Viviana Aguirre, 14, knows the air is bad when she has to reach for her inhaler once, maybe twice a week.
But this summer, the high school freshman has relied on her inhaler almost every day to keep her asthma under control.
The air in her low-income neighborhood has been thick with smoke for weeks, she said, forcing her to remain indoors most of the time. It’s hard for Viviana to tell whether the smoke is coming from the usual controlled burns in the farmers’ fields surrounding her home — or from the record-breaking wildfires blazing to the north and south of her, she said.
“I do see smoke,” Viviana said, “but I see smoke most of the time.”
People like Viviana and her family are hit disproportionately when wildfires ignite — because smoke adds another layer of toxic substances to the already dirty air, experts say.
“Without a doubt, these communities are at higher risk” when fires break out, said Emanuel Alcala, a postgraduate fellow with the Central Valley Health Policy Institute at California State University-Fresno. “Especially because you already have other environmental hazards: toxic waste sites, poor quality of water, and sometimes no air conditioning.”
More than a dozen major blazes still rage across California, including the two Mendocino Complex fires in the northern part of the state that together have charred nearly 460,000 acres. One of those fires, the Ranch Fire, is the largest in state history.
Fires are also burning in Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. Smoke from these blazes has drifted as far as Ohio. Portions of northern Nevada recorded some of their worst ozone pollution ever last month because of the fires, and officials across the West have issued health warnings to alert sensitive groups — such as young children, older adults and people with respiratory diseases — of the potential risks.
In neighborhoods like Viviana’s, which lies…