Smog enveloped New York City, obscuring the famous skyline and the Washington Monument, raising serious concerns over the issue of wildfires in Canada. A third day of unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires may be an unnecessary novelty for millions of people on the US East Coast, scientists say, but it’s a regular reminder of the troubling conditions plaguing the country’s west and the potential for the future. There is a warning about
Scientists and millions of residents consider it an amazing phenomenon. The conditions have sent asthma sufferers to hospitals, delayed flights, postponed ballgames and even pushed back White House Pride Month festivities. The fires sent plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina and northern Europe and parked clumps of unhealthy or poor air along the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard.
At some points this week, air quality in places including the nation’s most populous city, New York, hit the top of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s air-pollution scale. Local officials urged people to stay indoors as much as possible and to wear face masks when outside.
Such conditions are nothing new, in fact becoming increasingly common on the US West Coast, where residents were buying masks and air filters even before the coronavirus pandemic and have become accustomed to daily air quality checks in the summer. Since 2017, California has seen eight of its 10 largest wildfires and six of its most destructive.
City residents are taking precautions to avoid pollution
The dangerous air has sometimes forced children, older adults and people with asthma and other respiratory conditions to stay indoors for weeks at a time. Authorities have opened smoke shelters for people who are homeless or who do not have access to clean indoor air. So what’s the big deal about the smoke coming out of the east?
“The west like Canada has always been burning, but what’s important now is that we’re getting massive amounts of smoke over a heavily populated area, affecting a lot of people,” Loretta Mickle, co-leader said Harvard University’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.
Canada faces worst wildfires of decade
Fueled by an unusually dry and warm period in the spring, the Canadian fire season that is just starting could be the worst on record. There were more than 400 fires on Thursday. More than a third are in Quebec, where Public Safety Minister François Bonnardel said no rain is expected until next week and temperatures are predicted to rise.
He said there were so far no reports of injuries, deaths or house damage from the fire, but it was unclear on Thursday when the more than 12,000 evacuees from various communities would be able to return. Manon Cyr, mayor of the evacuated city of Chibogamau, said she advised residents to be “zen and patient”. This is most important. But, she said, the real solution would be a good dose of rain.
In neighboring Ontario, a haze hung over Toronto, Canada’s most populous city, where many school holidays, day care center activities and outdoor recreation events were canceled or moved inside. US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that hundreds of US firefighters and support workers have been in Canada since May, and he offered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “any additional help that can help Canada accelerate the effort to extinguish these fires”. need to be brought.” The two spoke on Wednesday.
Pollution plaguing other regions of the world
Wildfires aren’t the only air-quality problem besetting major population centers around the world. In Beijing, for example, decades of sandstorms coming from the Mongolian plains have mixed with man-made pollution, sometimes rendering neighboring buildings invisible to each other. Even commuters have been seen walking on the streets with plastic bags wrapped over their heads to protect them from the dust.
Many African countries in and around the Sahara Desert also regularly deal with bad air, mainly due to sandstorms. Climate experts say Senegal in particular has suffered years of unsafe levels of air pollution, which is causing asthma and other respiratory diseases. Chemically, wildfire smoke can be more toxic than typical urban pollution, but with an asterisk: With smog, “the problem is you’re in it all the time,” says an environmental and energy management professor. , says Jonathan Deason, George Washington University.
New York schools, offices to operate in online form
In New York City, health department spokesman Pedro Frisneda said emergency rooms were seeing a ‘higher than usual’ number of smoke-related asthma visits, estimating patients were in the ‘low hundreds’. The nation’s largest city public school system said Friday’s classes would be held remotely, a decision that mostly affects high schoolers because most other students already had a scheduled day off. Motorists also got a break on Thursday and Friday from moving their cars for road cleaning.
In Washington, a large Pride Month celebration on the South Lawn of the White House was moved from Thursday to Saturday, and the Washington Nationals-Arizona Diamondbacks game was postponed. Local authorities closed public parks and suspended some road works. Philadelphia ended garbage collection early for sanitation workers. The largest city in Bridgeport, Connecticut, open spaces are commonly used as warm-weather cooling centers so residents can escape the unhealthy air.
A Chris Stapleton concert at the Syracuse Amphitheater was pushed back, fireworks at Niagara Falls were canceled and racing at New York’s Belmont Park was canceled two days before the famous Belmont Stakes. It was not yet clear whether the Triple Crown race itself could be affected; Gov. Cathy Hochul said that will depend on the air quality at the track on Saturday.
And in central Pennsylvania, Country Meadows Retirement Communities temporarily closed designated walking areas and outdoor courtyards for residents in secure memory support units — “they may or may not recognize when they are experiencing respiratory distress,” the company said. spokesperson Kelly Kuntz explained. All 2,300 residents of its 10 facilities were told to cancel outside trips and strenuous outdoor activities. “The box is huge,” Kuntz said. “No ball until it’s done.”
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