When a megafire takes hold in California, those lucky enough not to evacuate close their windows and doors, check their air filters and settle in for some orange-skied, smoke-filled days. But for Keith Bein, it’s go time.
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He loads up his mobile research lab and heads to the smoke, entering what can be at times the planet’s worst air quality, so he can sample it. Bein is an associate professional researcher at 51³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏÍø’ Air Quality Research Center. His work is helping us better understand the impacts of wildfire smoke on air quality and health.
It’s exciting work, but also incredibly stressful. How does he deal? We talked about that shortly before this year’s wildfire season kicked into high gear.
How did your wildfire air sampling work come about?
I’ve studied wildfire and its human health impacts for a long time, since the early 2000s.
In about 2017, with the Napa-Sonoma fires, the landscape started to change. Rather than a distant and huge forest, this fire had crept into a residential area, burning like we’d never seen before. The fire regime was shifting, and the wildland-urban interface was shrinking. People were being directly impacted in a very real way — with the emissions they were exposed to, the mental health of the situation, as well as the loss of property, health, resources and employment.
I saw new opportunities to get involved because now it wasn’t just the trees and shrubs burning, but all the products that make up the built environment. That changes what’s in those smoke plumes and how it impacts human health.
It was tricky to figure out how to study it. You have to be there on site to capture the emissions to take back to the lab. That’s when we started thinking about having a mobile research laboratory we can deploy at a moment’s notice so we can go chase fires. That’s essentially what I was doing. Like a storm chaser who chases tornadoes, I was chasing wildfire to get samples to bring back to study.
We started thinking about having a mobile research laboratory we can deploy at a moment’s notice so we can go chase fires. That’s essentially what I was doing.
So I bought two electric Smart cars — the itty bitty things — one that powers all my equipment and one down the road that’s charging, so I have a 24-hour power source for all my supplies. They permanently sit with my sampling equipment, so if a fire happens, I hitch it and go. It’s a fast-deployment, wildfire-chasing, mobile research laboratory.
I was at the Camp Fire and Carr Fire in 2018. I went back to Santa Rosa after the 2017 fires when they were starting to rebuild, and then the 2020 wildfire siege. Now we’re gearing up for 2022. I’ll do my best to chase the fires I can and continue to accumulate and analyze samples.
I imagine you in the thick of some very heavy smoke. What’s that like for you?
One of the first light-shedding moments was the Carr Fire in Redding. The fire was very active. I’d set up, and I turned on some of my particle measurement instrumentation. I thought it was broken. The concentrations it was reading I’d never seen before. I didn’t even know instruments could go up that high. But it turned out to be correct.
And I couldn't escape it. I went to the hotel, and the smoke is everywhere. I went to go eat, and it’s everywhere. For the week I was there, everything was irritated — eyes, nose, throat. It almost didn’t matter what kind of mask you have on, it’s just so penetrating. I thought about the people who live there, who don’t have the resources to leave, and they’re just stuck, breathing this stuff every day until it goes away.
And you were there by choice.
That’s right! I could leave any moment I wanted to.
Then the Camp Fire came. That really hit home because of the impact that plume had on the Bay Area and where I live in Oakland. My wife’s sister had come to visit, and she spent the entire week inside next to an air filter. We couldn’t go out, couldn’t go anywhere.
Then I left to actually go to the Camp Fire with my rig and saw just the devastation of the whole town. I went to school at Chico State, and I have a lot of friends in Paradise. A lot of them lost their homes. I had about four or five people staying with me after they lost their homes. Some stayed several months while they tried to find places to live.
It’s all a very personal experience. You see the drama in them and the way it’s impacting them, and you don’t really know how to act or what to say. It’s a far cry from me studying wildfire to me having to home and board people who’ve lost their homes.
Do those kinds of experiences fuel your desire to do your work or make you feel more despair, or maybe a mix of both?
You know, when you’re in the middle of this crisis layer cake — where it’s not just wildfires but it’s fires and then it’s drought, then it’s heat, then it’s COVID, then it’s mass shootings, racial injustice, and it’s just one after another — it all compresses down on you, and it feels very overwhelming. I read the news regularly; it’s always doom and gloom. It’s hard to find the hope and those powerful stories where people are really making a difference. You do get those moments when it’s just like, what’s the point? It’s just so much bigger than me.
But the hope is in the action. The hope is in the small steps you can take. Recognizing that you can’t change the world, but do the things you can do. The transportation choices you make, the consumer choices you make, how you spend your money, what you fight for, what you donate to. Do what you can do at your level. Hopefully the collective makes a bigger difference.
You do get those moments when it’s just like, what’s the point? It’s just so much bigger than me. But the hope is in the action.
To me, hopelessness is a self-defeating cycle. I’ll do my best to do whatever I can to push the fight forward. That’s where I am.
And I have kids! That’s the big driver. I have to be a role model for them. You can’t get lost in the eco-anxiety. You have to push forward and make the decisions even if they’re hard decisions. I think society and America, we’re addicted to this path of least resistance; we’re addicted to convenience.
