A paralyzing disease that can cause people to die within 4 years is spreading in part of Australia, and toxic algae blooms could be to blame
Andrea Michelson
A paralyzing disease that can cause people to die within 4 years is spreading in part of Australia, and toxic algae blooms could be to blame
A girl uses a stick to try and scoop algae from an algal bloom off the beach at Maumee Bay State Park in Oregon, OH on August 3, 2014. Ty Wright for The Washington Post via Getty
Certain parts of Australia have unusually high rates of motor neuron disease.
People with MND are progressively paralyzed and typically die 2-4 years after diagnosis.
Multiple factors cause the disease, and some scientists think toxic algae is one of them.
Algae blooms can cause a host of problems, from mass-murdering fish to poisoning the air we breathe.
In Australia and beyond, some researchers believe that harmful blooms of blue-green algae are linked to increasingly high rates of motor neuron disease, a condition which causes paralysis and early death.
Folks in the US might be familiar with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which is the most common type of motor neuron disease.
Motor neuron diseases progressively attack nerve cells, reducing one’s ability to speak, move, and breathe and typically killing patients within two to fours years after diagnosis, researchers told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Rates of deaths due to MND have risen 250 percent over the past 30 years in Australia, Macquarie University scientists told the Herald. MND sufferers and scientists are trying to understand why certain areas of the country have especially high rates, which led them to the algae theory.
Some algae blooms release harmful toxins into the water and air
Certain areas of Australia have curiously high rates of MND. Riverina, an agricultural region of New South Wales, has between five and seven times the national incidence.
The region is home to Lake Wyangan, a reservoir that frequently has outbreaks of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. The area around the lake is currently on red alert, meaning people should avoid fishing and swimming in the potentially toxic water, as well as drinking it.
Cyanobacteria are known to release a number of toxins, including a neurotoxin called BMAA. Some animal research suggests that BMAA could be one of many factors that leads to the development of motor neuron deterioration.
Researchers have found BMAA in other algae-infested waterways in the Riverina area, but they haven’t yet confirmed a link to MND. It’s likely that the neurodegenerative disease stems from a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Even in genetically predisposed cases of MND, environmental stressors like algae blooms could contribute to the disease’s onset and progression, Dominic Rowe, chair of Macquarie Neurology, told the Herald. But more research is needed to better understand how those factors interact.
“Until we actually, systematically study the genetic causes and take them out of the environment, it’s hard to be 100 percent accurate about the environmental factors,” Rowe said.
Those Red Tide blooms in Pinellas just reached the Pasco coast
Jamal Thalji, Tampa Bay Times
Pinellas County officials have spent weeks dealing with a Red Tide outbreak that has spurred health warnings and left several tons of dead fish along the county’s sandy, lucrative beaches.
Now Red Tide might be Pasco County’s problem, too.
Three water samples taken off the southernmost tip of the Pasco coastline revealed the microorganism Karenia brevis, which causes the toxic algal blooms, according to the latest report Wednesday issued by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The strongest result found in Pasco is a medium-level concentration off the island of Anclote Key, at the county line. Low concentrations were detected near the Anclote River Park boat ramp and the Anclote Gulf Park pier.
That’s the first time the state has detected the presence of the current Red Tide outbreak in Pasco. That may have been inevitable, given the concentrations that have been moving north up the Pinellas coast toward its neighbor.
In Pinellas, 11 water samples contained Karenia brevis, according to the state. The only high concentration was detected in St. Joseph Sound, between Honeymoon Island State Park’s island of Grassy Key and Burghstream Point off the coast of Palm Harbor.
But starting from the northern tip of Caladesi Island State Park and moving north, there was a medium-level bloom found there; two more between Three Rooker Island to the west and Wall Springs Park to the east; and another detected southeast of Anclote Key, near the Tarpon Springs coast.
Pinellas officials announced Tuesday night that Red Tide was continuing its trek northward. Officials used a Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office helicopter to spot blooms. They found discolored water off Redington Beach and Clearwater Beach, but said they saw improvement from previous air observations.
Red Tide was also found in three water samples taken from Hillsborough County waters and seven samples from Manatee County waters, according to the state. That is where the owner of the old Piney Point fertilizer plant released 215 million gallons of polluted wastewater into Tampa Bay. Scientists are examining a potential link between the release and the algal blooms.
Meanwhile crews continue to clean-up the Pinellas beaches. The county said workers on Tuesday removed dead fish from the Dunedin Causeway and Fred Howard Park. So far, the county has removed 66.8 tons of “Red Tide-related debris” — mostly marine life killed by Karenia brevis.
From Clearwater Beach south, water samples showed low concentrations near Causeway Boulevard, Sand Key Park Beach, Indian Shores Beach, La Contessa Pier in Redington Beach, Madeira Beach, Bert and Walter Williams Pier in Gulfport and St. Petersburg’s Bayboro Harbor. Two medium blooms were found further south near the Fort De Soto fishing pier and Mullet Key.
Red Tide resources
There are several online resources that can help residents stay informed and share information about Red Tide:
Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, the county’s tourism wing, runs an online beach dashboard at www.beachesupdate.com.
The agency asks business owners to email reports of Red Tide issues to pr@visitspc.com.
Beachgoers should avoid swimming around dead fish.
Those with chronic respiratory problems should be particularly careful and “consider staying away” from places with a Red Tide bloom.
People should not harvest or eat mollusks or distressed and dead fish from the area. Fillets of healthy fish should be rinsed with clean water, and the guts thrown out.
Pet owners should keep their animals away from the water and from dead fish.
Residents living near the beach should close their windows and run air conditioners with proper filters.
Visitors to the beach can wear paper masks, especially if the wind is blowing in.
Source: Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County
‘Worst is yet to come’: Disastrous future ahead for millions worldwide due to climate change, report warns
Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
Millions of people worldwide are in for a disastrous future of hunger, drought and disease, according to a draft report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was leaked to the media this week.
“Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions,” according to Agence France-Presse , which obtained the report draft.
The report warns of a series of thresholds beyond which recovery from climate breakdown may become impossible, The Guardian said. The report warns: “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems… humans cannot.
“The worst is yet to come, affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own.”
Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and are bound to become evident in the decades ahead, according to AFP.
The IPCC’s 4,000-page draft report, scheduled for official release next year, offers the most comprehensive rundown to date of the impacts of climate change on our planet and our species, AFP said.
Climate change, also known as global warming, is caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, which release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the Earth’s atmosphere. Those greenhouse gases have caused our atmosphere to warm to levels that scientists say cannot be due to natural causes.
So far, since the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, the Earth has warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius (which is roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit), according to NASA.
Coal-fired power plants such as the Homer City Generating Station in Pennsylvania emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
The report warns of “progressively serious, centuries’ long and, in some cases, irreversible consequences.” The report also said that the millions of people who live along coastlines almost everywhere around the world could be battered by multiple climate calamities at once: drought, heatwaves, cyclones, wildfires and flooding.
Simon Lewis, a professor of global change science at University College London, told The Guardian that “nothing in the IPCC report should be a surprise, as all the information comes from the scientific literature. But put together, the stark message from the IPCC is that increasingly severe heatwaves, fires, floods and droughts are coming our way with dire impacts for many countries.
“On top of this are some irreversible changes, often called tipping points, such as where high temperatures and droughts mean parts of the Amazon rainforest can’t persist. These tipping points may then link, like toppling dominoes.”
In a statement following the leak of the report, the IPCC said that it does not comment on the contents of draft reports while work is still ongoing. The official report, designed to influence critical policy decisions, is not scheduled for release until February, AFP said.
‘The water is coming’: Florida Keys faces stark reality as seas rise
Oliver Milman
Long famed for its spectacular fishing, sprawling coral reefs and literary residents such as Ernest Hemingway, the Florida Keys is now acknowledging a previously unthinkable reality: it faces being overwhelmed by the rising seas and not every home can be saved.
Following a grueling seven-hour public meeting on Monday, held in the appropriately named city of Marathon, officials agreed to push ahead with a plan to elevate streets throughout the Keys to keep them from perpetual flooding, while admitting they do not have the money to do so.
The string of coral cay islands that unspool from the southern tip of Florida finds itself on the frontline of the climate crisis, forcing unenviable choices upon a place that styles itself as sunshine-drenched idyll. The lives of Keys residents – a mixture of wealthy, older white people, the one in four who are Hispanic or Latino, and those struggling in poverty – face being upended.
If the funding isn’t found, the Keys will become one of the first places in the US – and certainly not the last – to inform residents that certain areas will have to be surrendered to the oncoming tides.
“The water is coming and we can’t stop it,” said Michelle Coldiron, mayor of Monroe county, which encompasses the Keys. “Some homes will have to be elevated, some will have to be bought out. It’s very difficult to have these conversations with homeowners, because this is where they live. It can get very emotional.”
Once people are unable to secure mortgages and insurance for soaked homes, the Keys will cease to be a livable place long before it’s fully underwater, according to Harold Wanless, a geographer at the University of Miami. “People don’t have a concept of what sea level rise will do to them. They just can’t conceive it,” he said.
On Monday, the county gave details of its plan to spend $1.8bn over the next 25 years to raise 150 miles of roads in the Keys, deploying a mixture of new drains, pump stations and vegetation to prevent the streets becoming inundated with seawater. The heightened roadways are eagerly anticipated by residents who told the meeting of cars being ruined by the salt water and of donning boots to wade to front doors.
“The roads are shot, they’re full of cracks, the water is permeating up,” said Kimberly Sikora, who lives in a vulnerable neighborhood of Key Largo called Stillwright Point that is still awaiting a full road elevation proposal. “I’m just looking for some kind of relief.”
Another resident, Robert Schaller of Twin Lakes, an area further along in the planning process, muttered that he “should’ve done my due diligence” when buying his house last year. “I literally stand on my balcony and watch the water come up through my street,” he said. “It’s coming up right through the pavement.”
But Monroe county’s budget will not cover the raising of all the roads, nor any mass buyout of homes, and an appeal to Florida state lawmakers to levy a new tax to cover these mounting costs has been rebuffed. Further costs will pile up as the county grapples with how – and who pays – to keep critical infrastructure such as sewers and power substations, as well as people’s homes, from being flooded along with the roads.
“If we can’t raise additional money then we will have to look at prioritizing,” said Rhonda Haag, Monroe county’s chief resilience officer.
“For example, should we spend money on raising roads if people aren’t paying to raise their yards? We are blazing trails here. We are ahead of everyone in having to think about this.”
The pancake-flat Keys are in jeopardy from rising seas that are, as a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) scientist told the county commissioners in the Monday meeting, accelerating upwards as the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt away. Human-caused global heating means an extra 17in of sea level rise by 2040, according to an intermediate Noaa projection used by the county.
Compounding this problem, the islands’ porous limestone allows the rising seawater to bubble up from below, meaning it just takes high tides on sunny days to turn roads into ponds, while global heating is also spurring fiercer hurricanes that can occasionally crunch into the archipelago.
“The Florida Keys are one of the most vulnerable places to flooding in North America,” said Kristina Hill, an environmental planner at the University of California, Berkeley, who warned that the islands would face growing road and pipe maintenance costs, more pollution leaks and harmful algal blooms.
“Without a change in strategy, parts of the Keys will become accessible only by boat,” said Hill, adding that the islands could have to resort to floating structures and navigable canals to remain viable. “The islands will gradually disappear into a higher ocean, potentially leaving a ruined landscape of leaky underground storage tanks, old pipes, and flooded road segments behind to pollute the water.”
A sign reads ‘Salt Water No Wake’ as ocean water floods a street in Key Largo in October 2019.Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The threats faced by the Keys are shrugged off by some of its wealthy retirees who view the situation with a certain fatalism, while others in this Republican-voting bastion openly question the science. Eddie Martinez, one of the county’s five elected commissioners, challenged the Noaa scientist, William Sweet, on his sea level rise projections on Monday.
The sea level rise to date is “really a nothing number”, said Martinez, who told Sweet: “You’re a little bit more on this CO2 side, I’m more on the actual measurement side.” Another commissioner, David Rice, said that “predicting the future is probably best done with a crystal ball” and speculated that global temperatures could change following several volcanic eruptions.
“There are people who don’t want to sell because they love it here, others who want to get out while they can and those in complete denial who call you a troublemaker who is driving down property values by talking about it,” said George Smyth, a retiree who moved to Key Largo a decade ago for the quiet, slow-paced lifestyle. In 2019, his neighborhood spent 90 days partially submerged in water.
The nature of the Keys has changed in this time. While the islands still include pockets of poverty, an influx of affluent second-home owners has caused new properties to sprout up around Smyth. “It used to be pretty rough and tumble, you’d see a few fights on a Saturday night,” he said. “Now everyone looks like they’ve just come from the cosmetic dentist.”
Other new realities are more laborious – Smyth has to wash his car continually to rid it of salt water and has to pay for trucks to unload piles of crushed-up rocks around his property as a buffer against the encroaching tides. While Smyth doesn’t class himself as particularly wealthy, these protections are beyond the means of low-income Keys residents, many of whom live in exposed mobile homes dotted along the islands.
Smyth fears that the county will require poorer residents to stump up the money for the roads, rather than put a levy on the tourists that flock to the Keys. “We feel we are being held hostage,” he said. “I feel sorrow for what is coming and the loss of what is a wonderful community.”
But the mayor defiantly insists the Keys can be saved, even if it is currently unclear how. “We know we live in paradise and we want to keep it that way,” said Coldiron.
Pacific Northwest bakes under once-in-a-millennium heat dome
Jeff Berardelli
The heat wave baking the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans. By one measure it is more rare than a once in a 1,000 year event — which means that if you could live in this particular spot for 1,000 years, you’d likely only experience a heat dome like this once, if ever.
Portland, Oregon, has already broken its all-time record hottest temperature at 108 degrees on Saturday and the peak of the heat wave has not even been reached yet. Canada is expected to register the nation’s all-time highest temperature before the event is done. These are extremely dangerous numbers, especially in a region not used to heat like this, where many people do not have air conditioning.
By Monday, some — if not all — of the all-time record highs seen below are forecast to break, with many more cities not listed here expected to achieve the same feat.
These are all-time heat records for select cities prior to the current heat wave. Portland has already broken its former all-time record of 107. / Credit: CBS News
The heat is being caused by a combination of a significant atmospheric blocking pattern on top of a human-caused climate changed world where baseline temperatures are already a couple to a few degrees higher than nature intended.
The core of the heat dome, as measured by the thickness of the air column over British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, is – statistically speaking – equivalent to a 1-in-1,000-year event or even a 1-in-10,000-year event. / Credit: CBS News
This heat wave comes on the heels of another historic heat wave less than two weeks ago that baked the U.S. Intermountain West, Desert Southwest and California with hundreds of record highs.
Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. is also seeing the heat ratchet up, with “feels-like” temperatures pushing 100 degrees by Monday and Tuesday in the major cities of the I-95 corridor. The back-to-back and dueling heat waves are made more likely by a very wavy jet stream and our unnaturally heating climate.
Pacific Northwest heat wave
Sunday and Monday are projected to be the hottest days of the heat wave along the Northwest coast from Portland to Seattle. Even before the peak of the heat had been reached on Saturday, many records have already been broken, with even hotter temperatures to come.
As the heat dome continues to build, cities like Portland will likely break their all-time heat record again, on back-to-back days. On Sunday the thermometer reached a staggering 112 degrees Fahrenheit — that’s 5 degrees higher than what had been the all-time record of 107 degrees, prior to Saturday’s 108.
/ Credit: CBS News
In Seattle, after a record high of 102 on Saturday, the thermometer is likely to shatter its all-time record high of 103 degrees on Monday, with a forecast high of 108. In its history, Seattle has only reached 100 degrees three times before. Remarkably, in this one heat wave, highs in the city will easily top 100 degrees 3 days in a row.
Some of the inland cities in eastern Washington and Oregon will likely max out in the 115-120 degree range. And while the heat will break along the coast of Washington and Oregon by midweek, the record heat will continue over inland Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana late in the week.
/ Credit: CBS News
For the past week, as computer models have consistently forecast seemingly unbelievable numbers, meteorologists struggled to grasp how a heat wave of this magnitude could even be possible, given this region has never experienced anything of this magnitude before. Were the models wrong? Or, given climate change, should we now expect the unexpected — is this now just becoming routine?
Projected temperatures on Sun-Mon across PacNW are so extreme that I think folks are having difficulty putting them into context. There remains some uncertainty, but places along I-5 corridor from Medford to Seattle have potential to *shatter* all-time records. #ORwx#WAwxpic.twitter.com/W9yr7XXxLF
Turns out, the models were correct and we should expect extreme heat waves, even unprecedented ones like this to become more routine. “There is no context really, in the sense that there is no analog in our past for what we are likely to see this week,” says Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and author of the new book “The New Climate War.”
But calling it a new normal does not suffice says Mann, “Some people called this a ‘new normal. But it is worse than that,” explained Mann. “We will continue to see more and more extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods as long as we continue to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions.”
As shown in the below illustration from the Oregon Climate Assessment, this is only the beginning of the heating expected if humanity continues burning fossil fuels. By 2100, temperatures are expected to be 7 to 10 degrees above what they naturally should, and that would mean a dramatic increase in extreme heat waves.
As all-time record heat approaches the Pacific Northwest, a look at future climate change projections – graph shows annual mean temperature in Oregon 📈 + Oregon Climate Assessment (see fig. 10): https://t.co/CYo3H4u8nk+ National Climate Assessment: https://t.co/TXvHgQu5ljpic.twitter.com/IUZqlhg7r0
In the case of this specific heat dome, which is a mountain of hot air stacked vertically through the atmosphere, it is a once in a 1,000 or even 10,000-year event for this particular area. How do we know? It’s actually quite simple to explain.
The intensity of a heat dome is measured by how “thick” the atmosphere is at a given spot. The hotter the air in that column, the larger the thickness of air in that column, because heat expands. In our historical record of North America’s Pacific Northwest this heat dome registers a statistical standard deviation from the average of greater than 4.
In layman terms, that means it falls more than 4 deviations to the right of the center of a typical bell curve (shown below) and that equates to values with less than a 99.99% chance of happening.
This is called a temperature distribution, similar to a bell curve. It illustrates the normal distribution of temperatures we should expect given the historical record. However, as the animation shows, as the globe warms and the average shifts towards the right – the warmer side. As a result, the extremes shift even more resulting in more intense and more frequent heat waves. / Credit: Climate Central
In other words, statistically speaking, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of experiencing this value. So, if you could possibly live in that spot for 10,000 years, you’d likely only experience that kind of heat dome once, if ever.
To put climate extremes into perspective we measure against the average. The sigma is the standard deviation of a normal distribution of expected values. In this case the heat dome sigma max is 4.4 – that means it’s outside of 99.99% of expected values or a 1/10,000+ chance (1/2) pic.twitter.com/8raIMAngkg
It is worth noting that our historical record is limited and statistics like this are very sensitive to small changes. But if it seems like an overstatement to say there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of having a heat dome like this, it is certainly not an overstatement to say this is the kind of event you would expect to experience once in 1000 years.
But we will know the exact value soon, as some of the best extreme weather attribution scientists are likely to be hard at work doing rapid attribution — a new type of cutting edge science — this week to determine the actual values and to what degree climate change has contributed.
What it means for the Pacific NW is that there will be a very high attribution to climate change for the upcoming event and the exact numbers will depend on how hot it really gets. And the hotter it gets, the larger the attribution will be. Regardless of cause though, stay safe!
So what is causing this heat wave? Like any heat wave, it is being caused by a highly amplified jet stream pattern. These extreme jet stream perturbations are a natural, normal part of the atmosphere. But the climate science community is split as to whether these extreme jet stream perturbations are becoming even more likely because of climate change — a phenomena known as the wavy jet stream.
/ Credit: CBS News
Along with a more wavy, buckling and slow-moving jet stream, comes a phenomena called “blocking”. This is when waves in the jet stream become so elongated that they break off, sit and spin. In this case there is a textbook type of block called an Omega block over the Pacific Northwest because it looks like the Greek letter Omega. Inside this Omega, the heat pools and intensifies.
There is a faction of climate scientists who believe that a warming climate — specifically the Arctic — results in a more wandering jet stream at certain times of the year. But it is hotly debated; there is an equal amount of research that does not arrive at this conclusion.
Mann and his colleagues have been involved in some of this research, in which he finds that a specific type of Northern Hemisphere blocking — what he calls Quasi Resonant Amplification — will increase by 50% this century under business as usual human-forced climate warming. “I do indeed believe that the phenomenon we describe in our work played a very important role in the record heat wave,” Mann said.
As for the lack of consensus in the climate research on the wavy jet stream and blocking, Mann thinks it has more to do with the current state of climate modeling “This is an area where current generation models are NOT capturing a real-world climate connection,” Mann explained.
Whatever the cause, the result of an extreme jet stream pattern is extreme weather across many parts of the nation and globe. Over the past few days, the central U.S. has seen over a foot of rain with flash flooding along a stalled front. And, starting on Sunday and continuing through most of the upcoming week, the major East Coast cities will also sweat through a heat wave — although not nearly as intense as the one in the West — with feels-like temperatures near 100 degrees from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia and New York City.
/ Credit: CBS News
While natural swings between hot and cold patterns will continue, the trend is clear — extreme heat waves are bound to become more common, more extreme and more deadly in the coming years. In practice, the solution to worsening extreme weather is a herculean challenge for humanity, but in theory it is simple: “We can prevent things from getting worse if we rapidly decarbonize our civilization,” Mann said.
California’s drought and wildfire dangers rising at stunning pace
Faith E. Pinho, Alex Wigglesworth
A home destroyed in the 2020 North Complex fire sits above Lake Oroville in Oroville, Calif. At the time of this photo, the reservoir was at 39% of capacity and 46% of its historical average. (Noah Berger / Associated Press)
California’s drought and wildfire conditions are accelerating at unprecedented rates, according to state officials, and residents should brace for a summer of widespread burning and mandatory water conservation measures in some regions.
As reservoir levels across the state continue to drop, and as parched vegetation poses an increasing threat of wildfire, officials in Sacramento and Southern California offered a bleak assessment of the state’s drying climate, saying it has already begun to affect people, plants and animals.
The current drought, which blankets the entire state and a broad swath of the western United States, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, is already outpacing the state’s devastating 2012-16 drought, said Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources.
“It really wasn’t until year three or four when we saw these intense conditions … we’re now experiencing in the second year of the drought,” Nemeth said Friday. “That acceleration is really what’s new about this drought and what we’re working to respond to.”
California typically relies on the gradual melting of Sierra snowpack to fill its reservoirs, Nemeth said. But this year, the state saw record evaporation and record low runoff into streams and reservoirs.
It is “unprecedented in the breadth and severity of this regional drought,” said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the state’s Natural Resources Agency.
At the same time, fire officials in Southern California warned that wildfire conditions are already like those typically seen in August and September.
“We’re seeing fires move fast,” said Chief Brian Fennessy of the Orange County Fire Authority. “Fires that normally would be an acre, 2 acres, 5 acres, so far this year are getting to 30, 50 and beyond.”
They’re also spreading more quickly, he said.
“We are seeing fire spread that is even stunning many of us that have been doing this for a very long time — fire spread that could quite easily surprise many of the citizens within this region,” he said. He urged people to evacuate as soon as they’re told to do so.
These dry conditions do not bode well for the Fourth of July weekend, when first responders will probably face their first big test as a predicted heat wave collides with amateur fireworks displays.
Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded a drought emergency to 41 California counties, covering 30% of the state’s population. On Friday, Santa Clara County declared its own local emergency, saying drought conditions were so extreme that water levels were not adequate to meet demand.
“The reality is we live in an arid region that will continue to experience droughts,” Jasneet Sharma, director of Santa Clara County’s Office of Sustainability, said in a statement. “There are many steps that we should all take, from large-scale conservation projects and household-level water conservation retrofits to simple household changes like turning off the faucet when you brush your teeth. Each one is an important part of sustainability.”
Water conservation is likely to ramp up, possibly becoming mandatory in some communities, said Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board.
“It’s not about conservation just because it’s drought. … We really need to see conservation and efficiency here as just [a] simple course of action that we must do, no matter if it’s dry or it’s wet,” Esquivel said.
Usually the natural world can adapt to gradual changes in the climate, but California’s conditions are changing so frequently that plants and animals are not able to keep up, said Chuck Bonham, director of California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.
“They don’t have the luxury of adapting over millennia anymore; they’re being forced to adapt over a period of years,” he said.
The decrease in water levels has caused some rivers to heat up, becoming uninhabitable for some fish. Department of Fish and Wildlife teams recently removed almost 17 million Chinook salmon from four hatcheries in the Central Valley and released them into the ocean at places such as San Francisco Bay. The number of fish rescues has increased since the previous drought, Bonham said.
“We also know we’re going to end up serving as a Noah’s Ark,” he added, referring to a menagerie of animals kept at UC Davis until their environments become cool enough to live in again. “Every drop of water we can save as Californians is going to matter for people, but it’s going to matter for nature too.”
The drying also carries severe consequences for wildfire.
Live fuel moisture levels, which measure the dryness of vegetation, are on par with those typically seen in the late summer or fall, said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby, who serves as mutual aid coordinator for the region comprising Los Angeles, Orange, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
The fire broke out in an area that hadn’t burned in 50 years and that was choked with drought-killed vegetation, he said. Because of the topography and dryness, it grew to more than 1,000 acres before firefighters were able to bring it under control, despite relatively calm winds.
“Our expectations are that during this summer, we’re going to have those types of fires and larger with just the winds off the ocean,” Osby said. “And then we’re really concerned moving into the fall months when we start getting our significant wind-driven fires.”
Officials have taken steps to prepare. When the forecast looks dire — for instance, if the National Weather Service issues a red-flag warning — the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services works with local jurisdictions to pre-position extra firefighters, engines and aircraft and reimburses the governments for the added cost, said Cal OES Fire and Rescue Chief Brian Marshall.
“That gives us a fighting chance to catch the fires when they’re small,” he said.
Key to that is the prompt use of aircraft, which enables ground crews to then go in and extinguish the fires, Fennessy said. Southern California fire personnel have more aircraft available this year than in years past, including large helitankers that can fly at night, he said.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection moved to peak staffing earlier this year, sooner than normal, and will maintain that level for the rest of the year, said Chief Glenn Barley, assistant region chief for Cal Fire’s Southern Region.
“Last year was the worst fire season we’ve seen in California,” Barley said. “At this point this year, we are ahead of those numbers for last year, both in terms of number of fires and number of acres burned.”
Yet fire officials said that while they’re well resourced, they still don’t have enough, particularly in light of the potentially historic fire season bearing down on the region.
“I will say that from my municipality to the state to the federal government, that we’re stretched. We’re busy,” Osby said, adding that local municipalities still have to go on medical calls — more than 1,000 a day in the case of his department — in addition to fighting fires. “None of us have all the resources that we need.”
He said L.A. County would normally have 24 inmate firefighting crews but is down to eight, as many were sent home from prison after the state granted them early release because of the pandemic. That has forced the department to dip into its budget to train more paid crew members, he said.
Meanwhile, the National Interagency Fire Center this week raised its preparedness level to 4, the second-highest, said Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia.
“The significance of that is that the last time we were in this preparedness Level 4 at this time of year was in 2002,” he said. “And prior to that, the last time was 1991.”
Driving the news: The Department of Agriculture has responded by launching an extermination campaign against grasshoppers, the largest since the 1980s. Authorities have started to spray thousands of square miles with pesticide to kill immature grasshopper before they become adults.
But, but, but: Some environmentalists worry the pesticides could kill other insects, including grasshopper predators and struggling species such as monarch butterflies, AP notes.
The USDA said it would spray rangelands in sections to prevent other insect wildlife from being affected by the pesticide.
State of play: The USDA released a grasshopper hazard map that shows some areas have more than 15 grasshoppers per square yard in Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska.
Why it matters: “Left unaddressed, federal officials said the agricultural damage from grasshoppers could become so severe it could drive up beef and crop prices,” AP writes.
What they’re saying: “Drought and grasshoppers go together and they are cleaning us out,” Frank Wiederrick, a farmer in Montana, told AP.
The first time I experienced 110 degrees, I walked out of a strenuously air-conditioned hotel into the blast-furnace heat of a June day in Phoenix. WHAM. It was so hot, so crazy over-the-top hot, that I burst into laughter. You kidding me? That was a couple of decades ago, and now 110 is not unusual in Arizona, which had its hottest year ever in 2020, with 53 days of 110-degree heat and 14 days of 115 degrees or higher. This year might be hotter still — it was 118 degrees in Phoenix last week — as the entire Southwest and California bake in a pitiless megadrought. The Southwest has always been one of my favorite parts of the country; just before the pandemic halted travel in March 2020, I spent a delightful week in a casita tucked into Saguaro National Park south of Tucson. In recent decades, millions of “snowbirds” have permanently fled the upper Midwest and the Northeast for Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. But as the climate changes, will truly oppressive heat, and a dire lack of water, begin to force a reverse migration north?
The term “climate refugee” may summon images of Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa, or sinking islands in Micronesia. But in coming years, it could include Californians fleeing apocalyptic wildfires and choking air, and Arizonans and Nevadans facing unbroken months of heat so intense it is dangerous to leave the house much of the day. In this arid region, battles over scarce water will intensify. And the Southwest is not alone in its vulnerability. By 2040, climatologists warn, the Southeast will become noticeably hotter and even more humid. Southern Florida and coastal communities along the Atlantic will be so routinely flooded by rising seas and stronger storms that homeowners may have to retreat inland. Midwestern farmers are likely to see crop yields plunge. While we argue over other things, we might take note of the fact that the climate is already changing, with even more dramatic change to come.
Rising air temperatures remind us that our bodies have real limits.
By Bill McKibben June 23, 2021
Last week, researchers at nasa and noaa found that “the earth is warming faster than expected.”Photograph by Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg / Getty
It’s hard to change the outcome of the climate crisis by individual action: we’re past the point where we can alter the carbon math one electric vehicle at a time, and so activists rightly concentrate on building movements large enough to alter our politics and our economics. But ultimately the climate crisis still affects people as individuals—it comes down, eventually, to bodies. Which is worth remembering. In the end, we’re not collections of constructs or ideas or images or demographics but collections of arteries and organs and muscles, and those are designed to operate within a finite range of temperatures.
I happened to be talking with Dr. Rupa Basu, the chief of air-and-climate epidemiology at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, on Friday, a day after Palm Springs had tied its all-time heat record with a reading of a hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot—hotter than the human body can really handle. The day before, with temperatures topping a hundred degrees before noon, a hiker in the San Bernardino National Forest had keeled over and died. “We talk a lot about biological adaptability, but as humans we’re not supposed to adapt to temps that high,” Basu said. “If your core body temp reaches a hundred and five, that means death can be imminent. As humans, we can only adapt so much. Once the air temperature is above a hundred and twenty, there’s only so much you can do, except rely on air-conditioning and other mitigation strategies. And that puts a lot of pressure on the power grid, and that could result in brownouts and blackouts. It’s not really a long-term, chronic solution. It’s just living for the moment and hoping it works.”
And often it doesn’t work. Last summer, Basu published a remarkable paper, a “systematic review” of research on pregnant women. The studies she looked at—which collectively examined more than thirty-two million births—found that higher temperatures in the weeks before delivery were linked to stillbirths and low birth weights. “It’s weeks thirty-five and thirty-six that seem to be the trigger,” she told me recently. “What we think is happening is that a lot of the mechanisms from heat-related illness start with dehydration. If there are symptoms of dehydration, those might be overlooked. If someone doesn’t connect it with heat, they might not get to a cooler environment. You see vomiting—and people might say, ‘That’s O.K. Bound to happen when you’re pregnant.’ But it’s because of the dehydration.” Further along in the pregnancy, she said, “your body releases oxytocin, which triggers contractions. And if it happens prematurely—well, heat raises the level of oxytocin faster. If you’re not able to thermoregulate, get the temp down, it can trigger low birth weight or, earlier on, miscarriage or stillbirth.” Past a certain point, the body diverts blood flow to the subcutaneous layer beneath the skin, where the body’s heat can radiate out into the air. That diverts the blood “away from vital organs,” Basu said. “And away from the fetus.”
The brain is an organ, too. For all its metaphysical magnificence, it’s a hunk of cells that comes with operating specs. Again, don’t let its temperature get too high: in 2018, Basu published a study showing the effect of seasonal temperatures on mental health. A ten-degree-Fahrenheit jump in temperature during the warm season was associated with an increase in emergency-room visits for “mental-health disorders, self-injury/suicide, and intentional injury/homicide” of 4.8, 5.8, and 7.9 per cent, respectively. Those are big numbers, and the search for mechanisms that explain them is fascinating. Among other things, certain medications impede the body’s ability to thermoregulate: beta-blockers, for instance, decrease the flow of blood to the skin, and antidepressants can increase sweating, Basu told me. “There’s also some evidence to show that heat affects neurotransmitters themselves—that everything is just a little bit slower.”
Both these effects show up more strongly in this country in Black and Hispanic patients—probably, as Basu explained, because those groups disproportionately live in low-income neighborhoods. “They’re often in areas where there are more fossil-fuel emissions, fewer green spaces, and more blacktop and cement, which really absorbs and retains the heat,” she said. “And also living closer to freeways. That exacerbates air pollution. And, with the heat, that’s a synergistic effect. It’s environmental racism that leads to these differences in exposure.” Some people, she added, bristle at hearing that: “Someone said to me, ‘Oh, so now we’re breathing different air?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right. We can track it down to the Zip Code level.’ ” Call it critical race epidemiology.
Which leads us, of course, back to politics. There’s only so much that doctors can do to help us deal with heat; ultimately, it’s up to the Joe Bidens and the Joe Manchins—and the Xi Jinpings—of the world. “We’re seeing these kinds of extreme temperatures in Palm Springs right now,” Basu said. “If we start to see those in more populated areas, imagine the public-health impact.” That’s obviously what’s coming. Last week, researchers at nasa and noaafound that, according to satellite data, “the earth is warming faster than expected” and that the planet’s energy imbalance—the difference between how much of the sun’s energy the planet absorbs and how much radiates back out to space—has doubled since 2005, an increase equivalent to “every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once.” And the National Weather Service is forecasting a heatwave this week for the Pacific Northwest that could smash regional records.
Amid the endless deal-making—the U.S. last backed off what would have been a G-7 plan to end coal use—the human body is a useful bottom line. “I think what we need to do is prevent the warming,” Basu said, when I asked her for a prescription. “So it doesn’t get that hot.”
Passing the Mic
A 1999 graduate in sustainable design from the University of Virginia, Dana Robbins Schneider led sustainability efforts for many years at the commercial-real-estate giant J.L.L. As the director of sustainability at the Empire State Realty Trust, she oversaw an energy-efficiency retrofit of the iconic Manhattan skyscraper on Thirty-fourth Street, which demonstrated how landlords could save both carbon and money, and which helped pave the way for Local Law 97, the city’s effort to force large buildings to improve their energy performance. (Our interview has been edited.)
How did the Empire State Building retrofit come about? What are the bottom-line before-and-after numbers?
The Empire State Building’s ten-year energy-efficiency retrofit started as an exercise to prove—or disprove—that there could be an investment-and-return business case for deep energy retrofits. Once it was proven, it was implemented to save energy and reduce costs for both the tenants and Empire State Realty Trust. We partnered with the Clinton Climate Initiative, Rocky Mountain Institute, Johnson Controls, and J.L.L. to manage the project. Through the rebuild, we were able to cut emissions from the building by fifty-four per cent and counting, which has saved us upward of four million dollars each year, with a 3.1-year payback. We have attempted to inform policy with local, state, and federal governments to share what we’ve learned to reduce emissions—and to meet E.S.R.T.’s target for the building to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
As a result of the retrofit, the building is in the top twenty per cent in energy efficiency among all measured buildings in the United States. E.S.R.T. is the nation’s largest user of a hundred-per-cent green power in real estate and was named Energy Star Partner of the Year in 2021.
What were the key interventions? And do people working in the building even realize that much has changed?
The biggest lesson we learned was that there is no silver bullet—there is silver buckshot. A combination of measures that interact effectively delivers optimal savings. More than fifty per cent of the energy consumed in an office building is consumed by tenants, so the actions of tenants are critical. Landlord-tenant partnerships are the only way to drive deep energy-and-emissions reductions in the built environment.
The best practice for the lowest-cost implementation of energy-efficiency strategies is to make the right steps in the right order. Start with the envelope, or the exterior, of the building. Each project contributes to the success of other projects, so, when we measure effectiveness and R.O.I., it’s important to look at how each project interacts with another.
We were able to decrease energy use through strategic tactics throughout the building, with an emphasis on the reuse of existing resources. We executed eight major projects, which included:
Renovation of the central chiller plant.
On-site refurbishment of all sixty-five hundred and fourteen of the building’s double-glass windows, for which we reused more than ninety-six per cent of existing materials, to quadruple their performance.
Reflective insulation placed behind each radiator, to reduce energy.
Regenerative braking technology added to each elevator, to store energy instead of heat.
Do you hear from other building owners wondering how to do this? What do you think are the keys to getting it done?
From the earliest announcement, we have shared all our work for free with the public, and we have rolled out best practices from the Empire State Building’s deep energy retrofit to our entire portfolio. E.S.R.T. has a target to achieve carbon neutrality as a commercial portfolio by 2035. With Local Law 97 emissions limits effective in 2024, many building owners are unsure of how to make their buildings compliant. Our chairman, president, and C.E.O. serves on the LL97 Advisory Board and on the LL97 Technical Pathways for Commercial Buildings Working Group to develop and improve policy based on practice, and we are the only commercial landlord to serve on the Implementation Advisory Board.
The Empire State Building has long been a modern marvel, and we intend to keep that reputation as we transparently share our research and best practices in our annual sustainability report. As we prove that it works in the “World’s Most Famous Building,” which this year celebrates its ninetieth anniversary, we prove that it can work anywhere.
Climate School
The searing heat in Arizona and Utah has translated into early-season wildfires. The Pack Creek Fire, in the La Sal Mountains, scorched, among many other things, Ken and Jane Sleight’s Pack Creek Ranch, a literary landmark, where for decades many of the region’s writers have gathered. Some of them have put together a chapbook, “La Sal Mountain Elegies,” which includes Terry Tempest Williams’s account of being at the ranch, in 1989, on the day that Edward Abbey died.
There’s another controversy emerging at the Nature Conservancy.—this time about the use of forests. Last summer, a coalition of environmental groups around the country sent T.N.C. a letter asking it to reëvaluate support for promoting forestry as a “natural climate solution” and, in particular, to come out against burning trees to produce electricity—the so-called biomass energy that scientists now understand to be a major climate threat and that sociologists know to be a prime example of environmental racism. T.N.C. executives replied in a letter, saying that “reasonable people can disagree on approaches.” (I should note that I served for a decade as a board member of the Adirondack chapter of the Conservancy, and last winter I participated in a fund-raiser for it.) T.N.C. gets things done, but one of its strengths—access to lots of high-powered financial players who can bankroll their conservation efforts—can sometimes pose a problem, at least of optics. A board member and investor from Enviva sits on the group’s advisory board for its NatureVest “in-house impact investing program,” and Enviva is building plants across the Southeast to produce wood pellets for burning in European power plants. Danna Smith, of the Dogwood Alliance, which led the coalition that sent the letter last summer, told me, “Unfortunately, T.N.C. seems to be centering the financial interests of large landowners, investors, and corporations in ways that are seriously undermining efforts to protect biodiversity, solve the climate crisis, and advance environmental justice.”(In a statement, T.N.C. noted that it “only supports qualified use of biomass for energy generation produced as a by-product of native forest restoration,” and added that all of its decisions, “including on biomass, are informed by science, and are not influenced by the business relationships of any of our independent advisors. TNC is not engaged with Enviva, and we have no partnerships or plans for partnering with them.”)
Here’s a revealing examination of the weaknesses of carbon offsets: some University of California professors studying the system’s efforts to go carbon-neutral scrutinized the offsets that it was spending millions to purchase—and discovered that it was paying landfills in low-regulation states to burn methane as it was emitted by rotting garbage. This has, at best, a modest effect on greenhouse gases, and seems a very long way from the visionary leadership one would expect from one of the world’s greatest public university systems.
Writing in The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer lays out a useful case for the proposition that renewable-energy costs have become so low that they’re now driving rapid change even in politics and economics. What he calls the “green vortex” demonstrates “how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.”
Anyone who’s lived in upstate New York or Vermont knows, and generally loves, Stewart’s Shops. The chain of convenience stores, based in Saratoga County, is the Wawa of the North. But, because it derives much of its income from selling gasoline, Stewart’s Shops is objecting to legislation passed, in April, by the New York State Senate mandating that only zero-emissions cars be sold by 2035. In an excellent letter to the Albany Times Union, a New Lebanon resident named Elizabeth Poreba chides the chain for embracing “nostalgia as a business plan.” (Maybe the executives figure that, if temperatures continue to rise, sales of its renowned ice cream will, too.)
Meanwhile, climate action from the state legislature in Albany seems to have ground to a halt, as the veteran activist Pete Sikora, of New York Communities for Change, points out. “For another year, legislators slinked out of Albany after failing to take climate action,” he writes. His remedy: more activism. Victories such as New York’s ban on fracking and the divestment of its pension fund from fossil fuels were “not won in dingy backrooms,” he writes, adding that it took “handing out leaflets, holding signs as backdrops for press conferences, blocking entrances to government offices to draw attention to the issues, lobbying and calling representatives to carry the day.” (On Tuesday, Sikora predicted that, if early election returns hold and Eric Adams is New York City’s next mayor, the city’s efforts to force buildings to conserve energy may be derailed.)
Scoreboard
A new report from Clean Energy Canada finds that, if the country pushed hard for a renewable-energy switch, the new jobs created by 2030 would far outnumber those lost as fossil fuels decline.
A United Nations report found that drought has affected 1.5 billion people so far this century. According to Mami Mizutori, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, “this number will grow dramatically unless the world gets better at managing this risk and understanding its root causes and taking action to stop them.” Meanwhile, the U.N.’s eighty-five-billion-dollar pension fund has set out to decarbonize its portfolio: a forty-per-cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 2019 levels by 2025 is the target, with divestment from fossil-fuel stocks a key tool.
Warming Up
I have no idea who the Climate Change Jazz Fighters are—although I’m guessing from the song title “No More Petrol” that they may be European—but their album “Fridays for Future” is breezy listening on a hot summer afternoon.
This man spent last year flushing hundreds of toilets. The new fear as the pandemic wanes: Legionnaires’ disease
Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
LAS VEGAS – Michael Hurtado spent the past year of the pandemic flushing toilets. Once a week. Hundreds of toilets. Thousands of times.
“Every week, we go through the entire property and flush every toilet, run every hand sink, turn on every shower. You start at one end of the floor, and by the time you get back, you can turn them off,” he said.
Hurtado is the lead engineer for the Ahern Hotel, right off the Las Vegas strip. It’s officially been closed during the pandemic, and Hurtado had the job of keeping the building systems safe despite the lack of guests.
“It easily takes 60 hours a week every single week for my team,” he said.
Keeping water moving is necessary to protect shut-down buildings against pathogens that can build up in their miles of pipes.
The one that keeps safety experts up at night is Legionella pneumophila, the bacteria that causes 95% of Legionnaires’ disease cases. It kills at least 1,000 Americans a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s almost certain that we’re going to be at risk for more Legionnaires’ disease cases after the shutdown,” said Michele Swanson, a professor of microbiology at the University of Michigan and an expert on Legionella.
The bacteria occurs naturally in ponds and streams and most often becomes a problem when it sits in stagnant, lukewarm, unchlorinated water and multiplies, said Swanson, a member of a National Academies of Sciences committee that wrote a report in 2020 on the management of Legionella in water systems.
Those are exactly the conditions that can occur in the pipes of a closed building. The hot water cools to prime Legionella growing temperatures. Chlorine from the municipal water treatment system doesn’t last long in stagnant pipes, said Chris Nancrede of Nancrede Engineering, an Indianapolis company that specializes in Legionella control systems and services.
“Without new water flowing through the hot water system to push out the old, it can dissipate rapidly,” he said.
Empty rooms and clean pipes
Water management companies said they’re getting double and triple the usual number of calls as buildings get ready to reopen.
“Calls have been through the roof,” said Brian Waymire, CEO of IWC Innovations in Greenwood, Indiana. His staff has treated hotels, corporate buildings, health care facilities, sports arenas and residential buildings in 45 states.
One of those calls was from the Ahern, which is working with IWC to create a water management plan before the hotel’s planned third-quarter opening.
If there’s been one silver lining of COVID-19, it’s that people are thinking of biosafety in ways they hadn’t, said Keith Wright, the Ahern’s general manager.
“People are coming to Las Vegas to have fun, not to get sick. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said.
Wright, Hurtado and the IWC team spent a day last month taking water samples from taps throughout the hotel, recording temperatures from hot water spigots and tracking the water system in the eight-story, 200-room hotel and conference center.
That included crawling around bedroom-sized air conditioning units, inspecting boilers the size of bathrooms and climbing multistory cooling towers.
What they found impressed them. “This place is so clean, you could eat off the floor,” said Bill Pearson, the company’s chief science officer. Even the stainless steel on the pipes coming out of the cooling units gleamed.
Legionella pneumophila (stained red) can survive and replicate within the lungs’ white blood cells (DNA stained blue and cytoskeletal network stained green) and cause Legionnaires’ disease.
Hard to catch but deadly
Legionnaires’ disease is rare but deadly, and a single case can scar the reputation of a building for years.
The main avenue for infection is breathing in Legionella-contaminated water mist. Symptoms include cough, shortness of breath, muscle aches, headache and fever.
The CDC estimated less than 5% of people are likely to become ill if exposed. The greatest risk is to older people, smokers and those with compromised immune systems.
Of those who fall ill, 10% will die.
To guard against a flare in cases, the CDC issued guidance last year on how to safely reopen buildings after prolonged shutdowns.
Not even the nation’s premier health agency was safe. In August, several Atlanta office buildings where the CDC leased space had to be closed after Legionella was found in water systems.
In San Francisco, the Public Utilities Commission was so worried by the number of large buildings where water consumption was down 50% to 70%, it sent out guidance to 952 of them on how to safely flush pipes when they opened again.
Though water engineers have to worry about Legionnaires’ disease everywhere, the general public shouldn’t, said Richard Miller, a longtime Legionella researcher at the University of Louisville, who runs a consulting business.
Legionnaires’ disease is not contagious, and people can’t get it from drinking water. It can be contracted only by inhaling the bacteria.
“If you drink water that’s got Legionella in it, there’s no disease because your stomach acid kills it off,” Pearson said.
The biggest danger zone is health care facilities, because they have vulnerable populations. The CDC estimated 25% of Legionnaire’s disease cases acquired in health care settings were fatal.
For the general public, hotel showers are where most cases start.
“Taking a bath is not as big an issue. It’s the shower at the hotel,” Miller said. “Office buildings aren’t nearly the same risk because you don’t stay the night.”
Other sources of infection are decorative fountains, hot tubs and cooling towers that are part of large-scale air conditioning systems. In 2015, a single cooling tower in a New York City building was responsible for an outbreak that sickened 138 people and killed 16, some of whom lived blocks away.
Remediation
Well-maintained water systems with properly followed water management plans generally don’t have problems, experts said.
“Basically, keep the hot water hot, the cold water cold and everything moving,” said Mark LeChevallier, who led research programs for 32 years at American Water, a multistate utility.
When things go wrong, the most common remedy is to inject high levels of chlorine into a building’s water system and let it sit for up to 12 hours.
It’s not a simple fix. A building’s entire water system must be shut down, which requires signs posted at every water source and staff to enforce it.
“Then when it’s done, you have to open every tap, turn on every shower and flush every toilet until the chlorine is back down to less than 4 parts per million. You can’t miss anything,” said Pearson, who has overseen hundreds of such cleanings.
The cost is $10,000 to $25,000 for a typical building, he said, but it can go much higher.
“That’s why buildings need to get water management plans; it’s a lot cheaper than having to remediate,” he said.
Eventually, buildings might be engineered to make Legionella impossible, but that’s a long-term goal, Nancrede said.
“The whole field of Legionella detection and control is very young. We’re in a constant state of learning,” he said.
The newest ideas include filters to catch bacteria, ultraviolet light to disinfect the water stream, pipes resistant to biofilm formation and designing buildings so the bacteria can’t grow.
“We’re starting to talk about engineering Legionella out of systems, so no chemicals are needed,” Nancrede said. “But then you need to talk about how many feet per second the water is moving and what size the pipes are, so you have a certain velocity.”
For now, the best offense is a good defense.
“You don’t want to make people sick, and you don’t want to kill people,” Nancrede said. “It’s not a razzle-dazzle thing, you just need to plan.”
