![]() Then, they might have looked around their practically treeless neighborhoods and confidently told themselves, “This place doesn’t burn” now, they know that there is no quarantining smoke, and they may also know about the degradation of health that smoke brings. Ten years ago, coastal residents might have taken comfort in the hundreds of miles between the inland fires and their homes now they wonder about wind patterns that might bring the particle pollution to their doors. Now, increasingly, they fear smoke - each pyrocumulus cloud or fire tornado an airborne toxic event expanding outward from the flames. Ten years ago, Californians often feared fire, even as they lived in some uneasy accommodation to it. But even here, on a handful of days each fall, the air fills with particulate matter from wildfires in the West, the smoke carried thousands of miles but still dense enough to produce air-quality warnings in New York City, in Boston, in Philadelphia. They left the Bay Area for the East Coast, where even the most neurotic among us can comfort ourselves, most days, by scrolling past the temperature and precipitation to see air-quality indexes in the low double digits. “Why is it still nighttime?” her 3-year-old asked at the breakfast table.īlock turned to her husband. “‘The day that the sun didn’t rise’ is how we refer to it in our family,” Block says. 9, with the baby less than 2 weeks old, the sky above San Francisco was an eerie dark amber. They returned in the midst of the city’s Covid pandemic lockdown now they didn’t feel safe going outside for more than a few minutes at a time. ![]() “This was the exposure she was going to have because this was the day and the week and the month and the year and the place that she was born.”Īt home, the whir of fans and air purifiers that the family rushed to purchase on Amazon became the baby’s first white-noise machine. “A five-minute walk to the car wasn’t going to make the difference between her having a chronic lung disease or not, but it felt like we had to at least try something to protect her tiny little newborn lungs.” On that walk, “with ash falling from the sky directly onto her, I felt I was failing her - letting her breathe that air in the first few days of life and not being able to do anything about it,” she says. The precautions felt hopeless, even as she also knew they were irrational, Block says. “In a drafty old house, you certainly can’t escape the smoke, but if you can’t even escape it in a hospital room where you just had your baby, there really is no getting away from it.” When it was time to take their daughter home from the hospital, she and her husband made a quick plan: He would pull around, and she would “cover her with one of those little car seat covers and run her as quickly as possible to the car.” ![]() That morning, she says, “it was something horrible.” She says she felt an overwhelming postpartum lack of control. It was the latest in a string of extraordinary fire seasons in the state, and every morning, the first thing Block did was to reach over in bed to check her phone’s air-quality app. It smelled like something was on fire.” She and her husband looked outside, “and it was just this wall of smoky ash,” she says. ![]() 27, 2020, and Block, a family-care physician, was at the Mission Bay medical campus of the University of California, San Francisco - “a brand-new hospital, as pristine as a hospital can be,” she says. The first thing Alison Block noticed the morning after giving birth to her third child was the smell of wildfire smoke coming through the supposedly sealed hospital windows. ![]()
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