美国国家公共电台 NPR The Smoke In Redding, Calif., Is So Thick You Can't See The Sun Most Days

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

California is marking one of the most destructive fire seasons in its history. The Mendocino Complex Fire alone is the largest wildfire ever recorded in California and has currently consumed close to 400,000 acres. Across the state, more than 800,000 acres have burned. The multiple wildfires of the summer have taken lives, burned hundreds of homes and structures and caused thousands of people to be evacuated 1. There's another byproduct of these fires that will affect hundreds of thousands more people - smoke and the unhealthy toxins 2 blowing in with it. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports on how the West is trying to make itself more smoke-ready.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE 3: In the mountains of Northern California, Richard Libscomb's home has been choked by wildfire smoke for weeks. At first, it was just a nuisance, until one afternoon when he was out doing work around the garden.

RICHARD LIBSCOMB: I went up there, and I started breathing hard. I couldn't - what the dickens going on? I started getting dizzy, and I fell down, and I...

SIEGLER: The doctor told him wildfire smoke particles were coating his lungs. Now Libscomb has to travel everywhere with a small oxygen tank for emergencies.

R. LIBSCOMB: You know, it just - what in the hell's going on, you know? It never happened to me like that before. I'm a pretty outdoorsman.

SIEGLER: Libscomb is 81. He and his wife and son had to make the two-hour trip to Redding for doctors' appointments.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yes, sir.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Okey-doke.

SIEGLER: At the Whiskeytown Reservoir, the Libscombs are waiting with neighbors for authorities to escort them a hundred miles home through the burned area of the Carr Fire. Now, fires are a part of life here. Richard used to fight them when he was young. But the smoke never lingered this long.

R. LIBSCOMB: This year, it's been hanging in there. It's pretty good sometimes in the morning, and then before the day's over, oh, you can't see those trees.

SIEGLER: In Redding, you can't even see the sun most days. The smoke is that thick. High school football teams are practicing indoors. People who do have to go outside are wearing these green N95 smoke masks that filter out 95 percent of the harmful particulates 4.

DAVE MARON: I think there's about 15,000 masks. We've already distributed about 10,000 masks.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Wow.

SIEGLER: Dave Maron at the Shasta County health department says for three weeks straight, Redding has endured unhealthy air.

MARON: You can hear everywhere how difficult it is. Everybody comes in coughing a little bit, just struggling, sneezing, watery 5 eyes.

SIEGLER: Across the West, health agencies are urging people to seal off their windows and doors and change the filters in their air conditioning if they're lucky enough to have it. In Redding, when the temperature gets above a hundred for long stretches, which it does now a lot, the county opens cooling centers.

MARON: It's been, you know, a constant messaging from public health to avoid exertion 6 outdoors, wear your masks because the exposure to long-term wildfire smoke does have health effects.

SIEGLER: Especially for children, whose lungs aren't fully 7 developed, and older people, who may have pre-existing conditions. With climate change and dense 8 stands of trees and brush ready to burn, scientists are warning smoke seasons will also lengthen 9. It used to be a few days here or there. Now we're talking weeks, even months.

ANTHONY WEXLER: So you've heard a lot about air pollution in Beijing. Yeah, that's what it's like.

SIEGLER: Anthony Wexler directs the Air Quality Research Center at UC Davis. Even here, 80 miles from the nearest big fire, he's been measuring air quality readings 10 times worse than the federal standard. In California's Central Valley, the smoke pollution gets trapped and lingers.

WEXLER: You don't want a lot of wind because that - because a lot of wind makes the fire impossible to put out. But if you don't have the wind, then the smoke just sits there. So you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

SIEGLER: Wexler is leading a team of scientists who are studying the long-term health effects of prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke. It's a relatively 10 new field of research, but their work is urgent in states like California, where towns and even whole cities have been built out into forests where the fire risk is high. On the west side of Redding, the devastation 11 from the Carr Fire is alarming. Homes, power lines, old cars, gas tanks were incinerated. It's not just smoke from burning trees anymore, says Dave Moran at the health department.

MARON: When you get smoke, you know, from structures with benzenes and other cancer-causing formaldehydes and things like that in these materials, that's a whole nother ballgame.

SIEGLER: For now, most people are just staying inside when they can. Being cooped up this long has been hard for Richard Libscomb and his wife Sonya. They're an active outdoor family.

SONYA LIBSCOMB: We're just going day by day depending on how the wind shifts.

R. LIBSCOMB: Right.

S. LIBSCOMB: It'll take it away or bring it in.

SIEGLER: You can detect a reluctant acceptance in the West that prolonged smoke events are the future, just like these more destructive wildfires. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Redding, Calif.

(SOUNDBITE OF ERIK FRIEDLANDER'S "NIGHT WHITE")