Construction Workers Toil Away in San Francisco's Toxic Air

From where Trina Hill is stationed at the corner of 16th and Illinois streets, she can see the future of San Francisco rising all around her. This is the Mission Bay neighborhood, the new hotbed for science, tech, and medicine. Warriors Stadium is right across 16th. Behind her stands the building she and her coworkers are finishing, future research laboratories for the University of California at San Francisco—one of the leading medical research institutions in the world. To the east, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. To the north, the windows of Uber’s glistening new headquarters glimmer a strange smokey orange.

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Under normal conditions, Hill would be able to see across the bay to Oakland and Berkeley. But on Tuesday, smoke from the faraway Camp Fire, which left at least 48 dead and 103 more missing, had blanketed the city and the whole Bay Area. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers an Air Quality Index score of 150 or higher to be "unhealthy for everyone," due to the density of particulates in the air. On Tuesday in San Francisco, the AQI was 164. The smoke caused headaches, stung eyes, and obscured skylines with tiny, dangerous particles that left soot on the windshields of Lyfts navigating all the busy construction. When breathed in, those particles can embed in the alveoli of the lungs, causing or exacerbating respiratory distress and potentially leading to future cardiac and respiratory ailments. Hill suffers from respiratory issues already, and though she was wearing a bright yellow jacket and a hard hat to protect her on Tuesday morning, she had no respirator to shield her lungs.

“They gave us masks but I’m not wearing mine because it fogs up my glasses. And I should,” she said. A&B gave everyone on her crew an N95 mask on Monday, when it was clear the city was going to again be stifled by smoke from the fire that caught the previous Friday. Hill’s was unopened in her pocket. When WIRED explained the risks to her lungs, she took it out and put it on. “I’ll be out here all day,” she said. “I should know better. I’ve been in the field a lot of years.” She wore it the rest of the day.

The innovations that come out of this neighborhood change the world—from new pharmaceuticals and basic research on the brain to startups hoping to elongate human life and change the future of work. Yet the people building it are at risk. All over the neighborhood, construction workers were going up outdoor elevators into buildings, hanging off the sides of lifts, hammering and working and taking breaks with no respiratory masks on. When the tech workers, doctors, nurses, and researchers briefly emerged from their buildings at lunchtime with their face masks strapped on, most of the construction workers on break beside them wore no pulmonary protection.

California’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration sent out a warning on November 9, the day the Camp Fire broke out, that all employers in the state who have workers affected by wildfire smoke need to modify work conditions and schedules to minimize exposure, or hand out appropriate respirators, like disposable N95 masks, to protect workers. “Special precautions must be taken to protect workers from hazards from wildfire smoke,” the warning reads. “The greatest hazard comes from breathing fine particles in the air, which can reduce lung function, worsen asthma and other existing heart and lung conditions, and cause coughing, wheezing and difficulty breathing.”

Hill’s employer, Berkeley-based A&B Construction, complied. So did Bratton Masonry, an outfit in Fresno, which has some 30-odd workers in town to help build the new Warriors Stadium. “At the safety meeting Monday, they warned us about the smoke and handed out respirators,” said a Bratton mason who declined to give his name. McCarthy Building, the tenth most lucrative construction company in the state, according to the Engineering News Record, went a step further.

McCarthy halted all outdoor construction work on its Northern California projects in areas with an air quality index higher than 150. It completely shut down construction on pharmaceutical company Gilead Science’s new headquarters south of Mission Bay, in Foster City, because the air was so bad.

"If you take any project where the purpose of the building is to save lives or create medicines or to treat people, it doesn't make sense to be building these buildings and hurting people at the same time," said Paul Erb, Executive Vice President of McCarthy Construction, who couched his comments as referring to the firm's projects in general.

“The smoke has affected the majority of our projects in Northern California,” Erb said. “This haze, it’s unprecedented in modern construction times. In those moments you have to take a pause and think about what the effect is and sometimes it makes sense to shut the job down for the day.” Erb was speaking from a cell phone in Nevada, where he had just arrived, but he said his throat still hurt from breathing in the air in the Bay Area over the weekend and earlier this week.

WIRED spoke to two subcontractors who had been working for McCarthy on that Gilead project. When it was closed down, they moved to a job on the roof of UCSF’s new Cancer Medical Building in Mission Bay. “We couldn’t see anything driving over the bridge to Gilead,” said a machine metal welder on a smoke break from the cancer building. He declined to give his name and wasn’t wearing a mask, though he said he had a respirator on the roof where he was working for the day.

Other men working on that cancer research building said that the inside was fitted with HEPA filters and those working outside had been given masks by their team. Most were not wearing masks when WIRED spoke to them. Near the sign announcing the future of cancer research, one man in a hardhat could be seen three- or four-stories up on a lift working without a respirator, as air thick with smoke constricted this reporter’s throat, and hospital employees nearby walked around with masks on their faces.

Though most workers WIRED spoke said they had been given respirators or the option to leave work for the day without repercussions, some had different experiences.

A lift director for Bigge Crane and Rigging said that he and his crew had been told they could go home but hadn’t been given respirators. “I have one in my car that’s mine, but I’m not wearing it because I’ll only be out here a second,” the man who declined to be named, said. “I think everyone should have one.” He stood watching one of his crane operators work on the Warrior’s Stadium. The operator, he said, didn’t have a mask but was enclosed in the cab with air conditioning so he wasn’t worried.

A man I’ll call Dade, who works for Conco doing concrete work on a building on 15th street, said his company didn’t give him a mask at all and he was worried because he has asthma. “No one is talking about it,” he said of the atmosphere on his job-site.

WIRED observed no workers laboring outside on Clark Construction's massive $1-billion Warriors Stadium project site wearing appropriate masks on Tuesday. One man who works for Clark on that job, who declined to give his name, said that no masks had been handed out and that no one had mentioned in any meetings he’d attended that there was increased risk from the air. He asked if he should worry about the risks to his infant daughter in air like this. (Yes.) He’s been outside for hours every workday since the fires broke out.

Clark did not respond to numerous requests for comment. WIRED reached out to all the companies listed as running jobs in the neighborhood, and mentioned by workers in interviews. None but McCarthy responded to a request to learn their policy regarding air safety on the job.

Down the street, workers on a Webcor job site building UCSF’s new Center for Vision Neuroscience were observed not wearing any protective masks. Webcor is the third largest contractor in the state. When WIRED inquired in the project office whether any respirators had been given out, the safety officer replied, “I don’t like reporters,” and refused to give any information, before giving a nonworking number to the company’s press office. By press time the company had not responded to repeated requests for information about OSHA compliance.

Just because workers weren’t wearing their masks, though, doesn’t mean they didn’t have them available. Respiratory risk is a tricky thing to get people to care about. Many of the workers outside without masks in Mission Bay on Tuesday told WIRED they had masks in their pockets, or had been offered them, but weren’t wearing them.

A man on his lunch break from working on the new Uber headquarters shrugged. “It’s definitely terrible, but what are we going to do?” he said. His sister had to evacuate Chico on Friday, and he’d spent the weekend driving as far from the city as he could to find clear skies. He came back to the city to go to work. His friend, who was smoking a cigarette next to him, added, “We’re already killing ourselves.”

That same nihilism was a common theme among workers WIRED spoke to Tuesday. “In 35 years this is the worst I’ve ever seen,” said ironworker Christopher Hayes, a subcontractor on the new Uber building. “The company offered respirators to us, or they said we could go home,” he added. As is standard in the industry, anyone leaving would forgo pay. Neither he nor his three coworkers on break outside the job site wore masks and told WIRED they still wouldn’t wear them when they went back up to work either.

“We work 30, 40 feet in the air hanging off a side of a building, so we’re probably going to die way before cancer,” Hayes’ friend and fellow union member (Iron Workers local 377) Jackie Winslow said, sitting atop an orange box housing tools to measure lead particles in the air (since this neighborhood used to be shipyards, the risk of lead contamination during new construction is high). The younger guys on break with them agreed.

Many people told WIRED that since they couldn’t smell the smoke Tuesday, they assumed it wasn’t that bad anymore—despite how visible it was. Others said that they’re exposed to all sorts of hazards in their daily jobs, so what’s one more thing? A vast majority of workers also said wearing the N95 masks was annoying and made work hard.

“I would advise them to wear a mask, but then I know that it's harder to wear a mask when you're working hard,” said UCSF's John Balmes, a doctor specializing in respiratory exposure. “If they are doing heavy work to increase their rate of breathing, they're going to have a greater effective dose of the smoke particles. And if they are really working hard and breathing through their mouth, then they bypass the filtering mechanism of the nose. So you should not be training for a marathon like this.” You might not want to be doing heavy lifting in that case, either.

Balmes runs UCSF’s state-of-the-art research laboratory focused on respiratory illness caused by wildfire smoke. That lab, over the hill in the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, is nicknamed HEL (short for Human Exposure Laboratory), which felt fitting on Tuesday.

Balmes emphasizes that research into the long-term effects of wildfire exposure is inconclusive. It’s especially hard to know whether short-term exposure can lead to future illness like cancer. How can you say for sure many years into the future that it was definitely that one week of smoke inhalation that caused the lung cancer? “There are carcinogens in wildland fire smoke,” he says, but even studies of the risk to firefighters who breathe that smoke chronically are in their early phases. “Breathing this air quality for a week like we're probably going to do here is not going to appreciably increase our cancer risk,” he said.

But it might not just be one week anymore. As climate change warms the Earth, fires of this magnitude are growing increasingly common in the west. Some professors at UC Davis called on their school to declare smoke days—like snow days, but for the problem of smoke on campus. On Wednesday, UC Davis did cancel classes, owing to the bad air, which was at an Air Quality Index of 152. In San Francisco, where UCSF, USF and City College of San Francisco were still in session, the air was at 179. Berkeley and schools in the East Bay also remained in session despite an AQI rating of 168.

Maybe one more day, or one more week, working in these conditions won’t hurt someone who is otherwise healthy. But as it becomes a seasonal norm, the risks to people working outside are much greater, as are the losses to business.

These risks are not limited to construction workers, of course. The United Farm Workers of California noted on Twitter that laborers have been in the fields since Nov 9, working in dangerous conditions to pick the food that feeds the nation. WIRED witnessed farm workers in artichoke fields near Salinas picking vegetables with no respirators over the weekend, as SF city residents drove past to the South, fleeing the area for better air.

The vegetables grown in California feed the nation, just as the science and technology developed here feeds innovation all over the world. Though the fires—and the safety of those working in wildfire-affected communities—may seem like a local California problem, the haze settling over Mission Bay and all of the state, working its way into the lungs of thousands of people just trying to do their jobs, affects us all.