Resources for learning about effects of exposure to wildland fire smoke

Bill Gabbert
March 24, 2019

wildland fire smoke exposure — Cover of USFS publication.

Last week the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network conducted a live webinar titled, “Smoke Exposure Health Effects and Mitigations for Wildland Fire Personnel: Current Research and Recommendations.” The one-hour presentation was very informative and heavily emphasized how smoke from burning vegetation can be hazardous to your health, especially for firefighters. Below is the recorded version, and following that is a list of resources identified in the webinar that provide more information about the effects of wildland fire smoke. I suggest that firefighters make the video a part of their annual refresher training.

We have written dozens of times about smoke and the research efforts directed toward evaluating the effects on humans. Articles that describe the effects are all tagged “smoke & health” on Wildfire Today. At this writing there are 17 of them. This article is the 18th.

In addition to those resources, here are others that were listed in last week’s webinar. Where possible, we downloaded them to the Wildfire Today web site in order to preserve the documents.