Air quality district will distribute filters to combat ill effects from Bay Ara wildfire smoke

When the skies turned orange and ash filled the air during the historic wildfires of 2020, many Bay Area residents were prepared. Some fled to second homes at Lake Tahoe. Others sheltered in place with fancy air purifiers.

But for certain communities — particularly low-income people of color — the apocalypse wasn’t escapable. Without air conditioning to close windows, the money to buy filters or the liberty to take off work and leave town, the only option was to carry on and suffer through the smoke.

As California’s wildfire seasons worsen, inequities in accessing clean air are further straining marginalized communities. But a major new initiative from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District aims to combat that disparity by providing medical-grade air filters to public spaces in disadvantaged neighborhoods, expanding previous efforts to offer much-needed protection from the smoke’s long-term health effects.

“This way, everyone’s getting access to the clean air they need in a more equitable format,” said Areana Flores, program lead for the air district’s new Clean Air Center Program.

Last year, the American Lung Association found that people of color were more than three times more likely to breathe polluted air than White people. Residents of color make up 91% of the top 10% of neighborhoods most impacted by pollution in California, according to the latest CalEnviroScreen report from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and California Environmental Protection Agency.

The pollution from wildfire smoke is no exception.

When an unprecedented 2020 wildfire season set the state ablaze amid the COVID-19 pandemic, E. Gutierrez roamed the empty streets of downtown San Francisco as her 7-year-old asthmatic daughter gasped for air — her neck and abs strained from coughing and wheezing.

They stopped at a local Dyson electronics store to buy an air purifier but couldn’t afford the only model left in stock. A salesperson let them sit for two hours to breathe the store’s clean air. Then they returned home empty-handed to a small apartment with soot-covered windows and prayed for the skies to clear.

“It was horrible,” Gutierrez said. “I cried a lot. I felt like a failure.”

A few months later, Gutierrez qualified to receive a free air filter, hypoallergenic bed sheets and a vacuum cleaner. The goods were delivered by Breathe California, one of seven partnering organizations in the District’s Home Air Filtration Program, which started distributing personal filters to low-income residents last August.

“It really felt like a lifesaver,” Gutierrez said. “Come this October, we’re ready. I feel like we can handle it.”

But the organizations can’t provide air filters to everyone in need. Supplies are limited, and many who could benefit don’t qualify — including the more than 30,000 people in the Bay Area currently experiencing homelessness.

And the problem isn’t local to the Bay Area, either. In fact, the pollution burden is even worse in many surrounding counties, as shown in the CalEnviroScreen map.

“I haven’t received anything from anyone,” said Ivette Mora-Gutierrez, in Spanish. She is a single mother in Watsonville whose son ended up in the hospital with breathing problems during the October 2020 fires. “If I don’t go to work to take care of him, who’s going to pay rent?”

The unequal distribution of resources represents a larger theme of environmental injustice that plagues the state.

“Air pollution is just one slice of a whole bunch of layers of problems that are really interrelated,” said Catherine Garoupa White, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. She grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, which consistently ranks among the regions with the worst air pollution — and highest asthma rates — in the nation.

The bowl-shaped valley — where farms produce a bounty of fruits and vegetables — collects particulate matter from fires and other pollution sources. And the problem is amplified by a lack of enforced policies to regulate the air quality and protect residents and workers in the fields.

“The underlying economic and political theories that our country operates off of basically say that some people are worth more than others — and some places are worth more than others,” Garoupa White said.

A state bill passed in 2017 sought to address this air quality inequity, but its efficacy remains unclear. Environmental justice groups criticized the effort for failing to produce “quantifiable, permanent, and enforceable emissions reductions” — instead forcing marginalized communities to compete for resources.

A new bill, AB 836, passed in 2019 focuses on equitably regulating air quality threats specifically from wildfires — providing funding for a network of clean air centers across California. Local officials from each air district are responsible for establishing their own systems.

As part of its new Clean Air Center Program, the air district is working more directly with communities, allowing residents to pinpoint on an online map the locations where they’d most like to see clean air centers pop up — from schools to libraries to veteran centers. Community members have placed over 100 pins on the map over the last two months.

“People know their community best,” said Flores. “It’s just one more resource that counties can use when considering where to deploy the clean air centers.”

The district is encouraging counties to look for locations that will stay open 24 hours for round-the-clock access.

The goal is to have filtration systems installed by the start of the next wildfire season, according to Flores.

“This would help so many families just like mine,” Mora-Gutierrez said, “that don’t have the resources to have air conditioning or the opportunity to go to a better place.”