Volckens shipped 10 air pollution detectors to Los Angeles to measure the amounts of released by the flames, which burned more than , making it one of the country’s costliest natural disasters.

“These disaster events keep happening. They release pollution into the environment and to the surrounding community,” said Volckens, who shared his results with local air regulators. “We have this kind of traumatic experience, and then we’re left with: Well, what did we just breathe in?”

Scientists and public health officials have long tracked the pollutants that cause smog, acid rain, and other environmental health hazards and shared them with the public through the local Air Quality Index. But the monitoring system misses hundreds of harmful chemicals released in urban fires, and the Los Angeles fires have led to a renewed push for state and federal regulators to do more as climate change drives up the frequency of these natural disasters.

It’s questionable whether the Trump administration will act, however. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what he described as the , which critics warn will lead to a .

While Air Quality Index values are a good starting place for knowing what’s in the air, they don’t provide a full picture of pollutants, especially during disasters, said , a professor of environmental health sciences at UCLA. In fact, the AQI could be in a healthy range, “but you could still be exposed to higher air toxins from the fires,” she added.

In February, nearly a dozen lawmakers from California called on the EPA to create a task force of local and federal authorities to better monitor what’s in the air and inform the public. Locals are “unsure of the actual risks they face and confused by conflicting reports about how safe it is to breathe the air outside, which may lead to families not taking adequate protective measures,” the lawmakers wrote in to James Payne, who was then the acting EPA administrator. The EPA press office declined to comment in an e-mail to Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News.

Lawmakers have also introduced bills in Congress and in the California legislature to address the gap. A measure by U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) would direct the EPA to allocate grant money to local air pollution agencies to communicate the risks of wildfire smoke, including deploying air monitors. Meanwhile, a bill by Democratic state Assembly member Lisa Calderon would create a “” to study the health impacts of wildfire smoke, especially on firefighters and residents affected by fires.

The , a regional air pollution control agency, operates about 35 air monitoring stations across nearly 11,000 square miles of the Los Angeles region to measure pollutants like ozone and carbon monoxide.

During the fires, the agency, which is responsible for the air quality of 16.8 million residents, relied on its network of stations to monitor five common pollutants, including PM2.5, the fine particles that make up smoke and can travel deep inside the body. After the fires, the South Coast AQMD deployed two mobile monitoring vans to assess air quality in cleanup areas and expanded neighborhood-level monitoring during debris removal, said Jason Low, head of the agency’s monitoring and analysis division.

Local officials also received the data collected by Volcken’s devices, which arrived on-site four days after the fires broke out. The monitors — about the size of a television remote control and housed in a plastic cover the size of a bread loaf — were placed at air monitoring stations around the fires’ perimeters, as well as at other sites, including in West Los Angeles and Santa Clarita. The devices, called AirPens, monitored dozens of air contaminants in real time and collected precise chemical measurements of smoke composition.

Researchers replaced the sensors every week, sending the filters to a lab that analyzed them for measurements of volatile organic compounds like benzene, lead, and black carbon, along with other carcinogens. Volcken’s devices provided public health officials with data for a month as cleanup started. The hope is that the information provided can help guide future health policies in fire-prone areas.

“There’s not one device that can measure everything in real time,” Low said. “So, we have to rely on different tools for each different type of purpose of monitoring.”

ASCENT, funded by the National Science Foundation, registered big changes after the fires. One monitor, about 11 miles south of the Eaton fire in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, detected 40 times the normal amount of chlorine in the air and 110 times the typical amount of lead in the days following the fires. It was clear the chemical spikes came from urban wildfire smoke, which is more dangerous than what would be emitted when trees and bushes burn in rural areas, said Richard Flagan, the co-principal investigator at the network’s site in Los Angeles.

“Ultimately, the purpose is to get the data out there in real time, both for the public to see but also for people who are doing other aspects of research,” said Flagan, adding that chemical measurements are critical for epidemiologists who are developing health statistics or doing long-term studies of the impact of air pollution on peoples’ health.

Small, low-cost sensors could fill in gaps as government networks age or fail to adequately capture the full picture of what’s in the air. Such sensors can identify pollution hot spots and improve wildfire smoke warnings, according to a March 2024 .

Although the devices have become smaller and more accurate in the past decade, some pollutants require analysis with X-ray scans and other costly high-level equipment, said J. Alfredo Gómez, director of the Natural Resources and Environment team at the GAO. And Gómez cautioned that the quality of the data can vary depending on what the devices monitor.

“Low-cost sensors do a good job of measuring PM2.5 but not such a good job for some of these other air toxins, where they still need to do more work,” Gómez said.

UCLA’s Zhu said the emerging technology of portable pollution monitors means residents — not just government and scientists — might be able to install equipment in their backyards and broaden the picture of what’s happening in the air at the most local level.

“If the fires are predicted to be worse in the future, it might be a worthwhile investment to have some ability to capture specific types of pollutants that are not routinely measured by government stations,” Zhu said.

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Jesse asked for his cloth mask, and I explained again that if he wore that one he’d need to have on a surgical mask, too, which could make it hard to run around at recess. So I did my best to twist the elastic ear loops on the KN95 into a size that would fit his cherubic face, and we headed out the door.

When we got to Will Rogers Learning Community, our school in Santa Monica, California, the entry path was split into two lines by a velvet rope. Kids and parents clustered at the rope entrance examining a paper with large print poised on a music stand. It listed the classes with covid cases, whose kids had to be tested to enter school. Those kids were shunted to the right, into the cafeteria where staff members were helping them stick swabs up their tiny noses. The rest of the kids headed into the building.

This is parenting in Southern California in the days of omicron, swimming in an ocean of angst, with currents constantly shifting direction, an awkward soup of fear, determination and gratitude for those doing the hard work of keeping schools working.

The messiness is evident in the nation’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, where roughly started pouring back into schools Jan. 11 for the first time in three weeks.

“There is a lot of urgency in keeping schools open,” says Manuel Pastor, a sociologist who directs University of Southern California’s Equity Research Institute. Indeed, under that took effect in July, Los Angeles can’t switch to distance learning unless there is a severe staffing shortage. Yet at the same time, the schools have strengthened safety measures that were already among the strictest in the country, upgrading masking and testing requirements.

The push-pull is essential because physical attendance is vitally important to the kids already disadvantaged because they speak other languages at home, or have parents who can’t or don’t help with their lessons, Pastor said. Yet these same kids are more likely to create risks if they bring the virus home, because their families are more likely to live in crowded homes, their parents are more likely to be essential workers, and they are more likely to have unvaccinated siblings or relatives.

“It’s kind of the worst of both possible worlds in terms of challenges in remote learning and the challenges with going back to school,” he said.

Before students could return on Jan. 11, they had to participate in baseline testing, either through a home rapid test a few days before school started — which can sometimes give false-negative results — or a PCR test at a stationary site. Some 65,000 kids tested positive before school reopened; another 85,000 or so were also absent the first day, partly, perhaps, because of parental fear of the virus.

Testing was the easiest part about getting back into school, according to many families. There were 60 locations for students to pick up free tests. The district already had in the nation, testing every staff member and student every week.

Children in quarantine won’t have the option to Zoom into their classrooms, however. Schools have not trained their teachers to simultaneously teach to in-room and online students. Officials say that with the district’s modified quarantine rules — which call for only students who test positive or have active symptoms of illness to stay home — those who are quarantined should be recovering, anyway, and are likely to return in a few days.

Even for those who got into school, the transition was not always smooth. On the morning schools reopened their doors, Daily Pass, the app where students upload their test results, crashed.

So instead of flashing their phones at the schoolhouse door, kids formed lines and underwent a highly unscientific process to vet their state of infectiousness. Some schools went back to asking screening questions to students and parents.

Interim Superintendent Megan Reilly apologized for the Daily Pass glitches. “I knew that today was not going to be a day that we didn’t have some bumps along the road,” she said at a news conference.

Meanwhile, administrative staff members were brought in to substitute for 2,000 or so teachers (out of 25,000) who were out with covid or caring for someone infected with the virus. On Jan. 12, a school board member substituted in a classroom, and another classroom had an LAUSD architect helping out. Jenna Schwartz, an LAUSD parent who co-founded the group , said the district is bringing in thousands of staffers to help out. That isn’t as bad as it sounds, she said.

“The narrative is that bus drivers will be teaching algebra, but the truth is, there are a huge amount of credentialed teachers that work in admin now,” she said. “One of the perks of having bureaucracy is that there are a huge amount of people who can fill in.”

The district’s policy says that if there is an exposure in a classroom, students can remain in school while asymptomatic, testing on the fifth day after a suspected exposure.

But not every school is implementing that policy, and some schools, like public charters, have leeway to make their own decisions. Paulina Jones’ 6-year-old daughter, a kindergartner at Citizens of the World Hollywood charter school, was sent home with the rest of her class for 10 days due to an exposure the first week back in school.

That’s why Jones was driving to work on Jan. 11, to a construction site where she is a manager, with her daughter in the back seat. Jones fears it’s a scenario that will keep happening, over and over. “Half the school is under quarantine right now,” she said.

Between the long winter break and this quarantine, her daughter has had only one in-person instructional day in a month. And the Zoom instruction just doesn’t work for this age group, Jones said.

“It’s extremely stressful for me to have her at work with me, but it’s more beneficial than taking 10 days off of work,” she said. “We all have to make hard decisions right now, and I have to support my family.”

There’s a weariness to the waves of illness, Jones said. “If there was an end in sight, I would take time off of work, but there’s no end in sight.”

Pastor said the situation echoes the early days of 2020, but with a noticeable difference: “There’s no talk of a shutdown. There’s just talk about managing the illness so we don’t overwhelm hospitals and health care,” he said. “There are going to be a lot of scary moments for parents.”

The words echoed in my head as I watched Jesse, fitted with his new KN95, teeter as he settled his backpack onto his small frame, then gallop off toward the right lane to enter school. As he disappeared into the school gates, I could hear him chattering to another kid: “I’m ready.”

This story was produced by , which publishes , an editorially independent service of the .

Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at Â鶹ŮÓÅ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

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This story can be republished for free (details).