Indoor air quality suffers after a wildfire

As Los Angeles residents return to their neighborhoods, some may find their houses spared by the recent devastating fires. But is the air inside those homes safe to breathe? Recently published data collected after a 2021 Colorado wildfire provide some insight. Like the recent fires in Los Angeles, the wintertime Marshall Fire in Colorado was spurred on by high-speed winds. When firefighters were finally able to extinguish that fire, entire neighborhood blocks were gone. But amid the ash, some houses stood seemingly undamaged. Ten days after the fire was out, a group of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) rolled their mass spectrometer into one such house and began sampling. Their results, recently published alongside a companion health study, provide insight into how hazardous air persists in homes inundated with wildfire smoke ( ACS ES&T Air 2024, DOIs: 10.1021/acsestair.4c00259 and 10.1021 /acsestair.4c00258 ). The dataset from the