I covered the L.A. fires in the Palisades. So I had my blood tested for lead

I watched my blood snake through the tube stuck into my arm as I sat under a canopy erected by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health at an Altadena church.

Four months prior — almost to the hour — I stepped out of my car in Pacific Palisades to wailing sirens, raining ash and fleeing people.

Now, like hundreds of others, I desperately wanted to know: Had lead once locked away in the homes of the Palisades and Altadena seeped into my bloodstream? And, if so, how much now sat in the vial in the hands of Jessica Segura, a nurse with the Department of Public Health?

Tania Rysinski took my chair after me. She had evacuated from Pasadena and, after a trying remediation process, had moved back home with her husband and 3-year-old daughter. I asked what brought her to the Eaton fire resource fair.

“I also worry,” she told me. “My daughter is the one that we worry about the most.”

Despite hours of reading about and discussing remediation and health hazards with friends and family, Rysinski found little certainty that her family was safe. I shared her apprehension.

Alongside other health and environment reporters at The Times, I’ve read thick scientific studies, reviewed reams of data and interviewed dozens of experts to understand what dangerous compounds, transported by wind and smoke, had laced our water systems, settled into homes and embedded themselves in the soil and our bodies.

Even so, our reporting left me feeling mostly frustrated with my brain. Several times, after I interviewed residents in the burn areas, they would say: You’ve covered this in detail. Would you feel comfortable moving back here with kids?

I didn’t know.

A 20-foot-tall flame staring at you through the windshield is a very tangible risk. The lead lurking in the air and soil is a different story. It is invisible and damages our bodies in complex ways. And that damage happens quietly.

Segura, the nurse, removed the tube from my arm and pressed a cotton ball to the needle prick. The results would not be a simple positive or negative, she explained. Instead, it would list the concentration in micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. Anything over 3.5 mcg/dL requires follow-up care, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I could expect results within two weeks, Segura said. I asked Rysinski what her plan was if her levels were high.

“I have no idea,” she said.

Neither did I.

Survival mode

I, admittedly, took little precaution to protect myself from the wildfire smoke during the three days I spent in Pacific Palisades.

My brain focused on more immediate concerns: dodging downed electrical wires, plotting escape routes, jump=starting folks’ cars and watching in horror as buildings erupted into flames in front of me.

Rysinski had felt the same in Pasadena. “We were all on survival mode,” she said.

After retreating to my car, which reeked of smoke, for a brief break the morning after the fires erupted, I got a message from my editor. Like concerned friends and family who had been messaging me from the East Coast — and strangers who’d seen my reports on Instagram — the editor wanted to know what the smoke might be doing to our lungs. And were people worried?

I threw my body weight against the car door, barely managing to out-muscle the wind, and stumbled through gale-force gusts to talk to folks. At a haphazardly parked SUV, Amber Vanderbilt rolled down the window.

“I know this isn’t on the top of most people’s minds,” I said, “but I’m curious how you or the people you know have been dealing with the air quality. Has that been a concern for you?”

“No,” she said with a chuckle. “I see that it’s on the news too, which is really funny.” In fact, the discourse had frustrated her enough that she recalled yelling at the TV newscast, “No one cares! Show me where the fire perimeter is! Tell me where the wind is going!”

I chuckled with her. I too did not care.

Then, I started looking at the data.

Piles of data

On Jan. 8, an air quality sensor in Chinatown had read fine particulate matter at a concentration over 13 times the federal daily limit — the number that had prompted my team to elicit my interview with Vanderbilt.

Amid the scattered, ad hoc testing efforts that followed, one emerged as a leader: the LA Fire HEALTH Study, or the Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study. Scientists from eight research institutions had banded together with some private funding to, ambitiously, study the health effects of the fires over the course of a decade.

In May, I attended one of their events — supposedly a symposium, definitely a cocktail party and perhaps a fundraiser — at a home in Brentwood.

A Times photographer and I, slightly underdressed, scuttled past the valet and into the backyard. Guests began migrating to the white lawn chairs set up on the tennis court to hear the scientists speak.

The jaunty atmosphere turned tense as Palisadians struggled to make sense of the environmental crisis unfolding in front of them.

“My daughter is a surfer, Pali High student. She’s only 17 years old,” one attendee said when the topic of beaches came up. “Our family is having a really, really hard time telling what the actual truth is.”

Dr. David Eisenman, a UCLA public health professor and an avid surfer, had hit the waves that morning after carefully reviewing the nonprofit Heal the Bay’s latest test results that showed no significant levels of contaminants in the water.

But the attendee pushed back.

“I know a mom who spent $6,000 of her own money to have the beach tested and she found ridiculously high levels of arsenic,” she said. “This is where children are playing. This is insane. So, we don’t know who to trust. We don’t know what to do.”

The researchers sympathized with her frustration.

For almost every combination of contaminant and domain, scientists have rigorously studied the exposure risk and health impact, and, based on that, the federal and state governments have set screening levels: Any more of a particular contaminant requires additional action.

California’s level for lead in residential soil is 80 milligrams per kilogram. That’s the amount that, in the worst case, can raise the blood lead level of a child who routinely plays in the soil by 1 mcg/dL. A blood lead level increase in children of 5 mcg/dL corresponds to a loss of roughly 1 to 3 IQ points.

But the problem quickly gets more complicated than that.

Take the state’s screening level for arsenic, for example, based on a 1-in-a-million chance of developing cancer over a lifetime of exposure. The level is 0.032 milligram per kilogram of soil. But arsenic naturally occurs in soil, typically 2 to 11 milligrams per kilogram.

When I asked the state Department of Toxic Substances Control about this, it had a shockingly morbid answer. Arsenic occurring naturally at potentially cancer-causing levels, it said, is simply “a part of living on Earth.”

It’s not hard to see why talk of contaminants leaves people frustrated and confused. That includes me, whose full-time job is to figure this stuff out.

Yet one report from the LA Fire HEALTH Study struck me as surprisingly lucid. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Dr. Kari Nadeau, a researcher with the study and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been collecting firefighters’ blood for years. After the L.A. County wildfires, she did the same.

The results: The firefighters who battled L.A. County’s urban fires had lead levels in their blood five times of those who had battled forest fires in Yosemite.

Technically, no level of lead in the blood is safe, but we all live with it in our blood. The average American’s blood lead level sits around 0.8 mcg/dL.

Elevated levels in kids — above 3.5 mcg/dL, according to the CDC — can cause significant brain and nerve damage leading to slowed development and behavioral issues. Adults are less sensitive to lead, but under much higher concentrations — beyond 40 mcg/dL — the metal, which the body mistakes for calcium, can damage many organs.

When I read my colleague’s coverage of Nadeau’s findings in March, a thought flickered from the back of my mind: What was in my blood?

In our blood

As I waited for my blood test results via snail mail, I became increasingly interested not only in what the environmental health risks of the fires are, but also how our brains process them.

Spending so much time in the data had changed me. One weekend I sat next to a campfire, and as I admired the dancing flames, I also imagined the benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons the fire was stripping from the wood and whispering into the air for me to inhale. In my head, I recited the federal and state screening levels for airborne chemicals, like a high school student studying for a chemistry exam.

So, I called professor Wändi Bruine de Bruin, director of the Schaeffer Institute’s Behavioral Science and Policy Initiative at USC and an expert on the psychology of risk assessment.

“Any situation with environmental risk can be hard to comprehend … but with the fires, it is much more complex,” she said. Stacking multiple risks with limited information while likely dealing with a lost home and uncertain future — “it’s a lot.”

To escape the helpless quest to find solace and certainty in the numbers, Bruine de Bruin recommended focusing on the most relevant data to you from trusted experts or your own testing, then shifting your focus to simple, accessible actions to limit future exposure.

Dr. Michael Crane, a leading health expert in the response to 9/11 and the following environmental disaster, agreed with Bruine de Bruin.

“It’s funny, if you make a decision about it, you usually get some peace on that point,” Crane said. “I would urge people to manage the controllable risks — the ones that are right there, in their fingers.”

As the initial shock of the terrorist attacks morphed into trauma, the very real long-term cancer risk posed by the smoke and debris began to sink in among New York’s medical community. Crane recalled when an expert from the National Cancer Institute came down to talk with doctors.

“Fantastic young guy, and I mean, we basically surrounded him,” he said.

The doctors unloaded all their burning cancer questions until one finally yelled, “Well, what do you think we should do?”

“Get them to stop smoking,” the expert bluntly replied.

Suffice to say, it did not soothe the doctors’ concerns.

“He was lucky to get out of that room alive at that point,” Crane said.

Yet that one sentence, Crane believes, is a large part of why the cancer rates never reached the sky-high levels many of those doctors feared.

Since we don’t have silver-bullet medical techniques to reverse the effects of exposure to all harmful contaminants, it’s prudent we try to prevent another exposure and lead healthy lives. For doctors, it means staying vigilant: aware of their patients’ risks and ready to act should those risks become a reality.

Crane chuckled as he recalled the seeming absurdity of the expert’s cancer comment; then he turned sincere. “We’re very grateful for that guy,” he said.

The results

Ten days after my blood test, a letter from the Department of Public Health arrived. I quickly opened it.

The lead level in my blood: less than 1 mcg/dL.

Rysinski texted me a few days later to share that her results were the same.

In fact, of the 1,350 individuals concerned about their exposures from the wildfires who had partaken in the county’s lead blood testing program as of May 31, only seven had levels greater than 3.5 mcg/dL. All were adults older than 40; all lead levels were under 10 mcg/dL.

Dr. Nichole Quick, chief medical advisor for the Department of Public Health, wants people to remain cautious about contamination but is pleased by the initial results of the county’s lead testing program.

“The results are reassuring,” Quick told me, looking at numbers from the beginning of May.

Reassuring not that contamination isn’t present — it is — but that many of us are taking the simple, manageable steps to lower our risk.

To face the often scary and seemingly insurmountable challenge of making it through our scarred landscape, we must do the little things. Wash our hands, clean the floors and keep the cigarettes away from our lips.