Transcript:

Toxic Smoke, Deadly ParticlesWildfires produce clouds of deadly smoke whose effects can last long after the fires have burned. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.Coates: Any time you have a fire, smoke is going to be produced. Wildfire smoke is a combination of small particles, gases, and water vapor.Adam Coates is an assistant professor of Forest Fire Ecology and Management at Virginia Tech.Coates: These small particles have been linked to quite a bit of human health concerns: increased cardiac diseases, birth defects, carcinogenic properties that increase cancer. All those things have been linked to that.These particles from forest fires can kind of take two paths. One can be they can be lifted into the atmosphere and we inhale those as smoke. Those can have a multitude of breathing effects from folks that have asthma to older populations to children that tend to have weakened immune systems to those particular particles. One effect that many might not think of, is that as some of that material remains on the ground and is not lifted into the atmosphere, it can be impacted by precipitation events. So when we have large rain events after a wildfire, that material can be washed into a stream or into a river. So a lot of our water that we drink in the United States particularly is water that's treated from streams and rivers. So that water can be toxic to us in the drinking water that we consume. All of that material has to be treated in a water treatment facility.We'll about lessening the effects of toxic particles in forest fires in our next program. Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by the Center for Earth and Environmental Nanotechnology and the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.