Dr. Ashraf Elsayegh’s house was one of the first to burn.
He stepped out into his backyard atop the Pacific Palisades in early January to find a raging fire leaping from three houses away to two. He gathered his family, helped older neighbors to their cars and fled without a single keepsake.
In the days that followed, Dr. Elsayegh, a pulmonologist, did not have a chance to grieve. As he did his rounds with patients at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., his cellphone was bombarded with neighbors and friends seeking his expert advice.
What kind of air purifier?
Is an N-95 mask enough?
My daughter has asthma — should we rent a place farther away?
“Forty phone calls a day with the same set of questions,” Dr. Elsayegh recalled.
So when the chief administrative officer of the hospital invited him into his office to ask Dr. Elsayegh how he could support him and his family, Dr. Elsayegh replied instead, “Let’s open a clinic.”
Just three weeks after the blaze tore through neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the hospital’s urban fire clinic for pulmonary issues began seeing patients. They came in droves, each with a different set of symptoms and concerns. The clinic has served as an early indicator of the types of health problems developing among those exposed to the fires, ranging from newfound shortness of breath in healthy people to exacerbated symptoms in patients with asthma, C.O.P.D. and other lung diseases.
The health effects of an urban fire differ from a those of a wildfire, and when an entire community burns quickly, releasing unquantifiable toxins in unexpected directions for an unknowable period of time, there are long-term health effects that no expert can yet fully calculate. Dr. Elsayegh is making it his mission to support patients from the Palisades and surrounding communities for months and years into the future, when, he fears, cleanup crew members and others with chronic exposure may begin to show signs of severe lung diseases, like asbestosis and silicosis, and even cancers like mesothelioma.
