digitized and backed up off-site, but the loss of all the original media, his recording equipment and \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2017/10/11/bernie-krauses-equipment-decades-of-musical-memorabilia-lost-in-fires/\">decades of memorabilia\u003c/a> were reduced to ashes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just all ashes, which is…I guess the way we all end up at one point or another,” he laughed, summoning his irrepressible sense of humor. “We will survive this, too.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kat Krause agrees with her husband that Wild Sanctuary will survive. Their home and studio was an incubator and collaborative space that yielded a wide range of works from scientific papers to a ballet and symphony. But it was always less a place than an idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think because there were so many lovely ideas floating around here that had to do with connecting people to the natural world, it became sort of a magical place,” recalled Kat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917489\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 720px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917489\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup.jpg\" alt=\"In better days: Bernie in the field, recording at Sycamore Spring in Sequoia-Kings Canyon Nat'l Park.\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup.jpg 720w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In better days: Bernie in the field, recording at Sycamore Spring in Sequoia-Kings Canyon Nat’l Park. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I first encountered that magic nearly 20 years ago, documenting Bernie’s work recording soundscapes in Sequoia-Kings Canyon, for the National Park Service — a project that was foundational to the Park Service starting a broader program to document and protect soundscapes in the parks. Alcatraz Island is among the properties where Park Service scientists have made recordings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia is also where I met \u003ca href=\"http://www.jackhines.com\">Jack Hines\u003c/a>. He’s a musician and \u003ca href=\"http://www.eartothewild.com\">nature sound recordist\u003c/a> who drew inspiration for both from Wild Sanctuary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not just the work that they do or that we do, it’s this bigger piece, which is truly the sanctuary of the wild,” says Hines, “And by bringing the voice of that forward into all of our ears and our consciousness, it helps to preserve a certain resource for us as people, that is extremely valuable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917495\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917495\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767.jpg\" alt=\"The former studio at Wild Sanctuary. A second-story guest cottage collapsed onto the ground floor.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The former studio at Wild Sanctuary. A second-story guest cottage collapsed onto the ground floor. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It was Jack who called and warned Kat & Bernie to get out, which they barely did, escaping in their car at the very moment that flames exploded on the hills surrounding their home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You would think with the level of emotion that I feel right now, that it’s as though we’d lost those two people,” said Jack, needing a long breath to steady himself, “But thank God we didn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack and Bernie would sometimes record together up on Surgarloaf Ridge, the state park off of Highway 12, east of Santa Rosa. Bernie chose a wooded spot near a stream up there, to document \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/10/20/where-have-all-the-birds-gone-listen-as-a-california-forest-grows-quiet-over-time/\">changes in the soundscape\u003c/a> over the course of California’s 5-year drought. In those recordings, you can hear the life draining out of the place as the landscape became desiccated. There may be one more recording in the series, as much of Sugarloaf burned in the fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Kat hopes that, like that piece of scorched earth — the spirit that inhabited Wild Sanctuary will be reborn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It really resonated with people and they found a lot of community here,” she recalled. “So that part of Wild Sanctuary we hope will be re-envisioned and maybe re-purposed for a new generation to take this work forward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kat and Bernie have taken temporary refuge in Salt Lake City, where Kat has family. Where and how they will recreate their Wild Sanctuary, they still don’t know. They’re just confident that they will.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Amid the North Bay Fire Ruins: A Lost 'Sanctuary' for Nature's Music | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Among the casualties from last month’s North Bay fires were thousands of homes and businesses — and some cultural landmarks. One of them was the home base of legendary nature sound recordist Bernie Krause, a place he and his wife and business partner, Kat, knew as \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildsanctuary.com/\">Wild Sanctuary\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For decades the Glen Ellen retreat was an inspiration to artists and scientists alike, yet probably unknown to most of its neighbors in Sonoma County’s Valley of the Moon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only the foot-thick earthen walls of their unique “rammed-earth” construction home remain. It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago, almost exactly, I was here interviewing Bernie about his remarkable \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/2016/11/14/how-a-sound-guru-got-from-synthesizers-to-the-music-of-nature/\">50-year career\u003c/a> in music, film, and his greatest passion: nature sound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917490\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917490\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768.jpg\" alt=\"Nature sound recordist Bernie Krause examines the ruins of his home and studio in Glen Ellen.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8768-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nature sound recordist Bernie Krause examines the ruins of his home and studio in Glen Ellen. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I was with Bernie and his wife and business partner, Kat, as they had their first chance to pick through the ruins of their home, office and studio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve got 50 years worth of work here,” Bernie reflected, as he stood over the rubble in disbelief. “It’s just amazing how it can all go like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘There were so many lovely ideas floating around here that had to do with connecting people to the natural world, it became sort of a magical place.’\u003ccite>Kat Krause, Wild Sanctuary\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Bernie is a founding father in the \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2012/05/14/bernie-krause-and-the-great-animal-orchestra-2/\">emerging science of soundscape ecology. \u003c/a>Author of The Great Animal Orchestra and numerous other books, Bernie’s “niche hypothesis” brought attention to the important role that nature sound plays in healthy ecosystems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, the soundscape at Wild Sanctuary itself was reduced to the crunch of our own footsteps. No birdsong, no insects — only a light breeze in the blackened oaks and an occasional faint clang of falling debris — a cymbal crash to underscore the fragility of it all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917488\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917488\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777.jpg\" alt=\"Bernie Krause picks through the molten remains of his audio tape archive in Glen Ellen.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8777-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bernie Krause picks through the molten remains of his audio tape archive in Glen Ellen. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In the office and studio, Bernie & I stood over a molten reddish-brown mound that had been his archive of reel-to-reel audio tapes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are reels and reels of this stuff,” recalled Bernie. “I had over 500 reels of tape here — and it’s all gone, Craig.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fortunately, his irreplaceable nature sound archive — thousands of hours — was digitized and backed up off-site, but the loss of all the original media, his recording equipment and \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2017/10/11/bernie-krauses-equipment-decades-of-musical-memorabilia-lost-in-fires/\">decades of memorabilia\u003c/a> were reduced to ashes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s just all ashes, which is…I guess the way we all end up at one point or another,” he laughed, summoning his irrepressible sense of humor. “We will survive this, too.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kat Krause agrees with her husband that Wild Sanctuary will survive. Their home and studio was an incubator and collaborative space that yielded a wide range of works from scientific papers to a ballet and symphony. But it was always less a place than an idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think because there were so many lovely ideas floating around here that had to do with connecting people to the natural world, it became sort of a magical place,” recalled Kat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917489\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 720px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917489\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup.jpg\" alt=\"In better days: Bernie in the field, recording at Sycamore Spring in Sequoia-Kings Canyon Nat'l Park.\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup.jpg 720w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-240x160.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-375x250.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/BK-Lookup-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In better days: Bernie in the field, recording at Sycamore Spring in Sequoia-Kings Canyon Nat’l Park. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I first encountered that magic nearly 20 years ago, documenting Bernie’s work recording soundscapes in Sequoia-Kings Canyon, for the National Park Service — a project that was foundational to the Park Service starting a broader program to document and protect soundscapes in the parks. Alcatraz Island is among the properties where Park Service scientists have made recordings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sequoia is also where I met \u003ca href=\"http://www.jackhines.com\">Jack Hines\u003c/a>. He’s a musician and \u003ca href=\"http://www.eartothewild.com\">nature sound recordist\u003c/a> who drew inspiration for both from Wild Sanctuary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not just the work that they do or that we do, it’s this bigger piece, which is truly the sanctuary of the wild,” says Hines, “And by bringing the voice of that forward into all of our ears and our consciousness, it helps to preserve a certain resource for us as people, that is extremely valuable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1917495\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917495\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767.jpg\" alt=\"The former studio at Wild Sanctuary. A second-story guest cottage collapsed onto the ground floor.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/IMG_8767-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The former studio at Wild Sanctuary. A second-story guest cottage collapsed onto the ground floor. \u003ccite>(Craig Miller)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It was Jack who called and warned Kat & Bernie to get out, which they barely did, escaping in their car at the very moment that flames exploded on the hills surrounding their home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You would think with the level of emotion that I feel right now, that it’s as though we’d lost those two people,” said Jack, needing a long breath to steady himself, “But thank God we didn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack and Bernie would sometimes record together up on Surgarloaf Ridge, the state park off of Highway 12, east of Santa Rosa. Bernie chose a wooded spot near a stream up there, to document \u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/10/20/where-have-all-the-birds-gone-listen-as-a-california-forest-grows-quiet-over-time/\">changes in the soundscape\u003c/a> over the course of California’s 5-year drought. In those recordings, you can hear the life draining out of the place as the landscape became desiccated. There may be one more recording in the series, as much of Sugarloaf burned in the fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Kat hopes that, like that piece of scorched earth — the spirit that inhabited Wild Sanctuary will be reborn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It really resonated with people and they found a lot of community here,” she recalled. “So that part of Wild Sanctuary we hope will be re-envisioned and maybe re-purposed for a new generation to take this work forward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kat and Bernie have taken temporary refuge in Salt Lake City, where Kat has family. Where and how they will recreate their Wild Sanctuary, they still don’t know. They’re just confident that they will.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "After Wildfires, What Happens to Crops Soaked in Fire Retardant?",
"headTitle": "After Wildfires, What Happens to Crops Soaked in Fire Retardant? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The full extent of the damage from the northern California wildfires that killed 43 people and destroyed 8,400 homes is still being tallied. The devastation left an obvious scar, but not all the damage is visible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the assessments still to be made is what impact millions of gallons of fire retardant—essentially a potent fertilizer—may have on carefully tended plants and soils.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=”qlEvyStbds7PU1zqsELzXUwNdZ44g8jq”]Saved by timing, nearly 80 percent of the renowned wine region’s grapes had been harvested when the multiple fires started in early October. And for the most part, the blazes did not linger at the vineyards, which are kept free of grasses and other fire-devouring fuels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there was collateral damage: bright red slathers of fire retardant dropped from the state’s fleet of supertankers. In one week, more than 2 million gallons of retardant were dropped in California—a record, according to \u003ca href=\"http://www.fire.ca.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cal Fire\u003c/a>, the state firefighting agency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are always mindful of where we are trying to drop aerial fire retardant,” said Chris Jurasek, the Cal Fire aviation supervisor who directed many of the drops. “It’s always in our mind to try and alleviate contacting anything other than fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire has the largest aerial firefighting fleet in the world. As planes become increasingly central to fighting fires in California, more and more retardant is served up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917461 aligncenter\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"733\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires.png 550w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-160x213.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-240x320.png 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-375x500.png 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-520x693.png 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\">\u003c/a>On one day during the recent fires, Oct. 12, crews loaded nearly 700 gallons of retardant a minute from dawn to dusk to help slow the fire, according to Cal Fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By way of comparison: The state’s largest aviation facility, near Sacramento, pumped 1.7 million gallons of retardant into firefighting tankers in 2016. The base has already used more than 4 million gallons so far this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The retardant, called Phos-Chek, contains ammonium phosphate, a fertilizer. It also includes chemicals to regulate how the slurry drops, emulsifiers that render it gooey so it sticks to targets, and a coloring agent so air crews can track what they’ve dropped. For the most part, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/fire/wfcs/msds.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ingredients\u003c/a> are disclosed to Cal Fire by the Phos-Chekmanufacturer, ICL-Performance Products, LP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the entire formula is not made public. George Matousek, an ICL chemist who helped formulate the retardant, said the precise recipe is a trade secret but “all products in Phos-Chek are food-grade or better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chemicals are mixed with water and are generally harmless to humans and most animals, according to the company. But retardants are known to be toxic to fish, so state and national fire-fighting agencies \u003ca href=\"https://www.nifc.gov/PUBLICATIONS/redbook/2016/Chapter12.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">prohibit drops\u003c/a> within 300 feet of water sources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as Western wildfires increasingly move out of forests and into developed areas, firefighters have less wiggle room to target their drops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a converted 747 jetliner is lining up to release nearly 20,000 gallons of retardant, there’s no guarantee of precision. Pilots are often guided away from water sources and landscapes containing plants that are endangered or otherwise protected by law, using \u003ca href=\"https://usfs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=53c2f30ed89f429b93f2e09dc3336ad0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">retardant avoidance maps\u003c/a> published by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">U.S. Forest Service\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s an issue that’s taken seriously by fire-fighting agencies. Biologists say that a sudden dump of nutrients in soils can encourage the growth of non-native or invasive plants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is a precedent for concern about soil chemistry,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of \u003ca href=\"https://www.fseee.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics\u003c/a>, a watchdog group made up of Forest Service employees and others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improving soil productivity “would allow invasive plants that are better able to utilize these nutrients (to) crowd out natives.”How those interactions might play out in carefully curated vineyards is not known. Winemakers are famously fussy about soil: It’s what imparts the terroir that gives wines their unique characteristics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some vintners choose not to use fertilizers of any kind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of time and effort is put into that soil,” said Andrew Walker, a geneticist at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.ucdavis.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">University of California, Davis\u003c/a>’ Department of \u003ca href=\"http://wineserver.ucdavis.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Viticulture and Enology\u003c/a>, which is devoted to all things wine-making. Fertilizers may be altogether undesirable, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>North Coast vintners “make expensive wines. They work on quality rather than quantity. They don’t necessarily want excessive vine growth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Walker said not much is known about potential effects of retardants on commercial crops. Previous blazes have raced out of wildlands and into agricultural lands, destroying fruit and nut orchards, hay fields and, increasingly, California’s highly lucrative cannabis plantations. Farmers of such crops have specific guidelines for fertilizing their plants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Academics and researchers are beginning to study the issue—a good thing, Matousek said. “It’s something that’s going to come up more often.”The Napa County Agricultural Commissioner did not return phone calls for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wineinstitute.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Wine Institute\u003c/a>, an advocacy group for 1,000 wineries and business in California, declined to comment. A representative of a regional cannabis-growing association did not respond to a request for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the \u003ca href=\"http://www.countyofnapa.org/HHSA/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Napa County Health and Human Services Agency\u003c/a> posted an \u003ca href=\"http://www.countyofnapa.org/Pages/Search.aspx?keywords=retardant\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">online warning\u003c/a> earlier this month. It stated that although there is little danger in ingesting produce when retardant is present, it’s to be avoided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Individuals are advised against consuming fruits and vegetables from home gardens to which retardant may have been applied, or from areas in wildlands where residues are visible,” the agency said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In addition to avoiding consuming food items with visible residues, the fertilizer component of the retardants may lead to temporary increases in the nitrate content of soils in areas of application.” Walker said plants take in chemicals in soils, but they also can absorb some chemicals to no ill effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Dennis Hulbert, a retired regional aviation manager for the U.S. Forest Service who oversaw firefighting action in California, said retardants are relied upon too much by overwhelmed fire managers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hulbert said he spent 39 years ordering retardant drops without knowing much about the potential long-term implications. “This is 50-year-old technology,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s a good thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire’s Jurasek, for his part, said the tankers and their loads of retardant were instrumental in quenching the recent fires. The wineries will recover, he said. As for the possibility of lingering problems in soils and plants, he said, “I do not have any concerns.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CALmatters.org \u003c/a>is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"nprByline": "\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/articles/author/julie-cart/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Julie Cart\u003c/a>,\u003c/br>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CALmatters\u003c/a>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The full extent of the damage from the northern California wildfires that killed 43 people and destroyed 8,400 homes is still being tallied. The devastation left an obvious scar, but not all the damage is visible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the assessments still to be made is what impact millions of gallons of fire retardant—essentially a potent fertilizer—may have on carefully tended plants and soils.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>Saved by timing, nearly 80 percent of the renowned wine region’s grapes had been harvested when the multiple fires started in early October. And for the most part, the blazes did not linger at the vineyards, which are kept free of grasses and other fire-devouring fuels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there was collateral damage: bright red slathers of fire retardant dropped from the state’s fleet of supertankers. In one week, more than 2 million gallons of retardant were dropped in California—a record, according to \u003ca href=\"http://www.fire.ca.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cal Fire\u003c/a>, the state firefighting agency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are always mindful of where we are trying to drop aerial fire retardant,” said Chris Jurasek, the Cal Fire aviation supervisor who directed many of the drops. “It’s always in our mind to try and alleviate contacting anything other than fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire has the largest aerial firefighting fleet in the world. As planes become increasingly central to fighting fires in California, more and more retardant is served up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires.png\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1917461 aligncenter\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"733\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires.png 550w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-160x213.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-240x320.png 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-375x500.png 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2017/11/graphic_fires-520x693.png 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\">\u003c/a>On one day during the recent fires, Oct. 12, crews loaded nearly 700 gallons of retardant a minute from dawn to dusk to help slow the fire, according to Cal Fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By way of comparison: The state’s largest aviation facility, near Sacramento, pumped 1.7 million gallons of retardant into firefighting tankers in 2016. The base has already used more than 4 million gallons so far this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The retardant, called Phos-Chek, contains ammonium phosphate, a fertilizer. It also includes chemicals to regulate how the slurry drops, emulsifiers that render it gooey so it sticks to targets, and a coloring agent so air crews can track what they’ve dropped. For the most part, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/fire/wfcs/msds.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ingredients\u003c/a> are disclosed to Cal Fire by the Phos-Chekmanufacturer, ICL-Performance Products, LP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the entire formula is not made public. George Matousek, an ICL chemist who helped formulate the retardant, said the precise recipe is a trade secret but “all products in Phos-Chek are food-grade or better.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chemicals are mixed with water and are generally harmless to humans and most animals, according to the company. But retardants are known to be toxic to fish, so state and national fire-fighting agencies \u003ca href=\"https://www.nifc.gov/PUBLICATIONS/redbook/2016/Chapter12.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">prohibit drops\u003c/a> within 300 feet of water sources.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as Western wildfires increasingly move out of forests and into developed areas, firefighters have less wiggle room to target their drops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a converted 747 jetliner is lining up to release nearly 20,000 gallons of retardant, there’s no guarantee of precision. Pilots are often guided away from water sources and landscapes containing plants that are endangered or otherwise protected by law, using \u003ca href=\"https://usfs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=53c2f30ed89f429b93f2e09dc3336ad0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">retardant avoidance maps\u003c/a> published by the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">U.S. Forest Service\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s an issue that’s taken seriously by fire-fighting agencies. Biologists say that a sudden dump of nutrients in soils can encourage the growth of non-native or invasive plants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is a precedent for concern about soil chemistry,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of \u003ca href=\"https://www.fseee.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics\u003c/a>, a watchdog group made up of Forest Service employees and others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improving soil productivity “would allow invasive plants that are better able to utilize these nutrients (to) crowd out natives.”How those interactions might play out in carefully curated vineyards is not known. Winemakers are famously fussy about soil: It’s what imparts the terroir that gives wines their unique characteristics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some vintners choose not to use fertilizers of any kind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A lot of time and effort is put into that soil,” said Andrew Walker, a geneticist at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.ucdavis.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">University of California, Davis\u003c/a>’ Department of \u003ca href=\"http://wineserver.ucdavis.edu/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Viticulture and Enology\u003c/a>, which is devoted to all things wine-making. Fertilizers may be altogether undesirable, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>North Coast vintners “make expensive wines. They work on quality rather than quantity. They don’t necessarily want excessive vine growth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Walker said not much is known about potential effects of retardants on commercial crops. Previous blazes have raced out of wildlands and into agricultural lands, destroying fruit and nut orchards, hay fields and, increasingly, California’s highly lucrative cannabis plantations. Farmers of such crops have specific guidelines for fertilizing their plants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Academics and researchers are beginning to study the issue—a good thing, Matousek said. “It’s something that’s going to come up more often.”The Napa County Agricultural Commissioner did not return phone calls for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wineinstitute.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Wine Institute\u003c/a>, an advocacy group for 1,000 wineries and business in California, declined to comment. A representative of a regional cannabis-growing association did not respond to a request for comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the \u003ca href=\"http://www.countyofnapa.org/HHSA/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Napa County Health and Human Services Agency\u003c/a> posted an \u003ca href=\"http://www.countyofnapa.org/Pages/Search.aspx?keywords=retardant\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">online warning\u003c/a> earlier this month. It stated that although there is little danger in ingesting produce when retardant is present, it’s to be avoided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Individuals are advised against consuming fruits and vegetables from home gardens to which retardant may have been applied, or from areas in wildlands where residues are visible,” the agency said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In addition to avoiding consuming food items with visible residues, the fertilizer component of the retardants may lead to temporary increases in the nitrate content of soils in areas of application.” Walker said plants take in chemicals in soils, but they also can absorb some chemicals to no ill effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Dennis Hulbert, a retired regional aviation manager for the U.S. Forest Service who oversaw firefighting action in California, said retardants are relied upon too much by overwhelmed fire managers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hulbert said he spent 39 years ordering retardant drops without knowing much about the potential long-term implications. “This is 50-year-old technology,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s a good thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cal Fire’s Jurasek, for his part, said the tankers and their loads of retardant were instrumental in quenching the recent fires. The wineries will recover, he said. As for the possibility of lingering problems in soils and plants, he said, “I do not have any concerns.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"imageAlt": "KQED The California Report",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/26099305-72af-4542-9dde-ac1807fe36d5/kqed-s-the-california-report",
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}
},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-California-Report-Magazine-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/tag/tcrmag/feed/podcast"
}
},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.cityarts.net/",
"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/City-Arts-and-Lectures-p692/",
"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
"title": "Close All Tabs",
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/CAT_2_Tile-scaled.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
"link": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
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"link": "/radio/program/code-switch-life-kit",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9NTEwMzEy",
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},
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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},
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
"title": "Freakonomics Radio",
"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
}
},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"here-and-now": {
"id": "here-and-now",
"title": "Here & Now",
"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6c3dd23c-93fb-4aab-97ba-1725fa6315f1/hyphenaci%C3%B3n",
"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
}
},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
"meta": {
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/0OLWoyizopu6tY1XiuX70x",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-Our-Watch-p1436229/",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
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