In the recent warring press conferences between scientists raising alarm over air quality near the polluted Tijuana River and public health officials trying to defuse it, one particular voice stuck out the most: Kim Prather, an atmospheric scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Prather materialized as a minor celebrity during the Covid-19 pandemic. She studies aerosols, which became a household term during the pandemic as the world began to understand how the virus travels from infected carriers through particles that could hang out in the air.
“I’m the one that convinced Fauci that Covid is airborne,” Prather told the San Diego Regional Water Quality Board during an August meeting on the Tijuana River crisis. “I am just stunned that people don’t think about the air as a transmission pathway, still.”
It’s true that Prather, along with another aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech, bent the ear of Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, on the importance of understanding aerosols as opposed to what’s known as droplet transmission of viruses – aka coughing or sneezing mucus into each other’s orifices. The point being, Prather et al. were among the first to warn that aerosols could launch the virus further than six feet (the accepted social distance to prevent the virus’ spread), maybe even hundreds of feet. Fauci later admitted aerosols were an important component when considering spread of the deadly virus, according to an article in Wired.
Before that fated meeting, Voice of San Diego helped put Prather and her research on the map, reporting her warning in March of 2020 that people weren’t safe from getting Covid even at the beach.
“All the rules for six-foot social distancing when you’re at the beach do not apply,” Prather told Voice, warning that winds could pick up the exhaled virus, remain airborne for hours and transfer between surfers.
The Los Angeles Times and dozens of other outlets picked up the story. The Surfrider Foundation changed its recommendations to its environmentalist surfers following: #StayHomeShredLater. At least one disgruntled surfer took to the street in his wetsuit protesting Prather’s warning, calling her a “kook” and a “Commie.”
A month later, the National Science Foundation awarded Prather $200,000 to fast-track the investigation into how viruses could spread in coastal waters near sewage outfalls. She planned to study the Tijuana River estuary.
Her warning against strolling the beach later proved to be overly cautious as science began to unravel the true nature of Covid-19. Eventually the outdoors turned out to be the only safe place to gather. Socializing that used to occur indoors turned outward. Restaurants set up tables on the sidewalk. Parks and beaches were the locale of choice for group hangs.
Now, with almost 94,000 followers on X and the backing of Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, Prather has been dubbed a “sheroe” (a feminine play on the word hero) in the effort to understand whether air near the U.S.-Mexico border is safe to breathe. With Covid contained for the most part, it seems Prather has picked upon the Tijuana sewage crisis as her next mission.
At a Sept. 9 press conference and in subsequent tweets, Prather said the levels of hydrogen sulfide she detected were “extremely high” and a “serious public health concern.” But that’s not what her data showed when compared to government standards for sewer gas exposure.
Supervisor Nora Vargas held a press conference the next day, saying their experts couldn’t produce the readings the researchers found, telling residents there was nothing to fear; the levels of these gases the county’s own experts measured weren’t enough to be considered a serious public health threat.
Despite the initial disagreement, the researchers have succeeded in transforming the sewage crisis into an air pollution crisis. The focus on this hydrogen sulfide gas could dramatically raise the stakes and urgency of the crisis.
People living near the riverbed still deal with foul odors on the regular which indicates there’s some level of sewer and perhaps other gases making its way to their noses. Prather’s preliminary data she finally shared with me show levels of this gas, hydrogen sulfide, that are below any state or federal thresholds for serious risk to human health. But there is some evidence that prolonged exposure to low levels of the sewer gas (2 parts per million to 5 parts per million) could trigger nausea, eye tearing, headaches and loss of sleep or airway problems for asthma patients.
Prather and her research team members have since agreed to share their air quality data with public health officials after a kind of Potsdam-conference between the warring press conference parties held by County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency along with state and other federal public health agencies are working on how to issue guidance for long-term exposure to the kinds of lower hydrogen sulfide levels Prather’s team detected.
No more rogue public health alerts.
“It’s a very important and positive step forward to get all these different entities on the same page on how we collect data and devise an action plan,” Lawson-Remer told me.
In Other News
- A rare spate of sea lion attacks in Mission Beach injured two people. One snorkeler was out at South Mission Point Park and felt a “pinch” on their leg. She got five stitches from the bite. Hours later, another person swimming 50 yards offshore said he was bitten multiple times and transported to a nearby hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. (NBC 7)
- San Diego State University is building a campus in Imperial Valley near Brawley to train people to work in the nascent lithium industry there. Companies are trying to extract lithium from the underground brine around the Salton Sea. (Union-Tribune)
- The city of San Diego spent $1.7 million on a consultant to gather community feedback on a proposed trash collection fee for homes that don’t currently pay anything for the service, a guarantee voters upended in 2022. (inewsource)
- California’s greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 2.4 percent in 2022 compared to the year before due to electric vehicles and cleaner fuels. (Los Angeles Times)
- Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on plastic shopping bags into law Sunday. California already passed a ban on thin shopping bags but shoppers could purchase bags made with thicker plastic that purportedly made them recyclable. But that made the situation worse, as San Diego Sen. Catherine Blakespear revealed when she introduced another bag ban. Since the first ban, the use of plastic bags went up – a lot, as our Scott Lewis reported. (Voice of San Diego and AP)
- Excited to have a conversation with Los Angeles Times Reporter Rosanna Xia about her sea level rise reporting in her book, California Against the Sea, on Oct. 9 at 7 p.m. at the Book Catapult. Be there.
This post was originally published on here
