Wildfires are growing under climate change, and their smoke threatens farmworkers, study says
As climate change fuels the intensity and frequency of wildfires, it's also driving up the health risks for farmworkers who often have no choice but to continue working amid dangerous levels of smoke
LOS ANGELES — As wildfires scorched swaths of land in the wine country of Sonoma County in 2020, sending ash flying and choking the air with smoke, Maria Salinas harvested grapes.
Her saliva turned black from inhaling the toxins, until one day she had so much trouble breathing she was rushed to the emergency room. When she felt better, she went right back to work as the fires raged on.
“What forces us to work is necessity,” Salinas said. “We always expose ourselves to danger out of necessity, whether by fire or disaster, when the weather changes, when it’s hot or cold.”
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires around the world, a new study shows that farmworkers are paying a heavy price by being exposed to high levels of air pollution. And in Sonoma County, the focus of the work, researchers found that a program aimed at determining when it was safe to work during wildfires did not adequately protect farmworkers.
They recommended a series of steps to safeguard the workers' health, including air quality monitors at work sites, stricter requirements for employers, emergency plans and trainings in various languages, post-exposure health screenings and hazard pay.
Farmworkers are “experiencing first and hardest what the rest of us are just starting to understand," Max Bell Alper, executive director of the labor coalition North Bay Jobs with Justice, said Wednesday during a webinar devoted to the research, published in July in the journal GeoHealth. «And I think in many ways that’s analogous to what’s
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