(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer 1] On this edition of "Bay Area Bountiful".

- With the catastrophic wildfire season that we experienced last year, clean and healthy air is something that we appreciate much more.

- It's a common concern in the neighborhood that there is a high level of pollution.

(airplane engine roaring) - Brightline is trying to keep everybody breathing.

- We must do all we can to ensure that our farm and agricultural workers are not risking their health and their wellbeing every single time they go into the fields.

- [Announcer 1] It's all coming up next on "Bay Area Bountiful".

- [Narrator] "Bay Area Bountiful" is about agriculture.

It's about feeding us.

It's about land and water.

It's about the health of our planet.

It's about stories that matter.

(bright upbeat music) "Bay Area bountiful"... Cultivate.

Celebrate.

Connect.

- [Announcer 2] "Bay Area Bountiful" is made possible in part by Rocky, the free range chicken and Rosie, the original organic chicken.

The Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, Made Local Magazine and Sonoma County Go Local.

And through the generous support of Sonoma Water.

(mellow upbeat music) - [Narrator] As the sun rises on many mornings around the Bay Area, we can expect beautiful California weather, unlimited visibility and clear blue skies.

But lately, our days have been more and more hazy.

What's going on with the air we're breathing?

The people keeping track are the same who ask us to spare the air, our local Air Quality Management District.

- There's a total of about 35 local air districts in California.

And so the Bay Area Air Quality Management District is one, established in 1955 and regulates stationary sources around the nine counties around the Bay Area.

And that does include any source that doesn't move.

So that's basically oil refineries, auto body shops, diesel generators, things of that sort.

- [Narrator] Standards for mobile sources of emissions, cars and trucks, are set by the state because they're driving all around it.

CARB, the California Air Resources Board also oversees all other air districts, including, the Northern Sonoma County Air Pollution Control District, which has been a separate agency since 1971.

- We work very closely with our state agency and of course the Federal Agency, EPA region nine.

- [Narrator] The US Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, sets national standards and oversees state efforts.

- When the air district was established air quality wasn't great.

There wasn't a lot of thought into protecting public health as it relates to air quality.

- [Narrator] As recently as the 1970s, extremely smoggy days were commonplace in the Bay Area.

Frequently, the haze was so bad it obscured the view of neighboring hills or even the other side of town.

After early research began to define the problems, air districts were formed to create rules and regulate the offenders.

- The air district is in charge of creating a very healthy and clean environment for Bay Area residents.

That includes rule development efforts that we use to keep the air clean.

We've also been at the forefront of smog checks and other rules that the air district has passed.

Most recently, there is a rule 1118, which limits the amount of particulate an oil refinery is allowed to produce.

- [Narrator] Overall, air quality improvement has been a stunning success.

Until very recently, the hazy skies of the mid 1970s seem to be a thing of the past and a key step in achieving this has been extensive air quality monitoring.

- We have a network of about 35 air monitors located around the Bay Area around refineries, also around small airports.

You would never know that some of our monitors are located just in your community.

We stream those live data and the ambient air monitors also go into a forecasting.

- When we go to create a forecast for the air quality, we're looking at the current concentrations in our network.

We're also looking at a forecast weather patterns on how they're expected to evolve.

The reason that we have our air quality forecast broken up into the five different zones, is because of the expected changes in microclimates across the Bay Area.

- [Narrator] The geography and location of the Bay Area lends to a combination of factors that result in microclimates.

- The Bay Area is definitely unique in that it has more microclimates than say somewhere like Oklahoma.

You've got the combination of the cold Pacific Ocean to our West and then the hills surrounding the Bay, which actually act to keep the air, kind of funnels it in different directions.

As you go down to the South Bay, then you also still have some of the onshore flow and inland higher temperatures, but maybe not as high as say the East Bay.

And the winter time, when we have strong temperature inversions across the inland valleys, that acts to actually trap pollutants near the surface.

In the end, that's why we have the five different zones.

When we call it spare the air, we're calling it for the entire district because the air does mix and move around.

So AQI stands for Air Quality Index.

The AQI scale is broken down into six different categories.

It ranges from green, which is considered good to purple, which is very unhealthy and maroon, which is hazardous.

- Spare The Air was established in 1991, providing public education on the importance of keeping the air clean, doing your part to spare the air.

The Bay Area air district works with our local media partners to help message the importance of our Spare The Air campaign.

Having those single occupancy vehicle trips on Bay Area roadways creates unhealthy air quality for us all.

The Spare The Air program is really working with the public to better identify different ways to commute to and from work.

Last year, we had a record 52 consecutive Spare The Air alerts because of all the wildfires.

Wildfires are something that are part of our new normal.

- [Narrator] Wildfire smoke falls into one of two categories of air pollution.

- Ozone and particulate matter are two different pollutants.

Ozone is formed from automobile exhaust reacting with sunlight.

Particulate matter comes out of diesel trucks, it comes out of fireplaces and of course comes out of wildfires in massive quantities.

- [Narrator] Whether from wildfire smoke or other polluting sources, an increase of airborne particulates has drawn attention to the plight of vulnerable communities, both in and out of cities, who have little alternative to breathing bad air.

- Over the next couple of years, the Bay Area Air District will be working collaboratively with local environmental justice communities, nonprofits, and local agencies, looking to spend more resources and identify air monitoring and air mitigation projects.

(mellow music) - There are air quality sensors already existing in the city.

Bay Area Air Quality Management District has a reference air quality station placed in Potrero Hill, but there's only one for the entire city in county of San Francisco.

We really wanna make sure when there are wildfires happening and when people are very worried about air quality having negative impacts, that air quality data is available to all households who want it.

Brightline Defense is an environmental justice nonprofit.

We do a mix of youth leadership, job training and promoting renewable energy.

We also do air quality monitoring.

Individuals can acquire their own air quality sensor for 200, $300.

One needs the disposable income to even buy an air quality sensor in the first place.

And $200 already is out of reach for most low-income residents.

Our intent is to provide real time air quality data to residents that may not be able to afford their own air quality sensor, especially when wildfires are hitting San Francisco, as a result concerning everybody.

We've been focused on traffic congestion and trying to site the sensors appropriately to make sure that they are tracking changes.

The pandemic led to a decrease in traffic momentarily.

But now that traffic is surging again, it would be good to be able to track the effects of that.

(bright upbeat music) The construction of these devices is fairly sturdy.

There is a solar panel on top.

There is an antenna on the side.

It can upload data directly through its own cell network.

The idea is just to be able to leave these devices alone by themselves and have them continuously track air quality data.

(bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] Air quality data tracked by the sensors is then available online for free to anyone who needs it.

Brightlines new network now provides coverage of lower income neighborhoods that were previously unmonitored, shaded in green.

(bright upbeat music) And to make sure lower income city dwellers are not left out, a partnership between the central city SRO collaborative, San Francisco's Community Youth Center and Brightline works together to reach diverse neighborhoods with air quality information.

- This is our air filtration workshop.

These devices are not to be kept on all the time in your room but they're... - Every SRO has a tenant organizer.

We do Brightline and Brightline has meetings with us.

I love being a part of the Brightline family.

- Poor air pollution in the city.

Besides the wildfires, there's a lot of traffic, a lot of buses, a lot of diesel fired power plants and such, and it could be a factor in your long-term health and people need to be aware of it.

- So we've created an open data map available for anybody to see.

We've also been putting it on posters as well, and having our community organizing force, go flyer the neighborhood, essentially.

- When the posters and we put them in stores, we put them in buildings, we put them in restaurants and the community was really open to that.

I always have fun when I talk to people anyway.

(chuckles) - And we've done also a lot of work translating our air quality issues into Spanish, Cantonese as well.

The ability to understand how to reach communities has been an important point of cultural translation for our environmental issues.

- The people around us, our own neighbors, knowing that it brings up more understanding of what... We need to do to better our air quality.

- "Introduction to Air Quality" is a booklet we just did on air quality science and it was originally designed by Stanford University students, particulate matter, the science behind it, and what air quality monitoring actually does.

(mellow music) - We've worked with Brightline Defense and looking at how air pollution disproportionately impacts certain areas of San Francisco.

Our research involves looking at the impact of air pollution and wildfires on health, especially immune health.

Our lab is a immunology lab, we study blood.

Specifically, we're really interested in T cells, which are associated with fighting infection.

Typically, what we do for our studies is we go out and we collect blood, or we have someone else collect it and it's shipped overnight.

And then we analyze the blood even at a single cell level to determine how the environmental exposures impact the different components of your immune system.

What we've learned from our research and what we know from other research is without a doubt, exposure to air pollution will decrease your quality and quantity of life.

Simply from exposure to PM 2.5 or particulate matter that's 2.5 microns and smaller.

- [Narrator] The gray human hair is at least 50 microns wide, and a particle of dust is 10 microns wide.

Smoke particles are even smaller.

- When we talk about wildfire smoke, about 80% of the wildfire smoke is particulate matter that's 2.5 microns and smaller.

The reason it's so important is that it's small enough to when you inhale it, it go all the way down to the base of your lungs and cross over into your bloodstream and cause problems.

The bigger particles like PM 10, they will go down part way down your respiratory tract.

They can cause problems, but not nearly the amount of the smaller particles.

The source of the pollution does matter.

When the PM 2.5 is being produced from wildfire smoke, it's 10 times more toxic than PM 2.5 that's generated, for example, from traffic or industry.

The wildfire smoke is unpredictable.

Smoke can travel thousands of miles, which makes us all at risk.

As smoke ages, it actually becomes more toxic.

Maybe there's less in the atmosphere when you're breathing it farther away, but what you're breathing could be more toxic and more research has to be done.

And that's just one reason it makes wildfire important to try to control and mitigate for our health.

Just recently in the past few weeks, a new study came out showing that there's an association between COVID rates and COVID deaths and wildfire exposure.

And what they found is that there's an increase in rates in death somewhere between eight and 11% based on the increase in air pollution.

And this has a lot of implications, not only for people who have had COVID, but for people who are trying to keep their immune system optimal and not get COVID.

(upbeat music) Someone being more susceptible to COVID when they're exposed to the wildfire, completely makes sense based on our research and others, because we know that the smoke impairs your immune system.

If you're not able to come in out of the smoke and have a clean airspace, you can be susceptible to being exposed to the smoke.

Air pollution in general has an environmental justice component, some people call it environmental racism, in that the people who produce the least amount of pollution are actually exposed to the most.

So, there's a lot of work to be done regarding the social injustice associated with air pollution and wildfire smoke.

(birds chirping) - [Narrator] Some of the most vulnerable to wildfire smoke are those whose livelihoods depend on working outdoors, like farm and agricultural workers.

- You can feel it in your throat like there's something in your throat and it's harder to breathe.

You feel different in your whole body.

- [Narrator] This is the reality for Sonoma county vineyard workers, like Anabel Garcia.

In a region increasingly affected by wildfires, Garcia often works long days, even when the air reaches unhealthy and hazardous levels.

- [Anabel] Most of us bring our own bandanas or masks.

They tell us there's smoke but you need to get the grapes.

- [Narrator] Late summer is grape harvest season, an extremely important time for the North Bay wine industry.

Now, because of climate change, harvest coincides with fire season, placing farm workers on the front lines.

- If it's time to pick, it's time to pick.

There are no days off because it's important for the owner that they have to have the grapes in the winery.

- Workers have told us about how at the end of working for many days in a row, they can find their saliva is actually black and that they spit and there is that dirtiness that is inside their bodies.

- [Narrator] Max Bell Alper is with North Bay Jobs With Justice, an organization that led an effort earlier this year to form a Farmworker Safety Coalition in Sonoma county.

- We started to receive a lot of concerns about agricultural workers, vineyard workers, farm workers, going into fire evacuation zones.

Oftentimes in terms of the question of health and safety, they felt really alone and that nobody knew what was happening.

- [Narrator] The Farmworkers Safety Coalition collaborated with workers like Anabel Garcia to draft a list of safety priorities to send to wine industry stakeholders, which includes hazard pay for working in dangerous conditions.

- We need changes.

Just because we are undocumented doesn't mean we don't have a right to health and respect.

- [Narrator] Farm workers are protected by California labor laws, but some feel those protections don't go far enough and are difficult to enforce.

- There's a lot of challenges here.

Companies are supposed to provide masks after we're at over 151 on the AQI, but there's a few issues here.

One, is that we've heard of companies who don't provide those masks.

Two, over a hundred means that it's unhealthy for sensitive groups.

And if you look at the category of sensitive groups, the reality is that farm workers fit into multiple of these sensitive groups and that's people with limited access to healthcare, and it means low wage workers.

And so the reality is that even though the law is that you're supposed to provide masks after 151, even at a hundred, farm workers are already being impacted.

- [Narrator] State lawmakers are working to strengthen those existing protections.

State assembly member, Robert Rivas, recently introduced the Farmworker Wildfire Smoke Protection Act.

- And this bill, Assembly Bill 73, it seeks to build on Cal/OSHA's standard for protecting farm and agricultural workers from wildfire smoke.

It proposes to make available a state stockpile of N95 masks to farm and agricultural workers when there is a wildfire outbreak and subsequently unhealthy air conditions.

You know, air quality has worsened year after year, and we've all seen the social media images of the farm workers, laboring in the fields amid these terrible hazardous air quality conditions.

And so certainly we've got to do something about it.

We must do all we can to ensure that our farm and agricultural workers are not risking their health and their wellbeing every single time they go into the fields to harvest and produce the food we all eat.

- Yes, people need masks.

There's no doubt about that, but the problems are so much deeper.

And if any of us thinks that providing enough masks is gonna resolve this issue, we're not really dealing with the level of crisis.

- [Narrator] Assembly Bill 73, which also includes an educational component and resources to help enforce labor laws was unanimously approved by the state legislature in September.

The bill will now be sent to governor Newsom's desk to be signed into law.

(mellow music) (car engine roaring) - I mean, this is a billion dollar industry in Sonoma county and if we value the wine, we should value the people who do the work to produce this wine.

- The workers are what makes the wine possible.

We're all essential workers.

(bright upbeat music) (airplane engine roaring) (bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] In the South Bay, yet another community has been consistently exposed to bad air quality.

On the Eastern side of the city of San Jose, Reid-Hillview Airport was opened in the late 1930s.

In the decades since, Silicon Valley neighborhoods have completely surrounded the one isolated airfield.

(mellow music) - Reid-Hillview Airport is nearby.

It's very common that airplanes will fly overhead early in the morning, late at night and sporadically and often.

- So we are in the buffer zone of the Reid-Hillview Airport.

The park starts just feet away from where the runway ends.

- [Narrator] Within just a few blocks of the county owned airport, there are schools, libraries, and many places children gather.

- There's been a longstanding effort to really shut down the airport for a variety of reasons.

One, air pollution (airplane engine roaring) and there is a high level of noise pollution.

(airplane engine roaring) - [Narrator] And controversial for years has been the airport sale of leaded aircraft fuel.

- Leaded fuel was outlawed in cars and commercial jets in the eighties, early nineties, but these small airplanes continue to use leaded fuel and it's allowed per FAA rules.

We've known for years that this lead is toxic.

We started going door to door, but we never had concrete evidence until this recent publication of the lead study.

- [Narrator] As landlords, Santa Clara county supervisors commissioned a research study into the possible health effects of residents breathing air contaminated by leaded fuel exhaust.

- Lead is showing up in some of the blood samples that were taken from East San Jose youth.

- [Narrator] Right under the flight path, Grail Family Services provides daycare and essential assistance to families with young children.

(speaking foreign language) - If we have lead in the air and there's pollution, that's impacting our children, our families, and that is not acceptable.

- What I have heard from the majority of the parents is that they are quite worried.

Right now the parents are angry, because we want this to end now.

- It really came down to the lead study for me.

This issue is one of environmental racism.

We know that historically East San Jose is a predominantly working class immigrant community.

What possible benefit of keeping the airport open would justify the amount of exposure that generations of families have had.

- [Narrator] While the Federal Aviation Administration has final say, - [Woman] (indistinct) - [Narrator] The county supervisors have taken - [Woman] Keep the (indistinct) in charge.

- [Narrator] An important step - [Woman] Yes.

- [Narrator] Towards resolving the issue.

- They made a historic unanimous decision, five to zero, - Yes.

- In support of early airport closure.

Santa Clara county has now petitioned the FAA for early closure and we're waiting to see what happens with that.

(bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] In the meantime, the board will end the sale of leaded fuel at Reid-Hillview, a step in the right direction.

- I mean, children are the future of our society.

So we should all invest in making sure that they're safe and they live in a healthy environment.

- For a better future for our children, as they say: YES WE CAN!

(indistinct chattering) - I've lived in the Bay Area my entire life, and I don't think I've ever seen the skies turn that bright orange and dark over the course of the entire day.

- And the more you can do going online, educating yourself, being prepared to not have to breathe that smoke if it should occur, the better off you'll be, whether or not you have preexisting conditions.

- I believe that local community members can make a difference at the grassroots level because in fact, we're the only thing that it has ever made a difference.

(bright upbeat music)