The giant fire that raged for a week at the Lineage cold storage facility in Boyle Heights is finally out, but many Angelenos who lived under clouds of acrid black smoke for days are still worried about air quality.
On Wednesday night, L.A. Material hosted a panel with three air quality experts, who broke down what residents need to know to understand air quality and how to protect themselves.
Our panelists were:
— Yifang Zhu, professor at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health Sciences
— Sam Silva, assistant professor of Earth Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Population and Public Health Sciences at USC
— Jill Johnston, associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at UC Irvine’s Joe Wen School of Population and Public Health
Watch the full conversation:
Here are five of the top takeaways from our conversation.
1. How should people use the various air monitoring apps and services, especially during a disaster like this?
Most of these air monitoring apps use AQI — the air quality index — to measure the level of pollution in the air. AQI uses a scale from 0 to 500 to indicate the concentration of pollutants (0 to 50 is good, 51 to 100 is moderate). The AQI number you see when you open one of these sites or apps is the average level of pollution from the past 8 to 24 hours. In other words, contrary to what a lot of people assume, it’s not real-time data. Additionally, AQI readings can only tell us how much particulate matter is in the air, not what toxic metals or other substances might be in that particulate matter.
Furthermore, AQI does not detect gases or vapors, which can also be harmful, Professor Yifang Zhu said.
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