Environmental Impacts of Fires at the Wildland-Urban Interface

Joost de Gouw, Professor of Chemistry, University of Colorado Boulder
Joost de Gouw is a Chemistry Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). His research is focused on air quality. His group specializes in measurements of organic trace gases in air using mass spectrometry, and they use data from satellite remote sensing instruments to study the distribution and trends in air pollutants and greenhouse gases. De Gouw received his PhD in Physics from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and joined the University of Colorado Boulder as a faculty member in 2018 following a career in research with CIRES and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Sina Hasheminassab, Science System Engineer at JPL, specializing in air pollution monitoring and analysis
Sina Hasheminassab is an air quality scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His research focuses on integrating advanced monitoring techniques with data-driven methodologies to study air pollution sources, trends, and their societal impacts. He is a co-investigator on NASA's Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) satellite mission, where he leads its ground-based air quality monitoring subsystem. Hasheminassab holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Haroula Baliaka, Caltech graduate student in environmental science and engineering, will present data from ASCENT, a national monitoring network that measures air pollutants in real time.

Lauriane Quenee, Caltech Senior Director for Environmental Health and Safety
Lauriane Quenee is Caltech's Senior Director of Environmental Health and Safety. She develops and implements safety strategies, ensures compliance with regulations, and fosters a culture of safety. Quenee holds a PhD in microbiology, has years of research experience, and served on the University of Chicago's biosafety team. She joined Caltech in 2016 as its first academically trained biosafety officer. Quenee has strengthened connections across Caltech, built a biosafety program for biology research, enabled research to continue safely during the pandemic, and shaped safety procedures for essential workers on campus.

Francois Tissot, Professor of Geochemistry and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, Caltech
Francois Tissot is a professor of geochemistry at Caltech. He and his research group carry out elemental and isotopic investigations by combining wet chemistry sample preparation in a clean laboratory environment, precise isotopic analyses using advanced instruments, and interpretation of the data using physically based models. His research ranges from cosmochemistry (i.e., the formation and evolution of the solar system), to geochemistry (e.g., reconstructing redox conditions throughout Earth's history), and in recent years has focused on isotope metallomics, a nascent field using stable isotopes to study human health. Tissot holds a PhD from the University of Chicago.

Moderator

Jessica Neu, JPL Assistant Division Manager
Jessica Neu studies what controls the chemical composition of the atmosphere at the regional and global scales and, ultimately, how atmospheric composition and air quality will change with other components of the climate system. She uses a combination of satellite data, in situ measurements, and atmospheric chemistry models to understand how the chemical makeup of the atmosphere is changing with time, with a particular focus on ozone in the stratosphere and troposphere. Neu is the atmospheric composition discipline program manager at JPL. In that role, she supports research and future mission development across the breadth of atmospheric chemistry activities at JPL. Neu holds a PhD in atmospheric sciences from MIT.

Volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) are molecules that are small enough that they can easily be liquids or gases at room temperature. Not all are harmful, gasoline (harmful) and perfume (not harmful) are both common examples. This property means the VOCs can travel either through the air (as gases) or on particles (as liquids stuck onto the particle surface). In a big fire, they probably do both.

Having your stuff stored inside of a closed cabinet or bin will definitely help prevent contact with VOCs, but unless they are airtight — like a sealed Tupperware — there is a chance that they could let some amount of gaseous VOCs in.

For food, anything that was in air-tight glass or metal should be fine; VOCs do not permeate those materials. Plastic is a tougher call, since VOCs can slowly permeate some kinds of plastics. Thicker plastic materials are certainly better than thin ones, I would be cautious of anything stored in a thin plastic bag. For non-edible materials (woodwork, carpets, furniture), just try to take advantage of the fact that VOCs will evaporate on their own.

An analogy: Say you went away on vacation and forgot to take out the kitchen trash. When you return, the whole house smells. Everything you would do to get rid of those garbage smells will work for fire-derived VOCs too: open windows, tumble dry fabrics, set things outside in the sun, wipe down surfaces, etc.

--Alex Sessions, Caltech's Nico and Marilyn van Wingen Professor of Geobiology