What California Industrial Fires Leave Behind | Michael Hogan

In California, our fire season is now almost a whole year. And on top of it, these fires are hitting residential areas and we are having fires in warehouses and industrial places as well. There's a lingering impact of these fires that are invisible, and a lot of people don't talk about them. Today, we sit down with Michael Hogan, who's a university researcher, professor, and Kim Bright, founder of Brightcore, to understand the lingering and long-term impact of these fires. We had thousands of people affected by the Moss Landing Battery Plant plume. Half of them really didn't have remedies. They didn't have ways of escape. They didn't know their level of danger. Humans are now ingesting six times more microplastics than they did in 1990. And if microplastic plaque is discovered in your arteries or your veins, you are 4.5 times more likely to die from a heart attack or a stroke. I'm Siamak. Welcome to California Insider. Michael, it's great to have you on. Welcome back. Pleasure to be back, Siamak. We want to talk to you about industrial fires and fires in California. When these industrial fires happen, it takes weeks to put them out. And the health sides of it, there's some invisible factors, lingering factors, that most of the community is not sure about. We just had a fire in LA in Boyle Heights that there were some odor afterwards. Community was wondering what's going on. What are your thoughts? What's going on with these fires? Let me give you a backdrop on the regulatory side. We didn't even keep track of major industrial fires until the last five years. The Clean Air Act was signed by Reagan. I was actually on the National Academy of Sciences that did the work that presented it to him. And that laid the groundwork for what should have happened. It wasn't until D.H.W. Bush, who passed amendments that required mandatory reporting of big industrial fires. But it actually wasn't until the first Trump term that Trump mandated that all major industrial fires be reported. So we only have five years of national data that are clear on the record. And what we know is that the number of these fires is increasing fairly dramatically over the period 2019 to 2025, January, that the data is clear that nationally we have a big upsurge in these fires. But there are several elements in Boyle Heights that really need to be articulated for people to understand the severity and what's going on. The East Palestine fire, this was in Ohio a couple of years ago. And this was actually one of our big fires that got a lot of national attention. It was a train wreck, literally a train wreck. And the cause was twofold. One is that the hazardous materials designation on the tank cars was not labeled properly. So none of the crew really knew what they were carrying and the firefighters couldn't see what was the contents that they were trying to fight. The other factor is that there was an axle problem and the sensors on the rail line should have detected this. So this was a federal oversight issue where the federal government should be maintaining its rail sensors and that would have totally prevented this fire. So one of the things I want to get across is that most of these fires are totally preventable. And the East Palestine fire got national attention. It went on for four days. It was a disaster in every form. Half of the town of East Palestine had to be evacuated. There were many respiratory impacts to people. We don't even have a good death toll number. They claim there were no deaths, but the coroners are often told not to report deaths over a few hundred feet away from these fires. That's one of the underlying reporting problems. This featured vinyl chloride, which is a very toxic chemical. And the firefighters, when they arrived, literally had no idea how to fight the fire. They didn't know what chemicals they were fighting because of the lack of signage on the cars. And most firefighters, this is not the fault of the firefighters, they're strong and brave, but most firefighters do not have the chemical training to understand the different methods of fighting. And they were not given instructions from the top. So consequently, the fire went on for four days. It caused massive numbers of respiratory illnesses. And we don't even know what the long-term impacts are because they don't seem to be tracking it carefully. It also caused many, many tons of soil impacts. Soil and groundwater were severely impacted. So the residents will continue to drink toxic water of some level. They claim they've got it abated, mitigated, but this is a long-term impact. So these fires in general, the chemical fires, have very big health and environmental impacts. Now back to Boyle Heights, which is closer to where you and I are. First of all, it was interesting that most of the salient facts are not reported in the press in a timely way. So we didn't learn what the cause of the Boyle Heights fire was until well after the fire. The cause was actually solar panels on the roof. And it was accelerated by the fact that there were lithium ion batteries in the plant, which made it much more difficult to extinguish. So that was the causation. The chemicals were different. We have a more obscure chemical in the foam of the building, which is called polyisocyanurirate. I'm not expecting people to remember that, but it's another one of these exotic chemicals that is flammable and causes toxic emissions. And there were thousands of people affected. It was strange because there was no formal evacuation or people were recommended to stay in place. So I was talking hourly on the phone with friends of mine in that area, and they were just totally baffled. They weren't given clear instructions as to the level of risk, whether they should flee farther. This lack of information to the public is as much of a problem as the toxicity of the plume. We also had severe aftermath. What we do know is there were over 100,000 people that were in the smoke plume in one way or another, relative degrees of severity, and it burned for about a week. Again, the firefighters didn't know how to respond. They weren't trained in the specifics, and they didn't get the information either. In this quick case, we have a very large governmental unit called the City of Los Angeles, and the City of Los Angeles just did not dispense the information fast enough to the firefighters to give them a clear path forward or a communication path to the public. It's a big issue. Again, I stress there are two components. One is the toxicity itself and the lingering toxicity in soils and lingering in the lungs, as we've talked about previously with lithium-ion batteries. Since there were lithium-ion batteries in this fire, there was some cobalt as well. Those effects linger. That cobalt particulate, as we know from battery plant explosions, gets down in the lower part of the lungs, called the alveoli, and because these particles are jagged, it rests there for decades. That's why we saw so many deaths in the aftermath of 9-11, which were delayed. They were delayed by decades. We lost 3,000 heroic firefighters and occupants of the Twin Towers on the day of 9-11, but we lost 30,000 other lives from these lingering effects, these carcinogenic effects where the heavy metals linger in the alveoli of the lungs. Michael, who will get impacted in these fires? Is it the people that are in the immediate vicinity? Each one is different, of course, but the general answer is miles. The plumes for these go for miles away. With Moss Landing, I've done detailed calculations and we found that the plumes readily went out 15 miles, and so it's a big impact zone, and the people that are farther away don't get, really don't typically get enough information to know what their relative danger was. If I were within 15 miles of the Moss Landing fire, I'm lucky I'm about 20 miles away and more on the side than downwind, but if I had been anywhere in that impact zone in 15 miles, I would have just left. I would have gone to some hotel or some other property. And for how long does it stay in the air? Each one is different, of course. The worst are the battery plants because what we know from Moss Landing battery plant explosion which was the biggest in California's history is that the plume, it wasn't really a fire, it was a continuing explosion, and it kept exploding for almost a month. Now, the other two fires we've talked about, the East Palestine and the Boyle Heights, those are really more on the order of four to six days, each one of those. So they do, all of them last very long time, both because of the, what I've indicated above that the firefighters are not prepared with the chemistry to attack these fires properly there. It's not even their own knowledge. They're often told, as in the Moss Landing fire, they were given orders to stand down and not fight the fire. We are having more of these fires. You said the numbers are going up. We are hearing more about them in the news. They are big ones now. Is this a trend in your opinion? Well, it's not my opinion. So again, since 2019, we actually have hard data on industrial fires, and they've been going up at a rather rapid rate. But that rate has actually surpassed, if you just look isolatedly at the lithium-ion battery fires, those went up by roughly a factor of eight in a four-year period from 2020 to 2025. So both types, both the general chemical fires and the lithium-ion battery explosions are going up dramatically. And we have a lot of these plants in California, especially the battery plants. There's a thought that some of them are gonna be LFPs, or there's a different kind that doesn't get on fire. Batteries, what's the split right now? They're virtually all lithium-ion battery plants at present, both the ones that exist and the ones that are in process. Now, we do have other types of chemical batteries that are under development, they exist, and we should certainly be trying them. And we even have non-battery methods. There are many ways to store energy. If you're concerned about storing energy, there are all kinds of ways, from hydroelectric to sand to gravity. Have you heard of the gravity battery? That's where you have a large weight, and you raise, and it's actually in commercial use on smaller scales. You actually take excess energy and you raise the weight 10 stories high, and then when you need energy, you let the weight fall slowly. It sounds ridiculous, but what I'm trying to point out is there are many types of ways of storing energy. And we've gotten way ahead of our skis in the use of lithium-ion batteries, which are the most hazardous. And in terms of these fires, how should we prepare? You mentioned the fire department doesn't know how to deal with them. And how should we prepare for that? Is there a way that they can fight these fires better? Certainly, the firefighters should be given more training in the chemistry of these fires. And of course, that varies in each area. We have different chemical plants in the Central Coast, very few chemical plants, whereas in other parts of the country, in the Rust Belt and LA, you have many types of very hazardous chemical plants. So they need to be trained locally on the types of chemicals that are present in their districts. That just takes time. That's like going back to college and learning what these substances are like and which ones can be fought with traditional means, like water, which things can be fought by certain types of foam, and which fires, like lithium-ion batteries, are almost impossible to fight. Now, in terms of these fires, I mean, the size of these plants, some of them are gigantic, and we are hearing about these bigger fires. Are we building big complexes, too big of complexes, or is there something we've done that's changed? Like we're building big warehouses, or is this just the way it is? Now we're having more of these fires. Is this the material inside these warehouses? Is it that we're having bigger warehouses? What are your thoughts on that? You're on to something. We're definitely building at bigger scales. We are definitely building these too-close-to-residential areas. That's a very big effect. If we want to have some of these plants in operation, they just don't belong anywhere near people, whether it's a battery plant or a big chemical plant. You come across something like East Palestine, where it was a rail explosion. That could happen anywhere. So it's definitely a scale that we're building very large plants, but that's not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that we're not respecting the chemistry of the things that we're using. We're not respecting the fact that these are very different things than even existed in society 20 or 30 years ago. You mentioned about the battery plants. We don't have a solution to putting out those fires. It seems odd a little bit. Are we, what are your thoughts on that? Number one is that, as I said, we're ahead of our skis with lithium-ion batteries. We shouldn't be placing so much emphasis. The only reason we've been developing them in California is to support offshore wind. And if you've noticed the headlines recently, the offshore wind plants are getting canceled one by one. Humboldt just got canceled last week. So the whole raison d'etre for battery plants has subsided. We don't really have the kind of need if we're not going to have massive amounts of offshore wind. And that's one thing I emphasized in our last discussion that offshore wind and battery plants are joined at the hip. One doesn't even exist without the other. What about the residents that live in these communities? And when we hear there's a fire or there's a big chemical leak, what do you recommend to people? What should we do? Well, I mean, first of all, this is a great tragedy. We interviewed with our California Arts and Sciences Institute. We actually interviewed and had them on stage to tell their stories. And it's just a series of tragedies. The people who were in this were helpless. They weren't given clear instructions on their level of danger. They didn't, in many cases, have the economic means to readily move. They had larger families or infants, which made even temporary relocation difficult. So there were many, many, I mean, we had thousands of people affected by the Moss Landing Battery Plant flood. And half of them really didn't have remedies. They didn't have ways of escape. They didn't know their level of danger. Most of them sheltered in place and had what we now believe to be long-term pulmonary exposure to the cobalt. So the human tragedy is enormous. And we don't really even hear very much about that in the press. Once the event's over, the press gets bored and moves on to the next story. But the ongoing tragedies of lives of people who lived in the vicinity of Moss Landing is enormous. You mentioned sheltering in place. A lot of times people are told to shelter in place. Is that not a good idea? Should people leave the area? Well, as a scientist, I would leave. Shelter in place systems that your home doesn't breathe. Our homes actually inhale and exhale a lot of air. So while it does reduce the amount of particulate exposure, the chemical exposure continues even if you shelter in place. Of course, each home is different. Some of our modern homes have extremely high insulation. And so don't breathe as much, but most traditional homes breathe quite a bit. So shelter in place, it's not really a solution. It's a Band-Aid. And that's why many of the regulatory authorities put out the Band-Aid, because they feel like they should be saying something. It looks like we're having these major fires now more and more. In your thoughts, who should be doing this work of letting the residents know and educating the public about these type of fires? Well, most of it comes down to local authorities. We need to have very smart people who are the mayors of our cities and our boards of supervisors. And in many cases, we don't have people in those positions that know very much at all about this kind of science or about the toxicity. But that's where it really belongs. It's at the local level. It'd be good to have some direction from the state that would be helpful. But most of it is local control. The factories are built with local approval and they are supervised at the firefighting level with local approval. And that's really where the buck stops. Next, we look into the major LA fires that happened last year and the invisible impacts that many people didn't see. According to California officials, the death toll was only 31. But a new study has found that the death toll was much higher because of air pollution and other factors. Today, we sit down with Kim Bright, founder of Brightcore, who's a sponsor of the show, to talk to her about what were the factors behind these deaths. Kim, it's great to have you on, welcome. Well, thank you very much, Siamak. We want to talk to you about a phenomenon that many people may not know about in LA. There's a study that's showing that the death tolls from the fires were a lot more. Can you tell us about this study? Well, these additional 409 deaths, that's just the tip of the iceberg. First of all, it's very hard for them to attribute the deaths after the fact. And secondly, it takes time for these health effects to be realized. So that number is only going to go up. And you know, we so often hear about air pollution, but perhaps the most concerning part of air pollution is something that we've been hearing about more and more and more, which is microplastics. And this is not something that's just affecting people in California. This is a global epidemic that we are all facing. I mean, we are inhaling microplastics with every breath we take. And the average American is inhaling 68,000 microplastic particles every single day. And we're not only getting it from what we breathe in, these microplastics are actually finding their way into our soil, our water, and they work their way up through the food chain and then end up on our dinner plate. And recent studies out there and research is showing that microplastics are now found in 94% of the drinking water in the United States and 88% of our meat, seafood, and other protein sources. And the problem's only getting worse. For those of us that are not familiar with microplastics, what are they? Well, microplastics are these tiny plastic particles, usually smaller than five millimeters. And they form when the larger plastic items are breaking down through sunlight, heat, and friction. And the problem is they never go away. They just keep breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces and eventually they become something called nanoplastics. Now, those are so small, but they pose an equally great health risk and they're found everywhere. And they're found, again, in our oceans, in our rivers, our soil, our food, our drinking water, and even our air. And because these particles are so small, they easily move through the food chain and enter the bloodstream and into our organs. So how do these microplastics get into our body? Well, they're absorbed in through our skin and we ingest them into the gastrointestinal system and we also inhale them through our lungs. Now, the tendency is for people to think that avoiding plastic bottles and utensils will save them from the problem, but that just isn't the case. Researchers recently discovered that the average person contains seven grams or about one teaspoon of microplastics in their brain. That means we're 99.5% human and 0.5% plastic. And if you compare charts side by side, you'll see that the explosion of early onset dementia and Alzheimer's and other mental health issues aligns almost perfectly with the rapid increase of plastic exposure. And they are now even finding it in our blood vessels. It's interesting you bring that up. I saw a clip about this. Let's take a look at this clip. White ones, we've got clear ones. Tons of microplastics wash ashore all over the world every day. And now for the first time, scientists in the Netherlands have detected microplastic pollution in human blood. All the microplastics and anaplastics we are exposed to, we inhale and we ingest, that actually, you know, there's so much plastic that it can even enter our bloodstream. The Dutch study on blood samples from healthy adults detected tiny plastic particles in 80% of people. Did you hear that? CIMAC, did you hear that? It's 80% and it's rapidly growing. Humans are now ingesting six times more microplastics than they did in 1990. And if microplastic plaque is discovered in your arteries or your veins, you are 4.5 times more likely to die from a heart attack or a stroke. You've done a lot of work on this, studying this for many years. What can we do about it? Well, avoiding plastic bottles and containers, synthetic materials like the polyester in almost everybody's clothing these days, and cutting down on packaged or processed foods, these are all important steps to do. But limiting the use of plastic is just not gonna be enough. I mean, you would literally have to live in a bubble and it would have to be a glass bubble in order to avoid it completely. So what you can do and what we must do is take steps to remove these toxins from our body before they can do irreversible damage. And there's a brand new study that came out and it just came out. It shows how this centuries-old food called kimchi can actually eliminate and extract microplastics from our body. Researchers isolated a specific strain of lactic acid bacteria and administered this bacteria to a test group. And when compared with the control group, the ones that didn't receive the lactic acid bacteria strain, they found twice as many microplastics excreted in the feces of those that got the strain. Now, essentially meaning that this lactic acid bacteria strain unique to kimchi was extremely effective in removing plastics in vivo. Now, this is just the most recent study showing kimchi's powerful ability to rid the body of harmful microplastics. And another strain that they found in kimchi called Bacillus pumilus has been shown to degrade BPA, which is the most toxic chemical in plastic. And the reason that kimchi's so effective is because of the direct impact that it has on our gut microbiome. Now, keeping our gut microbiome healthy and having that perfect balance of good and bad is what determines the health of our entire body. And we're talking about our immune health, our brain health, our cardiovascular health, because it's all directly related to the health of our gut. How does the gut connect to the brain? It absolutely does. The gut microbiome plays a central role in nearly every single system of our body. It acts as a command center for overall health. And the trillions of microbes in our gut directly affect the brain chemistry through the gut-brain access. Now, this is like a little highway that goes up the vagus nerve from our gut into our brain. And a balanced microbiome supports our energy levels, our mood, our cognitive function, while imbalances have been linked to hormonal disruptions and cognitive decline. And did you know that 90% of the serotonin that's in our brains originates in our gut? Did you know that? I didn't know. Yeah, and that is our happiness hormone. And it's responsible for our mood and feeling of wellbeing. And people that are suffering from depression and anxiety, they don't realize how crucial gut health is for alleviating these symptoms. And the reason that kimchi's so effective comes from its unmatched diversity of beneficial strains of bacteria. Kimchi is the king of fermented foods because it contains over 900 strains of beneficial bacteria that's going to keep your gut in balance. And for instance, sauerkraut, that only has 28 strains. And this is why there's so many studies, just volumes of studies about the health benefits of kimchi and not about other fermented foods. The key to getting all these benefits is that you have to consume kimchi every day on a daily basis. The only problem is that it's not something easy to eat every day. So that's why we created Kimchi One. And what that is is convenient capsules for your daily use. And we use a cold process drying method to retain all of the fiber and all of the nutrition of actual fermented kimchi and virtually no sodium, unlike store-bought. And it's 100% made in the USA, non-GMO, all natural. And CMF, we have so many people that are riding into us with their success with using Kimchi One. People that had all this bloating and digestion problems, they couldn't even go out and be with friends and socialize. These people are now living their better life because the bloating's gone. Their digestion is regular. So this is a great success for them. And then people that had problems with their immune system and they used to get sick all the time, they're not getting sick anymore. And people that experience chronic fatigue, and we know so many people, that was happening since 2020, they've got energy again. They feel so much more energy after taking Kimchi One. And people who've struggled with obesity, they're actually losing weight and feeling better. And there's actual studies out there that show that they are losing 32% body fat when they consume Kimchi every single day. So this is huge. And they don't have the side effects from these drugs that they're really pushing and promoting now. So this is all great stories that we have from people using our Kimchi One. Kim, this sounds really good. Do you have any offers for our audience? Yes, we do. They can get 25% off their order of Kimchi One by clicking the link below and using code CALIFORNIAINSIDER. Or for an even better deal, we want to have them call us and we will give them up to 50% off plus free shipping. So that number to call is 888-350-6128. And the first 100 callers are actually going to get a free bottle of our Thrive with their order. Now Thrive is our curcumin tumeric complex combined with ginger and black pepper extract. And that helps combat inflammation, boost brain function, and even promotes liver health. Now remember, you can only get these best discounts and that free bottle of Thrive when you call. And again, that number is 888-350-6128. Well, thank you, Kim, for coming and sharing all this information with us and your product. Thank you. You're most welcome, CIMAC. Have a beautiful day. Tell us what you think about these conversations. Have you or your community been impacted by the lingering effects of these fires? Make sure to tell us in the comments or email us at CIMAC at californiansiderer.com. We read all of your emails and comments. I'm CIMAC Korami. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.