CAREERS & MANAGEMENT 2/2020 Business Spotlight 71Fotos: picture-alliance/ Reuters/Gene Blevins; ; khoj_badami/iStock.com
on a new urgency as ever larger fires burn through
both wilderness and developments, emitting unpre-
cedented amounts of gases and particulate.
“We know that firefighters have pretty intense
exposures under those conditions,” said Rachel
Morello-Frosch, an environmental scientist at the
University of California, Berkeley. She analysed
the blood of firefighters who fought the October
2017 Tubbs Fire, which raged for more than three
weeks through nearly 37,000 acres of California’s
wine country and killed 22 people. She found that
those firefighters returned from the blaze with
higher-than-normal levels of mercury and other
toxic chemicals in their blood. Blood samples from
149 firefighters sent to Tubbs showed higher rates
of mercury than members of the general public, but
also higher rates than those of other firefighters who
had not been sent to fight the fire.
“This was just an initial, pilot study,” Morello-
Frosch said. Still, it seemed to confirm what many
firefighters already thought: those working in places
where residential areas reach into the wilderness face
greater health risks.The changing risks
Wildland firefighters are often exposed to smoke
for long periods of time, working 40-, 50- or 60-hour
shifts, even camping and sleeping amid the fumes.
“They’re doing backbreaking work,” said Morello-
Frosch, digging lines, cutting trees and hiking for
miles.
They tend to wear relatively lightweight gear so
they can move easily. Whereas the responders run-
ning into burning buildings wear heavy-duty masks
that feed them clean air, wildland firefighters might
use a handkerchief.
And a simple handkerchief might be enough, if all
that was burning was vegetation. “But the dynam-
ics of wildfires have changed,” said Matt Alba, a fire
captain.
As communities have built and expanded into the
wild areas, “it’s not just plants and leaves burning,
it’s homes and structures, too,” Alba said. Paradise
didn’t smell like wildfire smoke, he remembered.
“There was this awful taste to it. We just knew it was
wrong.” His crew fought through stinging eyes and
headaches.
Many of the houses in Paradise were prefabri-
cated, and when they burned, so did a noxious mix
of plastics, metals, household cleaning chemicals“ THERE WAS THIS AWFUL
TASTE TO IT. WE JUST KNEW
IT WAS WRONG”
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beispiellosHelping firefighters on a global scale
Global Forest Watch Fires (GFW Fires) is an online platform that
shows where fires are happening in real time on an interactive world
map. GFW Fires combines data from many sources: real-time satel-
lite data from NASA’s Active Fires system, satellite imagery, detailed
maps, weather data and air-quality data. GFW Fires works together
with governments, NGOs, corporations and individuals to under-
stand why a fire has broken out, improve emergency response time
and help authorities to coordinate their response and combat fires
set illegally.
Source: https://fires.globalforestwatch.org/homecombat sth.
[(kQmbÄt]
, etw. bekämpfenemergency response time
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, Zeit bis zum Eintreffen der
Rettungskräfte