Los Angeles —
Tracy Quinn, driver of Pacific Coast Highway last Sunday, surveyed the scale of the coastal damage caused by the Palisades fire.
The water line was darkened by ash. Battered residue washer and dryer units and metal house appliances were surrounding the beach, scattered at random. Sludge carpeted the water's edge. Flood waves at high tide inundated burnt structures, redistributing debris and, maybe, toxic ash all the way out to the sea as they pulled back.
It hurt so much," Quinn, the president and chief executive of the environmental group Heal the Bay, whose team observed ash and debris up to 25 miles (40 km) south of the Palisades burn area in the west of Los Angeles, said.
While crews are evacuating tens of thousands of tons of highly possibly hundreds of thousands tons of hazardous material for the Los Angeles wildfires, in fact, scientists and regulators are starting to identify and understand the range of wildfires impacts on the marine environment. The Palisades and Eaton fires led to the death and destruction of tens of thousands of houses, stores, cars, and appliances, many of which now become derelict by the dispersion of "typical" consumer and industrial object particulates as fallout of the ash, which itself contains pesticides, asbestos, plastic, lead, heavy metals, etc.
As much of it is going to end up in the Pacific Ocean, it raises much to worry about but, for a large part, it is based on speculation on the effects of fire on deep sea biota.
“We haven't seen a concentration of homes and buildings burned so close to the water," Quinn said.
Fire debris and possibly toxic ash can pollute the top water of swimmers'/bathers' [waves crest] water through rainfall that may contain anthropogenic chemical, debris, and other pollutants released into coastal waters. On the long term scale, researchers are wondering whether and how the urban pollutants [charred products] affect food chain.
Last week's atmospheric river and mudslides that ravaged the los angeles region, played a role in part to bring to life some of those anxieties.
Ocean water pollution was one of Mara Dias' worries from the beginning of the fires in January. As the Surfrider Foundation Water Quality Manager (environmental NGO, see www.surfrider.org), strong winds distribute smoke and ashes not as far as the fire itself—horizontally and to the sea.
On the scientific voyages during the fires, scientists described ash and debris that covered the sea surface, for up to 100 miles (161 km) into the ocean, as documented by marine ecologist Julie Dinasquet and University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Things like twigs and shard. They described the smell as electronic burning, she recalled, "not like a nice bonfire.
Runoff associated with rainfall is also one of massive scope and implications. Pollutants and refuse are drawn from receiving waters from the storm sewer and stream channel system discharge onto beaches. That runoff may contain also high quantities of nutrients (nitrogen phosphate) and deposited in the ash of all the burned materials, can lead to contamination of the water, and also heavy metals, in the form of a PAHs structure originating during the combustion of the various fuels, (Dias, 2019)", continued he.
Debris flows and mudflows in the Palisades Fire burn scar may further contaminate hazardous waste entering the marine environment. Soil in burn scars following combustion is less capable of water retention and may develop a surface that repels water from the residue of burned organic matter. Because of the shortage of the organic amendment, soil is bonded to the sloping areas, it is susceptible to landslide and debris flow to aggravate the conditions.
In Los Angeles County and elsewhere, thousands of linear feet of concrete barrier, sandbags, silt sock, and more have been erected to prevent the deposition of debris on the beach. Not too long ago, the Los Angeles (LA) County Board of Supervisors started to request both state and federal assistance to address beach cleanups, storm runoff planning, and ocean water sampling for suspected toxics and pollutants, etc.
In addition to the routine samples, personnel from the state water department and related agencies are also being screened for total and dissolved metals (e.g., arsenic, lead, and aluminum), volatile organic compounds.
They are also collecting samples for use in the microplastics test, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) for human and aquatic toxicity to humans and aqua life, polychlorinated biphenyls(PCBs), a series of manmade compounds, and possible carcinogenic activity from animals and other health toxic effects in humans. They are at present 100% prohibited from manufacture and were used for pigments, paints and electrical applications.
County public health stated that chemical screening of water samples as part of last month's effort in that county did not raise a public health safety issue and, therefore, has lifted the ban on a beach's closure of an ocean water advisory. Beachgoers were still discouraged from entering the water but.
Dinasquet and colleagues are amongst the group working on understanding the scale of potentially toxic ash and debris floating in the ocean, to the depth and speed it reached and to its ultimate fate downstream.
Forest fires release vast quantities of ecosystem nutrients such as iron and nitrogen into the ocean to support the phytoplankton community and create a positive, systemic effect across the ecosystem. Yet, urban coastal fire toxic ash can have lethal effects directly such as (e.g.
The reports are reportedly already high lead and asbestos in the ash, she said. This is a sad situation of humans, and so must be a sad situation for marine species, too.
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