LOS ANGELES (AP) — As wildfires ravaged swaths of Sonoma County wine country in 2020, sending ash through the air and choking the air with smoke, Maria Salinas was busy harvesting grapes.
Her saliva turned black from inhaling the toxins, until one day she had so much trouble breathing that she was rushed to the emergency room. When she felt better, she went straight back to work while the fires raged.
“What compels us to work is necessity,” Salinas said. “We always expose ourselves to danger out of necessity, whether it’s a fire or a disaster, when the weather changes, when it’s hot or cold.”
If climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires around the world, a new study shows that farmworkers are paying a heavy price by being exposed to high levels of air pollution. And in Sonoma County, the focus of the work, researchers found that a program aimed at determining when it was safe to work during wildfires did not adequately protect farmworkers.
They recommended a range of measures to protect worker health, including workplace air quality monitors, stricter requirements for employers, emergency plans and training in multiple languages, post-exposure health checks and a hazardous materials surcharge.
Farmworkers “are experiencing first and hardest what the rest of us are just beginning to understand,” Max Bell Alper, executive director of the North Bay Jobs with Justice labor union, said Wednesday during a webinar devoted to the research, published in July in the journal GeoHealth. “And I think in many ways it’s similar to what’s happening across the country. What we’re experiencing in California is happening everywhere right now.”
Farm workers face immense pressure to work in dangerous conditions. Many are poor and do not get paid unless they work. Others who are in the country illegally are more vulnerable due to limited English language skills, lack of benefits, discrimination and exploitation. These realities make it harder for them to fight for better working conditions and basic rights.
Researchers studied data from the 2020 Glass and LNU Lightning Complex fires in Northern California’s Sonoma County, a region known for its wine. During those fires, many farmworkers continued to work, often in evacuation zones deemed unsafe for the general population. Because smoke and ash can contaminate grapes, growers faced increasing pressure to get workers into the fields.
The researchers looked at air quality data from a single AirNow monitor, which is operated by the Environmental Protection Agency and used to alert the public to unsafe levels, and 359 monitors from PurpleAir, which offers sensors that people can install in their homes or businesses.
From July 31 to November 6, 2020, the AirNow sensor recorded 21 days of air pollution that the EPA considers unhealthy for sensitive groups and 13 days of poor air quality that is unhealthy for everyone. The PurpleAir monitors found 27 days of air that the EPA considers unhealthy for sensitive groups and 16 days of air that is toxic for everyone.
And on several occasions, the smoke was worse at night. That’s an important detail, because some employers asked farmworkers to work at night, in part because of the cooler temperatures and less concentrated smoke, said Michael Méndez, one of the researchers and an assistant professor at the University of California-Irvine.
“Hundreds of farmworkers were exposed to the toxic air quality of wildfire smoke, and that can have a detrimental impact on their health,” he said. “There was no post-exposure monitoring of these farmworkers.”
The researchers also examined the county’s Agricultural Pass program, which allows farmworkers and other agricultural workers to evacuate in areas where they can perform essential activities, such as watering or harvesting crops. They found that the approval process lacked clear standards or established protocols, and that application requirements were poorly enforced. For example, in some cases, applications did not include the number of workers at worksites or detailed locations of worksites.
Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences at the University of California-Davis who was not in the study, said symptoms of wildfire smoke inhalation — eye irritation, coughing, sneezing and difficulty breathing — can occur within minutes of exposure to fine-particle smoke.
Exposure to these tiny particles, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, has been shown to increase the risk of numerous health problems, including heart and lung disease, asthma and low birth weight. The effects are amplified when extreme heat is also present. Another recent study found that breathing in tiny particles from wildfire smoke can increase the risk of dementia.
Anayeli Guzmán, who like Salinas worked in the grape harvest during the Sonoma County fires, remembers feeling tired and her eyes and throat burning from the smoke and ash. But she never went to the doctor for a health checkup after exposure.
“We don’t have that option,” Guzmán, who has no health insurance, said in an interview. “If I went to get checked, I would lose a day of work or have to pay a medical bill.”
Guzman said in the webinar that it is “sad that vineyard owners are only concerned about the grapes” that may be contaminated by smoke, and not about how smoke affects workers.
A 2021 report on farmworker health from the University of California-Merced and the National Agricultural Workers Survey found that fewer than 1 in 5 farmworkers have health insurance through their employer.
According to Hertz-Picciotto, farmworkers are essential workers because the country’s food supply depends on them.
“From a moral point of view and from a health point of view, it is really reprehensible that the situation has deteriorated and that no measures have been taken to protect farm workers. This document should be really important to bring that to light with real recommendations,” she said.
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