Health officials say Tustin hangar fire didn’t pose big health risk

Health officials say last month’s Tustin hangar fire put the community at minimal risk of exposure to harmful contaminants, based on the results of air monitoring near the site.

Orange County Health Officer Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong said during a community webinar held Thursday, Dec. 28, that people further away from the hangar can resume normal activities, but people in the immediate area might want to “take more precautions” until the city’s contractors test homes for asbestos and lead. She did not offer specifics about what constituted a dangerous or safe distance from the fire zone, and a spokesperson for Tustin said details are still to come on how residents can request testing of their homes.

Throughout the hour-long webinar, health experts from government agencies and universities gave their thoughts on the health risks the fire posed to nearby residents, basing their opinions on test results. They emphasized that asbestos was not detected in the air.

The fire that broke out on Nov. 7 at the Marine Corps Air Station’s northern blimp hangar emitted asbestos debris into surrounding neighborhoods and forced the city to initiate a cleanup effort for over a thousand homes. The cleaning work is ongoing and residents have continued to ask questions about possible health risks associated with the fire.

Arthur Frank, an expert on the health risks associated with asbestos exposure and a professor of  environmental and occupational health at Drexel University, said everyone inhales millions of asbestos fibers in their lifetime. He added that even if there were some elevated amount of asbestos in the air from the fire, the risk to an individual would be so small it would likely be unmeasurable.

The asbestos debris at the site has been encased and can be cleaned up in a way that poses no risk to workers or the community, Frank said. The California Department of Toxic Substances Control will provide oversight for the Navy’s clean-up plan at the hangar site.

Frank said finding asbestos fibers “here or there” is not unexpected “given that literally every place in the world has some background level of asbestos.”

“I would not be concerned, with the data that we have, that there’s going to be any risk to folks in the community,” Frank said.

Chinsio-Kwong, who moderated the webinar, said residents want to know if they were at risk at the start of the fire because they came outside to take pictures or touched some debris. She asked Frank if such actions constituted a low-risk exposure.

“It would be a very low risk of exposure, sort of a one-time handling of some debris that probably was mostly something else other than asbestos, even if there were some extra fibers that they breathed,” Frank said. “Again, I’m not going to say the risk over a lifetime was zero. But I’m going to say the risk is so low it would be scientifically unmeasurable. It’s not something folks ought to be concerned about.”

Frank recommended that people tell their doctors to put a note in their health records indicating they lived near the fire.

The county health agency has said residents can use their heating, ventilation and air conditioning units without fear of asbestos contamination related to the fire.

Oladele Ogunseitan, a professor in UC Irvine’s Department of Population Health and Disease Prevention who researches toxic environmental pollution, said the data was reassuring because they show no ongoing contamination risk to people in the surrounding neighborhoods. He added that while initial concerns were warranted, the exposure is not something to continue worrying about.

Agencies tested for hazardous air pollutants at more than 30 places around the hangar, said Christopher Kuhlman, a toxicologist and industrial hygienist at the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health. No asbestos has been detected in more than 900 air samples.

Residents also have raised questions about exposure to any metals that may have become airborne as a result of the fire. Of the 700 samples of lead in the air, there were 10 detections in the two weeks after the Nov. 7 fire, Kuhlman said. Six of the detections were from samples at monitoring stations along the fence line near the hangar. Air monitoring stations last detected lead on Nov. 20.

There were seven detections of volatile organic compounds, from samples collected by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, but all were at common background levels and there have been zero detections since Nov. 15.

After the fire broke out, AQMD detected lead and arsenic in the smoke plume’s area. There were 30 samples of air that had aluminum, antimony, barium, manganese and zinc metals collectively that were collected later. Kuhlman said the vast majority of the testing samples however did not detect these and other metals.