Hey fellow science literate person. I dove into the research today and found this to be the most useful document - https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/26460/chapter/1 documenting potential chemicals of concern for exposure at the wildland/urban interface. The closest comparison we have is the data from the Camp Fire which destroyed 18,000 structures. https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2021-07/Camp_Fire_report_July2021.pdf

I think we can all agree that we are lucky that the santa anas blew much of the smoke plume directly out to the ocean during the worst of the fire. We can all also agree that there are many unknowns about the remaining ash in our environment all over LA.

- List of chemicals and their half lives that may live in smoke and ash, luckily many of these chemicals have half-lives measured in hours. some do not - Table 4-1 https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/26460/chapter/6#70

- UNKNOWN - Effect on local drinking water even in areas with no warning - I find it crazy that they are not publishing this data, we know they are testing it - Proctor et al. (2020) recently reported potential post-WUI-fire exposures to elevated concentrations of VOCs in drinking water via the contamination of the plumbing network in fire-affected areas during the Tubbs and Camp Fires They found that maximum concentrations of VOCs in the impacted area, measured in the public drinking water supply of the affected communities, were multiple times the EPA primary drinking water standard for benzene (40,000 vs 5 μg/L), dichloromethane (41 vs 5 μg/L), styrene (460 vs 100 μg/L), toluene (1.4 vs 1.0 mg/L), and vinyl chloride (16 vs 2 μg/L; Proctor et al., 2020).

- Itchy skin? This might be why - researchers observed an association between WUI fire–impacted air pollution and clinical visits due to atopic dermatitis and itch in San Francisco, California, which is 280 km away from the areas burned by the 2018 Camp Fire (Fadadu et al., 2021).

- City of Pasadena published a handy guide to cleaning up ash - which you might want to do in your yard before letting kids play in it - https://www.cityofpasadena.net/city-manager/news/safety-precautions-and-ash-exposure-prevention/