On Sept. 8 at about 4 A.M., smoke from the nearby Line Fire in the San Bernandino mountains crept onto Pomona College’s campus. As is typical of wildfire smoke, 90 percent of the smoke was made up of particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), an agent known to have disastrous health consequences.
When inhaled, PM2.5 batters structures deep in your lungs, damages your mucous membranes –– the tissues inside your body that protect you from pathogens –– and enters your bloodstream, increasing your risk of catching a respiratory infection and inducing cough, labored breathing, chest pain, irregular heartbeat and a host of other serious health issues. Even hours-long exposure to high concentrations of PM2.5 increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and several types of cancer; for people with pre-existing heart or lung conditions, it can prompt hospitalization or death.
Pomona College has an obligation to protect their students from health hazards like wildfire smoke and the PM2.5 it contains. Since more than 70 percent of their students hail from outside California, where the threat of wildfire smoke is significantly less common, they ought to caution these students about the dangers of inhaling it. When wildfire smoke impacts campus, they should issue alerts quickly and release comprehensive behavioral recommendations so that students know how to protect their health.
But, when it mattered, Pomona failed to take these steps.
Every building on Pomona College’s campus is outfitted with filters meant to improve indoor air quality. Each filter has an associated MERV rating, a number from 1-20 that increases with more effective PM2.5 filtration; most buildings have MERV 11 filters, which capture about 65 percent of PM2.5. MERV 11 filters help, but they are fallible: If outdoor PM2.5 surges, unhealthy concentrations of PM2.5 can percolate through them and circulate indoors.
This is what happened on Sept. 8. In the early morning, as the smoke settled and the Air Quality Index (AQI) spiked, concentrations of PM2.5 well above the EPA’s 24-hour “safe” standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3) began trickling into students’ dorms while they slept. By midday, Mudd-Blaisdell residence hall –– where I live –– smelled like smoke, and residence halls without AC were even worse: Some students had opened their windows for relief from the 108 degree heat, unknowingly allowing the toxic outside air to enter into their rooms.
Campus Safety did not issue an alert acknowledging the air was harmful to the general public until about 35 hours later, on Sept. 9 at 2:56 P.M. And while this alert recommended students “stay indoors whenever possible, stay hydrated, avoid strenuous exercise, keep windows closed” and “use air conditioning if available,” it did not urge students to wear an N95/KN95 mask when outside, stop running the evaporative swamp coolers Pomona suggests students run in dorms without AC (which pull unfiltered outdoor air inside) or stay inside buildings with filters rated MERV 13 or higher –– all measures that the EPA recommends.
Pomona College seems to have overlooked that many of their buildings do not have filters that can effectively stave off wildfire smoke, since they did not encourage students to wear N95/KN95 masks inside or stay in better-filtered buildings. And they did not make an effort to distribute N95/KN95 masks –– which cannot be accessed quickly since they must be purchased online –– even though the Office of Facilities and Campus Services informed me they have thousands of these masks in storage.
Assistant Vice President of Communications and Community Relations for the Claremont Colleges Services Laura Muna-Landa said that Student Health Services “did not experience an increase in students experiencing respiratory issues or ailments related to air quality issues” on the week of Sept. 8. This is fortuitous –– since it means no medical emergencies occurred –– but it does not reflect the many students who had less acute, but still concerning, health responses. At the “unhealthy” and “very unhealthy” AQI levels present during the week of Sept. 8, the EPA estimates 30-50 percent of healthy adults experience “moderate or greater” lung function impairment and 5-15 percent of healthy adults experience “moderate to severe” respiratory symptoms within 24 hours.
This incident was not a one-off. Heat waves, wildfires and the smoke that comes with them are all comorbidities of climate change, which is not letting up. A “long-term drought [in the] US Southwest since the 1980s” has made nearby vegetation vulnerable to combustion, said Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College. The “excessive heat, low humidity, and high winds” that allow fires to balloon quickly have become common “every summer and fall,” he added. Even if no fires are active nearby, they can still affect the air quality.
“Smoke always gets in our eyes and lungs. Fires far to our east and west have clouded our skies over the years,” Miller said. “We don’t need the fire to be in our foothills; smoke can be traced over very long distances.”
Since it poses a dire, immediate and recurrent threat, Campus Safety and Pomona College must start preparing to respond more constructively to smoke-induced poor air quality.
Campus Safety should make alerts based on AQI automatic to improve their response time, since their Sept. 9 alert was issued far too slowly. When it crosses the “unhealthy for sensitive groups” threshold, they should caution students with heart and lung issues; when it crosses the “unhealthy” threshold, they should caution everyone. They should also overhaul their behavioral recommendations and make them more comprehensive to ensure students know how to respond safely.
Pomona College should implement a system to distribute N95/KN95 masks when the air quality is poor so they can be accessed more easily. They should install AC in every residence hall: Wildfires typically coincide with periods of intense heat, and students should not have to choose between overheating with their windows shut and breathing in smoke with their windows open. In buildings whose HVAC systems can support them, they should install MERV 13 filters –– the only commercial model capable of effectively filtering smoke and PM2.5 –– and deploy air purifiers and air scrubbers in buildings whose HVAC systems cannot.
On Sept. 25 and Sept. 26, I collected preliminary data inside several buildings on Pomona’s campus using a handheld air quality monitor I obtained from Pomona environmental analysis professor Marc Los Huertos. The PM2.5-based Air Quality Index (PM2.5 AQI) on these days was classified as “unhealthy for sensitive groups” and “moderate” respectively, something common in the area: From 2020-2023, LA County averaged 15 days of “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” or worse, PM2.5 AQI and 270 days of “moderate” PM2.5 AQI per year.
On both days, I found concentrations of PM2.5 1.5-3 times the EPA’s “safe” yearly standard of 9 μg/m3 in several buildings on Pomona’s campus: the hallways of Mudd-Blaisdell, Harwood, Lyon, Wig, Dialyanas, Sontag, Mason, Crookshank, Carnegie, Pearsons, the top floor of Hahn, Seaver Commons and the lounge in Seaver North. On Sept. 25, Walker, Smiley, and the ground floor of Hahn had concentrations of PM2.5 that exceeded the EPA’s “safe” 24-hour average of 35 μg/m3. These data are not exhaustive, but they are worrying.
If Campus Safety and Pomona College are serious about prioritizing the health of their students, they had better act fast.
Facebook Comments