Sonoma County residents enduring perhaps most polluted air ever here

Air quality levels will not start to sharply improve until late Tuesday, when a Pacific front moves into the area bringing winds and much-needed rain.|

North Bay residents will face another weekend of some of the worst air quality ever reported in the region with local public health officials and medical professionals drawing comparisons to pollution-plagued cities such as New Delhi and Beijing.

A public health official in the Bay Area for 40 years, Dr. Robert Benjamin, Sonoma County’s acting health officer, said he has visited those two cities in the winter when air pollution is at its peak. The past week in the Bay Area has been worse than those experiences abroad, he said.

“This feels quite a bit worse than what I have seen there,” Benjamin said.

Much of the Bay Area, along with Butte County, where the Camp fire has burned since Nov. 8, registered among the worst air quality in the world late this week, a regional air quality official confirmed Friday.

Sonoma County was blanketed Friday by smoke-choked air with a rating of “unhealthy.”

In the southern part of the county, along the San Pablo Bay, it was worse, with air registered as “very unhealthy,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index. That means all residents were exposed to potentially serious health effects from breathing air sullied by the Camp fire, the most destructive and deadly wildfire in California history.

The persistent smoke has significantly upended daily life in the region for more than a week.

Schools have closed. Most outdoor events, from high school sports to the local arts, have been canceled or postponed. Outdoor wine tastings have been scuttled. Local parks have been deserted. Hardware stores have reported major runs on the N95 masks for people to wear to filter the smoky air. And notably the Big Game, the annual college football showdown between Cal and Stanford, was postponed for the first time in 55 years. It will now be played Dec. 1.

The prediction for the weekend is more of the same as health officials urged area residents to stay indoors. If people do venture outside, they should limit their time as much as possible and wear a properly secured N95 mask. Air quality levels will not start to significantly improve until late Tuesday, when a Pacific front moves into the area, bringing winds and much-needed rain to the parched region.

“If you can, stay indoors,” Benjamin said. “It’s a matter of common sense.”

Smoke from the Camp fire has led to the greatest levels of unhealthy air ever recorded in the Bay Area, said Kristine Roselius, a spokeswoman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

“We’re seeing the highest hourly (air quality index) readings in San Francisco since we started measuring more than ?20 years ago,” she said. The air here and to the north in Butte County was among the most polluted in the world, she said.

The air quality is expected to improve only slightly today, she said, but a winter Spare the Air alert banning wood burning will remain in effect through Tuesday.

Smoke from the 2017 wildfires resulted in worse hourly air quality index readings in Napa and Santa Rosa, with better readings in the rest of the Bay Area. This year, however, the entire Bay Area is being hit by unhealthy and very unhealthy levels as a result of stagnant air, she said. The Bay Area district covers a large region from Windsor to the north, south to Gilroy and east to Vacaville and Brentwood.

“The thing that’s so unusual is that smoke from the Camp fire is so widespread,” Roselius said.

The most immediate concern is over the health effects, especially for at-risk populations such as those with respiratory problems.

Dr. Lisa Ward, chief medical officer for Santa Rosa Community Health, said her medical providers are starting to see an increase in the number of patients affected by the poor air quality.

They have been reaching out to 1,200? patients with emphysema and moderate-to-severe asthma, those considered at high-risk when air quality plummets to its current levels, Ward said. They are telling those patients to heed health warnings and that even if the smoke clears temporarily over the weekend, they may continue to get symptoms over the next few weeks.

“The irritation of the smoke and particulate matter and solvents that have burned and are now floating in the air, they can set off cascades of immune reactions that may crop up later on,” Ward said.

Symptoms include wheezing, shortness of breath and coughing for those with respiratory illness. Even healthy people might feel a sore throat and irritated eyes and nose. She said some may have difficulty breathing, as well as show symptoms that resemble allergies or a cold without the fever or muscle aches that come with an infection.

In some cases, Ward said people may be “triggered by the fire and get the flu,” resulting in a double blow to the immune system and elevating the risk of contracting a bad respiratory illness.

For example, Ward said she saw a patient on Friday morning who had been coughing for five days. The patient, she said, reported feeling much better after receiving respiratory treatment in the clinic.

Officials at two of the North Bay’s largest medical campuses - Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital and Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital - reported no significant increase in emergency department visits this week because of the contaminated air.

Vanessa DeGier, a Memorial Hospital spokeswoman, said medical staff reviewed patient data from Nov. 8 to Nov. 15 and compared it to the same week last year. During that period in 2017, 83 people complained of respiratory issues when they entered the emergency department. This week, the number had only increased slightly to 89, DeGier said.

Patients with asthma and allergies or related pulmonary issues should use air purifiers and inhalers until the smoky air clears, DeGier said.

Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, who has two daughters and is expecting her third child in January, said she is heeding such advice and so has three air purifiers running in her home. She also donated an air purifier to her one daughter’s kindergarten class at Sebastopol Charter School. Both of her daughters wear children’s N95 masks, one emblazoned with stars and the other a zebra pattern.

“I’m wearing a mask everywhere I go,” she said. “Whenever I’m walking somewhere or if I’m in the car, I’m wearing a mask, and so are my kids.”

Her daughters returned to school Friday after a week removed from their classrooms, she said. They’ve been staying indoors, a challenging task that prompted a “3-year-old meltdown” over dashed hopes of going outside to feed the dogs, Hopkins said.

“Yesterday (Thursday) it was better, so you get hopeful it’s clearing up and today (Friday) it was worse again,” she said. “It’s an emotional roller coaster. I think every single parent in Sonoma County has done every single board game and every single art project at least 10 times over the past week.”

Hannah Beausang contributed to this report.

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