Wildfires have been raging across Los Angeles County since Tuesday morning, but only in the past 24 hours or so has the city’s air quality begun to suffer.
That’s because of the classic path of the Santa Ana winds, Alistair Hayden, a public health professor at Cornell who studies how wildfire smoke affects human health, told me. “Yesterday, it looked like the plumes [from the Palisades fire] were all blowing out to sea, which I think makes sense with the Santa Ana wind patterns blowing to the southwest,” Hayden said.
But with the Eaton fire now raging near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles, the air quality across large swaths of the city is deteriorating, Hayden said. That’s because the winds are now carrying a smoke plume as they travel down to the coast. And the situation is still changing rapidly…