Indirect Death Toll From California Wildfires Could Be Thousands

Clouds of smoke hang over Los Angeles earlier this
month from the wildfires in the region. Long term
effects of the wildfire disaster will kill far more
people than the actual fire. 

 At last check the death toll from this month of California wildfires stood at 28. Perhaps a couple dozen other people are missing. 

Hideous as that is, the indirect toll might end up being exponentially larger. 

Millions of people have been breathing toxic smoke and ash. 

Our health care system is in shambles, largely due to corporate greed, so the people who get sick from those toxins might not get the care they need. 

Mostly because the insurance companies will murder these people by denying coverage, deeming them too expensive for their bottom line. 

The fires had to take a terrible toll on mental health, too. Not everyone can recover from having their homes and possessions wiped out in a flash. 

THE SMOKE

As Yale Climate Connections reports, wildfire smoke is remarkably deadly. But it takes its victims quietly, gradually, in places far from the fires themselves

Per YCC:

"In a 2020 policy brief, Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford University wrote: 'Our research suggests that many forepeople likely perish from smoke exposure during large fire events than perish directly in the fire, and many more people are made sick."

Wildfire smoke contains minuscule particles that can enter the lungs and blood stream and harm the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. 

Yale Climate Connections cites several studies. In 2018, the year Paradise, California burned down, wildfire smoke killed as many as 12,000 people according to one of those studies.

Another review said that in the 11 years from 2008 to 2018, wildfire smoke claimed the lives of nearly 5,000 Californians per year. 

Yet another study said between 46,000 and 90,000 people globally die annually from inhaling wildfire smoke and 13 percent of those deaths were attributed to climate change. 

It's probably even worse when a lot of houses and commercial buildings burn down. Think of all the plastics, chemicals, and other toxic chemicals going up in smoke. 

This will especially affect people who have pre-existing health problems. I'm thinking of, for example, news footage I saw of elderly people being evacuated and they're out there in that thick smoke and ash as they struggled to get into vehicles to get away. Or people trying to fight the fire and save their homes without wearing protective gear. 

THE UPHEAVAL

Yale Climate Connections makes the point that the stress of evacuating, losing your home, trying to recover, trying to navigate life into a "new normal" can also cause a lot of premature deaths. 

If you're mentally stressed, if affects your body, and can cause premature illnesses that seem unrelated to the original disaster. 

One study looked at deaths from hurricanes. 

Hurricanes are obviously not the same as wildfires, but they have some of the same effects - destroyed home, upheaval for families, an uncertain future.

The 2024 paper "found that the average landfalling U.S. hurricane between 1930 and 2015 caused 24 direct deaths.

However, they observed an increase in excess deaths - mortality beyond what would otherwise be expected in that period - lingered for 15 years, totaling 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths per storm. This burden is 300 to 480 times greater than the government estimated of direct death and was equivalent to 3.2 to 5.1 percent of all deaths across the contiguous United States."

I expect we might unfortunately see the same thing in southern California.