This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It is third in a series about health risks following the Los Angeles wildfires that destroyed Pacific Palisades and Altadena. This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Nicholas Spada was used to fielding urgent requests when wildfire smoke blanketed cities. But these weren’t the usual calls.
For one thing, it wasn’t even fire season.
Winter was supposed to be the quiet period when wildfires die down and researchers like Spada perform instrument maintenance, write grant proposals and go home for dinner.
Instead, 2025’s so-called offseason ignited January 7, when the Santa Ana winds came howling through Los Angeles, bringing gusts upwards of 100 miles per hour, after more than eight months without meaningful rainfall.
By nightfall, thousands of homes in Los Angeles’ swanky Pacific Palisades neighborhood and the Altadena community north of the city were gone.
The next morning, Spada was fielding call after call at the University of California, Davis, from fellow air researchers at universities across the country who were packing instruments and other gear and heading for Los Angeles, many on their own dime.
They would be studying urban fires—not normal wildfires or even urban-wildland interface fires—but urban fires in which most of the fuel was manmade: lawn chemicals, asbestos insulation, lead paint, lithium batteries. Very toxic stuff, in other words.
They asked Spada which instruments to bring, what measurements to take, where to set up downwind and when he would be there. The calls quickly morphed into a WhatsApp group that’s still going strong, as results continue to roll in sporadically all these months later.
Spada, a trim, energetic man with a close-trimmed beard and reddish hair, is a project scientist at UC Davis’ Air Quality Research Center. He is one of only a handful of scientists in the world proficient at using a nuclear method for detecting toxic substances in air particles to understand their impact on human health and the environment.
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