According to scientists, the smoke of forest fires in Manitoba could be even more toxic than usual and more research on pollutants that are released in the air should be done, according to scientists.
The fires may be releasing the contamination stored in the land of the province during millennia, including toxic chemicals of more than a century of exploitation of resources in the north, said Colin McCarter, president of Canada’s research.
The bosks cover approximately one third of the province and the swampy wetland is a critical carbon warehouse and even acts as a natural fire barrier, but climate change puts them more and more at risk.
As the landscapes dry and become more susceptible to flames, a “pollution pump” is potentially prepared, McCarter said.
The bosks are “also regionally important landscape stores or sinks of toxic metals,” he said. “Toxic metals can vary from everyday things where we think [like] copper … [to] Lead, arsenic, Mercury: All these things that are associated with quite poor human health results. “
McCarter said that Pedatlands can kidnap more of these toxic metals than other ecosystems, and that it is easy to find areas rich in bosks in Canada that are close to places where there has been historical industrial activity and extraction of resources, including Flin Flon.
A fire that forced the evacuation of the city about 760 kilometers northwest of Winnipeg, at the end of May was approximately 347,105 large hectares this week, which makes it the largest active fire in the province.
The last community of the community closed in 2022. Its foundry of copper -inc, which had been operating since the 1920s, closed in 2010.
At one point, the Flin Flon Foundation issued more than 200,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per year. The studies carried out in the last three decades have found high levels of mercury and other metals trace in sediment nuclei, soil humus, plants and peat.
Canada’s environment and climate change said that, although it was in operation, the foundry was the largest source of atmospheric mercury emissions in the country.
“I can probably name half a dozen other sites throughout Canada where you have this type of … Pollution at the landscape level of this historical industrial pollution in the boreal, which is a fire ecosystem,” McCarter said, mentioning Thompson, which is about 15 kilometers southwest of another wild fire.
“It is an ecosystem adapted to the fire and … it usually burns.”
But McCarter said that the level of toxicity of what can be released depends on several factors, including the temperature of the fire, the type of peat bogs and the climatic conditions.
“Try to make that link there … from what is in the peats to what is the risk remains a very active part of my research,” he said.
“We are starting to put some of those ideas to the experiments, but we are still missing those links to really make these predictions about the risk.”
‘We need studies’
Michael Schindler is a professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Manitoba, and has previously investigated how pollutants are mixed with the smoke of forest fires.
“The contaminants in Flin Flon are mainly main, Zinc, Mercury,” Schindler said, added that Selenium is a problem. The province limited the consumption of fish in a nearby lake last year due to high selenium levels, which were probably the result of the wastewater of the mine during the last century.
Schindler said that pollutants that could not normally be inhaled bind to the finest particles in smoke of forest fires, which allows them to get into the lungs.
The particles “are literally the Trojan horse,” he said. The “smoke health effects are much greater.”
Many of the metal particles released by a foundry are “quite blocked,” said Schindler. “But some of them are already mobile and in theory they could … be volatilized and united, especially mercury, which is a really volatile element. Selenium, too.”
The smoke of Canada’s forest fires extended by North America and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean this summer.
“It is a lot of smoke from forest fires and you get those metals entering … but will deceive long distance,” Schindler said.
The professor said he is more concerned with the mixture of smoke with urban contaminants downstream, from sources such as “each diesel engine.”
Toxic metals theoretically “can only affect people in Flin Flon, but we need studies,” Schindler said.
“Is the population around Flin Flon more affected by the smoke of forest fires in terms of health problems later than a community where it has not been undermining or melting? I think people in Manitoba should know about this.”
Dave Price has lived in Flin Flon since the 1970s. A former geologist was among a group of volunteers who worked to rehabilitate land around the city that had left sterile due to the increase in acidity caused by the emissions of the foundry for more than a decade. The project concluded in 2016.
The price was one of the 5,000 residents who were allowed to return to the community last month.
“It was a very hot fire because of what I understand. That is, the trees burned to the roots and the burning continued in the mob under, and the mob under these metals,” he said.
“That type of situation must be monitored. Where does smoke come and what toxins are there?”
