LOS ANGELES: Massive wildfires burning in the Los Angeles area have filled the air with a thick cloud of smoke and ash, prompting air quality adviseries across a vast stretch of Southern California.
\nThree major fires broke out Tuesday amid dangerously high winds, killing at least five people and destroying more than 1,000 structures. Tens of thousands of people have been told to evacuate, many in harrowing conditions.<\/p>\n
Fires have burned several celebrities\u2019 homes and force stars including Mark Hamill, Mandy Moore and James Woods, to evacuate.<\/p>\n
In Altadena where one of the major fires raged, the smoke was so thick a person used a flashlight to see down the street. A dark cloud hovered over downtown Los Angeles and smoky air and ash drifted well beyond the city to communities to the east and south.
\nWildfire smoke increases tiny particles in the air known as particulate matter that can be harmful to people\u2019s health. Children, the elderly and people with conditions such as heart and lung disease are more sensitive to the effects.
\nDr. Puneet Gupta, the assistant medical director for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said wildfire smoke is known to cause heart attacks and worsen asthma, and that burning homes can also release cyanide and carbon dioxide. He said sickened patients are showing up in emergency rooms when hospitals already are full because of flu season, and some hospitals could also face evacuations due to the fires.
\n\u201cWe have a number of hospitals that are threatened, and if they have to be evacuated, it could become a crisis,\u201d said Gupta, also a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians. \u201cSo that is one of the things that we have to consider.\u201d<\/p>\n
US Health Secretary Xavier Becerra raised concerns Wednesday about the smoke\u2019s impact on people\u2019s health in the aftermath of fires that have charred massive amounts of vegetation and buildings.
\n\u201cThat air that\u2019s being spewed is no longer just the kind of smoke that we used to see from wildfires, where it was natural vegetation that was burning,\u201d said Becerra, a former California Attorney General. \u201cNow you got a whole bunch of toxic materials that are getting burned and put into the air.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LOS ANGELES: Massive wildfires burning in the Los Angeles area have filled the air with a thick cloud of smoke and ash, prompting air quality adviseries across a vast stretch of Southern California. Three major fires broke out Tuesday amid dangerously high winds, killing at least five people and destroying more than 1,000 structures. Tens …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":75388,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75389,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75375\/revisions\/75389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}