Science Friday - Hawaiʻi Wildfire Survivors Join Health Study | Wind Turbine Blade Sinks Off Massachusetts Coast

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

The University of Hawaiʻi study will be the largest of its kind to investigate the health and social impacts of the Maui wildfires. Also, fiberglass is washing up on Nantucket’s shores, and residents are concerned about the long-term environmental impact of this debris.Hawaiʻi Wildfire Survivors To Join Long-Term Health StudyNearly a year ago, Maui experienced a series of wildfires that caused major destruction and anguish for residents. More than 100 people died and thousands of structures were destroyed in what was the fifth deadliest wildland fire in U.S. history.Survivors of those fires are now taking part in the largest study of its kind to understand the health and social impacts of the Maui wildfires. The research team will sample the blood, DNA, and urine of participants over at least a decade to see if they develop conditions such as cancer. Researchers say this information will be essential as the island and its residents continue to recover.Casey Crownhart, climate reporter for the MIT Technology Review joins guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about this story and other top science news of the week, including California’s Park Fire.Damaged Wind Turbine Blade Sinks Off Massachusetts CoastA large piece of fiberglass debris from the damaged Vineyard Wind turbine blade has sunk to the ocean floor, as the debris cleanup continues, according to press release from the town of Nantucket that’s timestamped for 9:10 a.m.Town officials said that about half of the fiberglass shell of the blade remains attached and crews will continue to monitor it until a removal plan is developed. Most of the green and white foam fill dislodged during the initial failure last Saturday.They added that Vineyard wind is also developing a plan to test water quality around the island.“This complex undertaking involves engaging experts to determine the best path forward. To conduct the testing, specific information from GE’s Safety Data Sheets is required, which is expected to be delivered to Vineyard Wind today,” according to the press release.To read the full story, visit our website. Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Residents of Nantucket are worried about a giant wind turbine blade that crashed into the ocean in July. This huge piece of fiberglass came in, floated by us. This morning I found bets that were like one of our freckles. I mean, that's small. It's Friday, August 2nd, the best day of the week. It's Science Friday. I'm CyFri producer Deep Petersmith. The Biden administration has pushed the U.S.

towards more use of green energy, including offshore wind. But this recent accident off the coast of Massachusetts has some people worried about what exactly is in these wind turbine blades. We'll get to that story in just a bit. But first, here's Kathleen Davis with the biggest science stories of the week. California's park fire has been burning since July 24th, and it's become the fifth largest wildfire in the state's history. It's burned more than 600 square miles in northern California. And elsewhere, dozens of wildfires are also burning in Oregon, Washington, Washington, and throughout Canada.

If it feels like there are a lot of simultaneous fires out west this year, it's because there are. And climate change, unsurprisingly, seems to be making this worse. Joining me to talk about this and other science stories of the week is my guest. Casey Crownheart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review based in New York. Casey, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, Casey, let's start off here with this park fire in California.

What's the latest? Yeah, so like you said, this is already breaking records as one of the largest wildfires in California's history. So far in just, you know, a couple of weeks, it's burned almost 400,000 acres, or that's around 600 square miles. This fire didn't start naturally. A suspect has been arrested after allegedly pushing a burning car down an embankment. And officials say that seems to be what sparked this blaze. But it's really taken off and burned really fast. and really hot. Yeah, I mean, what were the conditions in California that kind of led to this fire just picking up steam so fast? Yeah, I mean, it's been pretty much perfect conditions for wildfire. We've seen really across the western U.S. and even Canada, heat waves, droughts, also strong winds have kind of worked together to boost wildfires across the west this season.

And we can really tie a couple of those conditions, the heat and that dry weather to climate change, which is why, even though obviously somebody had something to do with starting this fire, we can also really point to climate change as a reason that it's gotten so bad, so fast. And as we said, there are lots of wildfires going on alongside those park fire. And there's new information that posits that situations like we're experiencing now is probably due to climate change, right? Absolutely. I mean, we see heat waves which really dry out vegetation, all of the droughts across the area as well.

all of these conditions are really turning the West into just an absolute tinderbox for these wildfires. And so we're going to probably keep seeing worse and worse fire seasons in the future. We're thinking of everybody who's affected by all the wildfires going on right now. And I want to actually take us back in time to a wildfire from last year, the Maui fires. There's a study going on that's actually looking at long-term effects of these fires on the survivors. Tell me a little bit about this. Yeah. So last year, last August, there were devastating wildfires, like you said, on the island of Maui.

That fire killed around 100 people, and survivors are still dealing with about $5 billion in damages on the island. But there are also really long-term health effects that we know can come after these wildfires happen. And so researchers have just gotten funding for a new, long-term study to follow people after these blazes and see what kind of health effects they're dealing with. So this would be one of the biggest and one of the longest term studies of its kind. Researchers have already enrolled over 800 participants to try and track their health after this fire. I mean, what specific health problems are they looking for? So, I mean, some of it is things that you would probably expect.

So things like respiratory problems, also high blood pressure, other kinds of cardiovascular conditions, and things like mental health challenges as well. But because this is also a big and a long-term study, they'll be able to check for other sorts of things as well. So they're looking for things like different rates of different cancers and stuff like that as well. Yeah, I mean, how long into the future is this study going to go on? So they're hoping to follow participants for at least a decade, maybe even two. Wow. And it all kind of depends on how much funding they're able to get.

They also say that they could have up to 2,000 total participants, including children, depending on if all that money comes through for them. Okay, let's move on to another big news story from this week, this Listeria outbreak that's broken out in Deli Meats. What's the latest here, Casey? Yeah, so there's a really, really big outbreak going on right now. And Boar's Head has recalled about 7 million pounds of products across 71 products in its portfolio. And the reason is because of concerns about Listeria. So this is a foodborne illness that can make people sick and in worst cases be deadly. So officials have. have tied this outbreak to meat that's been packaged between May and July in a food processing plant in Virginia. But the outbreak has already killed two people and hospitalized at least 33 across 13 states. So it's a very, very big outbreak. Wow. So how does Listeria spread? Listeria is actually a bacteria and it can hang around in food processing plants. And if it gets into food like deli meat, which you don't typically cook before you eat it, it can end up in your food and end up in your

digestive system and end up passing into your blood and making you sick. In the worst cases, it can actually cross the blood-brain barrier, which is why, though this is a somewhat rare condition, you know, only about 1,600 people get sick across the U.S. each year. It can be a very serious infection. So at this point, what are officials telling people to do? So if you have any of these products in your home, you can check the dates that they were packaged. There are certain kind of codes on the packages that you can look at either the Boershead website or the U.S. Department of Agriculture website to get a full list of the affected products and either throw them away or you can return them for a refund. But definitely make sure not to eat them.

Okay. Let's switch gears here, literally. There is some interesting news for our clean energy transition in Baltimore, some people are actually using their electric trucks to power homes. Tell me about this. Yes, I love this story. So since electric vehicles have become kind of more of a mainstream option for people, there has been more talk about using them to really help the grid. So we know that especially in these hot summer months, there are times when the grid can get really stressed because we're all turning on our air conditioners, getting home, turning on the TV at the same time, these kind of like early evening hours from like 5 to 9 p.m. And so what this Baltimore utility is doing, they rounded up some owners of Ford F-150 lightning truck, so that's the electric pickups. And if people have the right kind of charger and

equipment, the utility is going to pay people to be able to take some of that energy out of that battery and help to power their homes. I mean, I usually think of this as the other way around. where your homes are powering the cars. So this seems like a pretty creative way to think about like electricity transfer. Absolutely. I mean, and that's one of the big kind of concerns that you always hear about electric trucks, electric vehicles in general is, is the grid ready? Is the grid ready? So this is a great kind of example of where if we're a little bit creative and instead of, you know, letting cars charge right when you plug them in when you get home, instead maybe you use whatever capacity is left in the battery right when you get home in that early evening time and then charge it up

overnight, when there's much less demand on the grid, you can really solve some of these problems. I'll say that this study is very small. It's just a few households right now, so we really need to see these kinds of programs expand to really have an effect. Yeah, I was going to say this seems like it's really great if you're one of these truck owners, but, I mean, is this potentially sustainable on a bigger scale? Yeah, it can be tough to kind of wrangle homeowners and utilities and kind of the automakers that would need to be involved. So I think. think there's a lot of work to do to scale this and make it more of an option for not just people who happen to own this kind of truck in this one place. Okay, time to go to space for our next story,

Casey. Some scientists have an interesting idea. They want to put a doomsday vault on the moon. Tell me about this. This is a very interesting story. Yes, I was fascinated by this as well. So people might be familiar with what is often called the Doomsday Vault in Norway. It's called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This is a seed bank that has millions of seeds. Basically, in case, you know, really bad things happen, we have sort of like a backup of all these seeds available. And the mountains in Norway seems like a great place to kind of keep these things safe. But in 2017, there was a heat wave.

It melted some permafrost, flooded the seed vault. No seeds were lost, but it really got scientists thinking about. how else could we kind of put an insurance policy, say, on our future, store seeds, maybe even preserved animal cells. And so this week, a group of researchers put out a plan suggesting that we should put these on the moon. If you were able to find, you know, a permanently shaded area that's already cold, which can, you know, preserve these cells, you might be able to kind of have a backup plan for the backup plan. Okay. Well, we'll see how that progresses if it does. Very interesting story. So our last story, Casey, is about something that's kind of close to home for me. I have been

having fruit fly problems this summer. They just love the bananas in my fruit bowl. And there's a new study that points to them being actually smarter than we give them credit for. Tell me about this. Absolutely. So while the fruit flies buzzing around your bananas might seem like they're doing so, just totally at random, researchers say that fruit flies actually have very specific stress. that they use when they're looking for food. So we knew in the past, if there's wind, a fruit fly will kind of fly into the wind and go back and forth trying to follow the scent. But in this new study, researchers wanted to figure out what would happen if there's no wind. How will fruit flies, you know, try to find a source of food? And they found that flies tend to kind of sink down and

fly in circles, this kind of downward spiral to try and figure out where the smell is coming from and find your bananas. Okay, so how exactly did these scientists do this? Okay, this is my favorite part of the study because it's actually kind of tough to deal with sense, you know, like clouds of chemicals that would, you know, trigger your smell. And so researchers actually set up these fruit flies with what they called a virtual reality for smell, sort of. Basically, they genetically modified flies so that instead of their antenna being triggered by chemicals, so instead of smelling, they actually got triggered by light instead. And so they were doing like little light flashes to kind of give them the signal that food was close. Wow, that is super

interesting. I mean, can we learn anything about these flight patterns to maybe put into practice in our own kitchens or in our own food storage areas? Great question. So the researcher said that one of the reasons that they were trying to study this is so that maybe we can get better insight into not only fruit flies, but more harmful pests like mosquitoes, which obviously spread a lot of disease and kill a lot of people every year. So that's kind of hopefully we can learn more. All right. Well, that is all the time that we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Casey Crownheart Climate Reporter at MIT Technology Review based in New York. Casey, thanks as always for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. It's always great to be here. And now it's time to check in.

on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Three weeks ago, a wind turbine blade off the coast of Massachusetts suffered significant damage,

plunging large pieces of debris into the ocean. Since then, thousands of pieces of fiberglass have washed up on Nantucket beaches. There's, of course, a lot of concern about the environmental impacts of this damage. So here with me to help us understand what's going on is my guest.

Eve Zuckoff, climate and environment reporter at WCAI based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Eve, welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me back. Okay, Eve, take us back to when this all began on July 13th. What exactly happened? Yeah, okay, so as you said, this story starts the weekend of July 13th when Nantucket residents and vacationers start going to their local beaches, heading out on boats. And over the course of a few days, they start seeing more and more pieces of this green and white debris in the ocean on the shore.

I talked with Colin Wyatt Letty about what he saw on Nobadere Beach come Monday. This huge piece of fiberglass came in and floated by us. I mean, it must have been 15 by 20. This morning, I found bits that were like one of our freckles. I mean, that's small. Yet he's describing these little. flex of this hard green foam that we saw every few steps we took on the beach. Truckloads of the bigger fiberglass pieces were removed in the first few days, though all of this

had been and was supposed to be 15 miles offshore inside the blade of one of the two dozen or so wind turbines that's been built so far by a company called Vineyard Wind. But today, a few weeks later, the debris is continuing to fall into the water and it's now washed up on a number of beaches, increasingly now on Martha's Vineyard, another island. Wow. So what have we learned sense about what really happened to this turbine? Yeah. How did we get one of the three blades of a wind turbine practically sheared off dangling over the water? Right, right. Well, Vineyard Wind has said that this failure was caused by a manufacturing error by the renewable energy arm of General Electric, which supplies Vineyard Wind

with its turbine blades. So GE, Vernova said that. Yes, okay, insufficient bonding led to this breakage. It was not related to the turbine's design or engineering. So now all 150 blades that were made in the same factories are set to be inspected using data that was already gathered via a kind of ultrasound for wind turbines. They said they're going to go through the data on every blade, but they should have identified these deviations earlier. And meanwhile, the federal government has shut down Vineyard Wynn's whole power production until really more is understood. Wow. Yeah, it is concerning. I mean, but this wasn't the first broken offshore wind turbine, was it? No, no. It's rare, but several of these GE-Vernova blades have broken on onshore and offshore wind turbines across Europe in recent years. Vineyard Winds failure is the second involving this turbine blade model. The last occurred just two months ago off the coast of England, but GE said that these two events actually appear unrelated because what happened off the UK was an incident. installation error at sea. Okay. So understandably, a lot of people are worried about the potential environmental impact of this. Do we know anything about these impacts so far? We don't know enough yet. Locals have been raising questions about water quality and what happens if this debris is consumed by

fish and birds and everything else up the food chain. And an early report from Arcadus, a Dutch design and engineering firm, says that the blade materials and debris are inert, non-soluble, stable and non-toxic. It's the same material that's used in boats. But the firm also released the list of materials that was in the blade. So I brought that to Valeria La Sapanara, who's a professor at the University of California Davis in mechanical and aerospace engineering. She said she's been studying the materials used to build wind turbines for about 25 years and said that that finding from this design firm is rushed at best and misleading at worst. These are all carcinogenic materials. So it's not going to kill you all in next week, but this has possible

long-term consequences. So more environmental reviews from the federal government and the company itself are in the works. But it is important to remember, Kathleen, that this is just adding to so much other garbage that ends up in the ocean. And it's all still in service of drawing down our reliance on oil and gas, which, I mean, how many oil spills have we read about? How much do oil and gas companies drive up greenhouse gas emissions versus, you know, what this offshore wind company is trying to do. So have you spoken to people who live in Antucket? What are you hearing from them? Yeah, I've heard reactions that kind of fall into a few buckets. The angriest people are always the loudest. And many in that category are the ones whose livelihoods rely on the water. You know,

I've talked with fishermen and seafood restaurateurs and to the owner of a surf school who's lost business over this. And you have to understand this is a seasonal economy. So a day of lost income on Nantucket is a week anywhere else. And that's part of why the town of Nantucket is kind of getting urged to sue the project developers. Officials are considering it. But I've also heard from people who say, look, this blade failure has been awful, but I'm still in support of offshore wind because it's really helpful to pull away from fossil fuels and get us towards renewable energy. Eve, you follow this world of offshore wind very closely. Do you think in your expert opinion that this will have any impacts on this industry moving forward? I don't know about expert, but, you know, to date, there's been no evidence that this one event has had any meaningful impact on the industry as a whole.

Like there are about 30 projects in this country in various states of review outside of Vineyard Wind. A few small American projects have already been completed. And even this one event won't kill Vineyard Wind. I think that the big question is what it means for public opinion. Like we've seen in recent years and different Massachusetts Offshore Wind Project get sunk because people opposed it so hard for so long. And at this point, the story is still a local one. You know, people on Nantucket will probably hate Vineyard Wind and Offshore Wind for a long time, the ones who are angry now. But the story hasn't broken through. It could.

And that partly depends on how vineyard wind resolves this issue. And whether, you know, this story catches on to the rumor mill, no pun intended. We saw endangered right whales get swept up in this. So it actually wouldn't be the first time. Well, Eve, thank you so much for telling us all about this situation. And that's all the time that we have for now. Eve Zuckoff, climate and environment reporter at WCAI, based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Thank you again. Thank you.

And that's all the time we have for now. A lot of folks helped make the show happen this week, including Jason Rosenberg, Shoshana Bucksbaum, Rasha Auretti, Sandy Roberts. Next time, we'll take a big picture look at the current state of cancer treatments. But for now, I'm Cy Fri producer Dee Petershmit. Have a great weekend.