Toxic

When wildfire smoke turns the air brown and hazy, you might think about heading indoors with the windows closed, running an air purifier or even wearing a mask. These are all good strategies to reduce exposure to the particles in wildfire smoke, but smoky air is also filled with potentially harmful gases. Those gases can get into buildings and remain in the walls and floors for weeks. Getting rid of these gases isn’t as simple as turning on an air purifier or opening a window on a clear day. In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, colleagues and I tracked the life of these gases in a home exposed to wildfire smoke. We also found that the best way to get rid of the risk is among the simplest: start cleaning. The challenge of smoke particles and gases In December 2021, several of my friends and colleagues were affected by the Marshall Fire that burned about 1,000 homes in Boulder County, Colorado. The “lucky” ones, whose homes were still stand...

Hundreds of industrial facilities with toxic pollutants were in Hurricane Helene’s path as the powerful storm flooded communities across the Southeast in late September 2024. Near the coast and into Georgia, Helene swept over paper mills, fertilizer factories and oil and gas storage facilities. Paper mills are among the most polluting industries on the planet – some with thousands of pounds of lead on-site from prior production practices. Florida officials reported that a retired nuclear power plant just south of Cedar Key experienced a storm surge of as much as 12 feet that inundated buildings and an industrial wastewater pond. Spent nuclear fuel stored at the site, which also flooded during Hurricane Idalia in 2023, was believed to be secure, Bloomberg reported. Further inland, the storm dumped more than a foot of rain on industrial sites in the Carolinas and Tennessee, some near waterways that quickly flooded with runoff from the mountains....

On Feb. 3, 2023, a train carrying chemicals jumped the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio, rupturing railcars filled with hazardous materials and fueling chemical fires at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The disaster drew global attention as the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania urged evacuations for a mile around the site. Flames and smoke billowed from burning chemicals, and an acrid odor radiated from the derailment area as chemicals entered the air and spilled into a nearby creek. Three days later, at the urging of the rail company, Norfolk Southern, about 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride, a chemical that can be toxic to humans at high doses, was released from the damaged train cars and set aflame. Federal investigators later concluded that the open burn and the black mushroom cloud it produced were unnecessary, but it was too late. Railcar chemicals spread into Ohio and Pennsylvania. The scene after a train carrying haz...

Across the U.S., children and adults are increasingly exposed to harmful chemicals from a source few people are even aware of. It begins on a street outside a home or school, where a worker in a manhole is repairing a sewer pipe. The contractor inserts a resin-soaked sleeve into the buried pipe, then heats it, transforming the resin into a hard plastic pipe. This is one of the cheapest, most common pipe repair methods, but it comes with a serious risk: Heating the resin generates harmful fumes that can travel through the sewer lines and into surrounding buildings, sometimes several blocks away. These chemicals have made hundreds of people ill, forced building evacuations and even led to hospitalizations. Playgrounds, day care centers and schools in several states have been affected, including in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. With this sewer pipe repair method, the chemical wast...

Hundreds of industrial facilities with toxic pollutants are in Hurricane Milton’s path as it heads toward Florida, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene flooded communities across the Southeast. Milton, expected to make landfall as a major hurricane late on Oct. 9, is bearing down on boat and spa factories along Florida’s west-central coast, along with the rubber, plastics and fiberglass manufacturers that supply them. Many of these facilities use tens of thousands of registered contaminants each year, including toluene, styrene and other chemicals known to have adverse effects on the central nervous system with prolonged exposure. Farther inland, hundreds more manufacturers that use and house hazardous chemicals onsite lie along the Interstate 4 and Interstate 75 corridors and their feeder roads. And many are in the path of the storm’s intense winds and heavy rainfall. Black dots indicate facilities in EPA’s...