Air will be toxic for a long time after fires, says expert
The adverse impact on air quality from the wildfires that engulfed different parts of Greece will be protracted, Athanasios Nenes, a professor of atmospheric processes at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, tells Kathimerini.
“Smoke and anything emitted through it stays in the atmosphere and becomes more toxic long after the fire, so the air we breathe becomes more toxic,” notes Nenes, who is also director of the Center for Air Quality and Climate Change Studies at the Institute of Chemical Engineering Science in Patra, western Greece.
With regard to Attica, he stressed that “there is significant exposure to toxic particles when a forest burns frequently, because even when the fire is out, the emission of particles continues.”
He added that “the climate crisis does not cause the phenomena, but makes them more intense and difficult to manage.”
