Exposure to bushfire smoke during prescribed burns and wildfires: Firefighters’ exposure risks and options

Near-source grid-based measurement of CO and PM2.5 concentration during a full-scale fire experiment in southern European shrubland

“…Other authors (Reinhardt and Ottmar, 2004;De Vos et al, 2009;Reisen et al, 2011) found strong correlations between respirable particles and CO in prescribed fires and wildfires, however, these results are not fully comparable since the size of respirable particles sampled was different.…”

“…The composition of smoke itself depends on several other factors, such as the characteristics of the vegetation consumed, the efficiency of combustion, the fuel moisture content, fire temperature, and the weather conditions (e.g., Crutzen and Andreae, 1990;Levine, 1999;Ottmar et al, 2009). Despite the smoke exposure research studies carried out in the United States of America Ottmar, 2000, 2004), Australia (McMahon and Bush, 1992;Materna et al, 1993;De Vos et al, 2009;Reisen and Brown, 2009;Reisen et al, 2011), Canada (Austin, 2008) and Portugal (Miranda et al, 2005(Miranda et al, , 2010(Miranda et al, , 2012, the current state of knowledge in this field is still limited. The inherent difficulty of monitoring smoke and personal exposure levels during a fire has contributed to this scientific gap.…”

Particle and volatile organic emissions from the combustion of a range of building and furnishing materials using a cone calorimeter

“…During prescribed burning and bushfire operations firefighters are exposed to a range of hazardous pollutants in particular fine particles, carbon monoxide (CO), formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, toluene, xylenes and phenol [18][19][20]. Previous studies have also investigated exposures at structural fires [21][22][23][24], and have found air pollutants of concern to be CO, formaldehyde, acrolein, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulphide, hydrogen fluoride, benzene, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).…”

Local and regional smoke impacts from prescribed fires

“…There have been studies of firefighter exposure at prescribed fires (Miranda et al, 2010;Reisen et al, 2011;Adetona et al, 2013) but the effect of prescribed burning on smoke exposure to the local community has rarely been addressed in research (Reisen and Brown, 2009). To our knowledge there have only been two studies attempting to quantify the spatial distribution of prescribed burn smoke pollution close to the source (Pearce et al, 2012;Meyer et al, 2013), and only one of those was empirical (Pearce et al, 2012).…”