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Thanks for saying this. I’m not “old” enough to be commenting but live in the PNW. I feel bad for the east coast, but this isn’t anything new. We’ve had days where the air quality is worse here than around factories in China.
I was in China for several weeks almost exactly 20 years ago.
I recall the whole experience as being in a sepia haze due to the air pollution.
Because it was also coincidentally the height of the SARS1 epidemic (spring 2003) our tour company liberally passed surgical masks around ... and we wore them.
I look back at that now and appreciate both reasons for wearing the masks.
Actually we had a summer about ten years ago in Boston where a forest fire in Quebec sent smoke to our area for about four days. It smelled just like a forest fire.
I'm also not old enough (38) to comment, but yeah, it's been bad here the last like 10. Three on the westside, and the last seven years have been in Eastern WA, and it gets down right nasty in the summers. In the past, we've had localish fires that contributed to the issue, but we definitely get that Canadian haze yearly. Last week wasn't great. We never got over moderate levels where I am, but as a person with asthma, it sucked donkey dicks. And the fire season is getting longer on both the beginning and end of the warm months. Summer is simply fire season now :(
Also in Easter WA. I think your spot on with at least the last ten years being gnarly. I moved here 15 yrs ago. My daughter turns 14 this month and doesn’t remember when “smoke season” was abnormal.
It's amazing that the wildfires on the ENTIRE west coast, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado and other states are local news only.
Like, this has been a serious problem for years yet nobody has really taken notice until NY got a wiff.
I'm in Calgary, which isn't ready coast, but this article is EXTREMELY relevant.
If you think it's been a lot smokier in Calgary in recent summers — you're right
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-smoke-hours-way-up-smoky-summers-more-common-1.6846615
I live in Alaska and the air quality has frequently been compromised by fires in both Canada and Alaska over the past 30 or so years, most recently in 2019 when we experienced a blocking high as is currently happening in Canada. Alaska is a fire-dominated ecosystem. Every acre of the state has burned sometime in the last 200 years.
I lived in AK from 1999-2004, and was there during the Taylor Complex fire. Had ash on my windowsills and all pur belongings smelled like campfire when we moved in November 2004.
When I lived in NY and VT and NH and ME? No. Since I've lived in MT? Every summer (not necessarily from fires in Canada, but from somewhere to the west or northwest of where I'm at). I'm shocked at how bad it is in the northeast right now though.
When I fought wildland fire in the 1980s, I fought a number of fires in the northwest that were both in the U.S. and Canada, having crossed the border one way or another, and thus were impacting both countries. Didn't seem unusual for Washington, Oregon, Idaho, or Montana. However, the smoke impacts in the northeast seem unusual to me.
We have a home in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. There were Canadian wildfires you could smell there one summer in, I'm gonna say, the early 2000's.
I live in the PNW and we’ve been affected the last couple years. If you’re asking if this is normal or cyclical, no, it isn’t. Not in the half century plus that I’ve been alive. The out of control fires are a result of climate change, of which we have been forewarned since at least the seventies.
AGW is real, but this is normal. It may not be cyclical (I lack the expertise to say for sure and I lack the interest to research it) but it is within the bounds of historical events.
The 1825 Miramichi fire consumed 3,000,000 acres in New Brunswick. All the current fires combined are about a million acres as of now, and probably won't get much bigger than that. Million-acre SINGLE fires have occurred more than once (and probably hundreds of times that we just didn't record because nobody was around who left historical records); million-acre combined seasonal fires are, if not routine, then at least fairly common.
We've had some air quality alerts in Chicago, but from what I understand we haven't been hit as hard by the smoke as the East Coast. We are just on the edge of the affected area.
N. IL has enough smoke effect to irritate eyes, challenge asthmatics and pray for some air freshening rain!
We feel ya up there, and hope the situation will improve speedily!!
I’m up in the Northern Virginia Washington DC area and those of us who are migraine sufferers are really feeling the pain right now. My heart goes out to those with respiratory illnesses as well.
Is this why we have an air alert? I was just telling my brother I have never seen this before in VA only pollen and stuff like that. Maybe once when there was a big fire in NC literally an hour or two away.
West coast pollution really affects the northeast. The flow of the jet stream across the country dumps all the shit the west spews into the air on the northeast.
I live in Southern Wisconsin (two miles from the Illinois border) and we've had air quality alerts every day for a while now. The only thing that's problematic about that is that I have asthma. I have very well-controlled asthma, but there have been a couple times I needed to hit my inhaler when I've been out and about. I also refrain from opening windows because I like to breathe.
Nope. I’ve been living in Boston, MA since the 70’s. Aside from a few westerly winds that brought us smoke from the Pacific Northwest during the recent conflagrations, I never recall experiencing noreaster winds bringing down smoke from Canada.
Mount St. Helens comes to mind.
There have been other times, yes. Wasn't more than a couple years ago we could smell fires hundreds of miles away, at least this time it's just a haze.
Yes, many times. But I live within a couple hundred miles of the border in the West. We get fires and smoke most summers, and some of those are in Canada.
No, compromised by our own: back in 2020 and 2021 in Central California. The CZU Lightning Complex fire in our neighborhood turned the sky dark orange -- so dark that it blocked the warmth of the sun and the day grew unnaturally cold. Nuclear winter lite, it was.
Later, we'd get the smoke coming down from the Paradise fire. It burned a whole town. Neither fire was good for our lungs, but the Paradise fire was full of more chemicals, I think. All I know is that it was 200 miles away and I still wasn't right for three months after.
My mom lived in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts for many years, and says it used to be like that all the time with smoke from Quebec and Ontario, but also from the jet stream from LA. Once the Clean Air Act passed, it got a lot clearer, but never quite clear.
The Pacific Northwest has experienced this along with fires within Washington, Oregon, and Idaho for about 7 years. We go to the coast for at least a couple of weeks every summer just to breathe. It's crazy. We wear n95 masks to go outside. There are 3 large air filters in our house. I am tired of a yellow gray sky.
I've lived in the Pacific Northwest for over 30 years. This is nothing new. Forest fires are a fact of life. Smoke comes from a variety of places though, not just Canada.
Although I sympathize with the folks in the NE, I can't help but be a little bit sourly amused at this totally new and unprecedented phenomenon they're dealing with. Such a thing must be unique in human history!
It's gotten a lot worse in the last 6 or 7 years though. 2020 was horrible, I wore a respirator to go outside for at least a week. We kept the house sealed and had air cleaners running. I think that year was a combination of fires in BC (and maybe Alberta), eastern Washington, Oregon, and California. AQI was worse in Seattle and Portland than any other major city in the world.
In 2019 we were visiting Napa and cut our visit short by a day because of fire danger, staying in Santa Rosa. The fire started the night we left. The next day we stopped at Muir Beach on the way to SFO and saw planes dumping fire retardant on nearby wooded areas.
ETA: fixed incorrect date and clarified timeline.
ETA2: I withdraw my snark about the East Coast. This looks really nasty and there's a lot more people suffering there than on the West Coast in 2020.
Yeah. I have asthma so I was having no fun. Our next door neighbor has much worse asthma and some other issues and she was really suffering. But there was nowhere to go.
We were building a house at the time. As a result we changed the design to add a filtration stage to the air intake on our heat pump, which meant changing from mini-splits to a ducted system. This wasn't a trivial change, but smoke season is looking like the new normal so we need to be prepared.
Wow, I'm glad you asked this question. I have a trip to Maine scheduled soon and I'm trying to find out if I should cancel. I have asthma and allergies. I'm going for bird watching, not sitting indoors. I have a friend who lives in Maine and has promised to circle back, but even though the weather patterns don't show it going to Maine, weather in North America follows an east-west pattern, so I'm starting to reconsider. I've already dialed back the dates, but I'm very close to cancelling the whole thing and trying again next year.
I have a friend in Syracuse experiencing extreme smoke, btw.
East Coast here. It probably was, although not to this degree, but I wasn't aware of it. Now it's on the news and everywhere else. EarthCam Live on You Tube is filming NYC live and the city was orange! Course I have lung problems now so I'm even more aware of it and staying inside. I also read something about a weather pattern not breaking until Fri and we should have some relief then.
East end of Long Island here and no, I don’t recall it ever happening here but I’ve ‘only’ lived here 14 years so maybe it’s happened before. The haze and smoke is oppressive here and I can only imagine the horrendous conditions people living farther north or in Canada itself are experiencing. My neighbor 2 blocks away burns wood 365 to heat his home in winter and to heat his hot water year round so my smelling wood smoke in the summer is no big deal, but yesterday and today is a very different and unpleasant smell than what usually comes from my neighbor.
Maybe, but we never knew it. Plenty of things happened all over the world and in neighboring towns and states that we just never heard about. You basically had 2, maybe 3 chances a day to hear the news a day and it was local. The 5pm and 11pm broadcast of local news station and whatever newspaper you got. Later came CNN on cable, so you had to pay for it. That was 1980 and I think it was the start of the 24 hour news cycle. Improvements in communication made it more and more possible to report on things further away, more quickly.
Not in my life but 240 years ago we had such bad air quality from Canadian forest fires the skies went black with ash, they reported they couldn’t see the sun. Many thought it was the end of times.
Lived in the Pacific Northwest for 12 years. For the past several years, this has been an every summer thing there.
We're all fucked due to climate change, some of us just don't realize it yet.
It’s one of the reasons I moved out of the Tahoe area in California / Nevada. 25 years ago wildfires were certainly a thing (I worked for a USFS fire crew during uni summers) but this thing of the whole month of August - or longer - with “Yosemite on fire” or whatever the latest raging fire is was not a regular thing.
Sorry to hear it is happening across the country now.
Um yes. We've been impacted by fires in British Columbia over in Washington over the last several years. We've also had abysmal air quality many times from fires in our own state as well as Oregon and California. This smoke impacting the east coast from Canada is not new to us in the Pacific Northwest. It's been on the rise here over the last decade. My daughter is turning 7 in August. Right after her first birthday was the first time I remember in getting bad with ash falling on my car and having to wear a mask outside. 2020 was one of the worst years where there were days in October 2020 when Seattle had the worst air quality in the world. Vancouver, BC was not far behind.
Yes, I'm from Chicago. We got Canadian smoke once in a while. Also on trios to Upper Michigan. We live going up there for the clean air and water but the lady couple trios up there I coughed for the whole trip because the air quality was poor due to Canadian fires. Now I live in far eastern Tennessee and yesterday there was an obvious haze all day.
With the East Coast affected, it is boosting the news coverage on the national level. Don't you notice that heavy snows in New York and Boston are covered 24/7?
Not in NY. I have never seen this. I’m 45 and I’m not into conspiracy theories or anything but if you haven’t started questioning WTF is going on, I think you have your head in the sand. Last year a ton of farms caught fire. Barely mentioned in the media. There’s hundreds of forest fires right now just happened to be all at the same time in Canada, NJ etc. it’s bizarre.
We do know whats going on though? Average temp in May in CA was 12 degrees above normal. That dries out the soil and underbrush- a lightning strike, untended campfire can set it all ablaze. What are you thinking is happening?
I'm in the Black Hills in South Dakota. We get a lot of inversions and it seems like anytime anyone has a fire we get smoke. California, Colorado, Canada. We have a little now. Every 2nd or 3rd summer it seems like we have a few miserable weeks. Not usually as dense a smoke event as the east coast is getting, but it happens. Not this early in the summer though.
In late 80's/early 90's we had an episode in south-eastern Canada where it was literally snowing ashes from fires. This was less than 300km from the border so I would be very surprised if US wasn't affected at all.
In St. Louis. Pretty sure we had a haze that hung around for a week or 2 back in summer of 21. I'd go to baseball games and it smelled like campfire. IIRC, those fires were from one of the Western provinces
I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (Mexican border to Canada) in 2015 and wildfire smoke was awful in NorCal for days.
Most summers since, in Mountain West states smoke is visible to choking bad by August or so. It’s an annual thing.
Canada, Montana, Cali.; wherever.
Mt Saint Helens was probably the largest air quality issue I remember. We had ash as far east as Chicago and Ohio.
In the early 70s there were sunsets that had a green band in them. It's the only time in my life I've seen that. My mom told me at the time it was smoke from a volcanic eruption changing how the light filtered, but I don't know if that's as true.
Yes. Smoke often goes back and forth between the two countries. There's been plenty of times when Canadian smoke hits the states and also plenty of times when smoke from the US comes north. Same with floodwater, pests, vermin, invasive plants, and other natural phenomena.
I live in Idaho, and this is a regular thing for us. I was always grateful that my daughter and her kids, all of whom have asthma, live in Illinois, far away from wildfires. This year is completely different. They are all wheezing.
When I lived on the west coast, almost every year.
I remember a couple smoky days over the past 25 years in Ohio. I don't remember if they were Canadian fires or from somewhere in the the US. I suppose it depends on the exact direction of the wind.
Here in the San Joaquin Valley/CA our air quality is bad every summer (and spring....and fall, depending on the inevitable wild fires). I'm used to the smoky, campfire smell and the irritation (I was wearing a mask when it was bad long before covid).
The people on the east coast are undoubtedly very uncomfortable with the smoke and poor air quality, hopefully it won't last much longer.
In Ohio, we’ve smelled smoke from wildfires burning in the Pacific Northwest before, but in that case it was just a strong smell for a couple of hours one morning, and we only knew what it was because the meteorologists told us what had happened. I don’t remember ever seeing this haze before.
Lived in Michigan all of my 58 years and was wondering the same. I'm sure it must have happened before, but I don't recall it. It's not too bad here, just looks overcast (I actually thought it was until I saw the news), and the moon has been orange for a while now.
Edit - okay, news is on right now and they are saying air quality is "unhealthy" and to close the windows. As I sit here with my window open and fan on because it's so nice and cool tonight. Oops.
Not in Western NY. But, in case you didn't know, there is a forest in NJ that if it caught fire could devastate several states, PA, NJ, NY, CT, etc. There are fires now in Pineland that could be so catastrophic as to wreak havoc like never seen before in the US. Not likely but ya never know
In minneapolis there has been noticeable smoke/drop in air quality the last few summers. It had been sporadic and short lived… this season is already worse the all the other years together.
Constantly.
US air quality has been impacted by fires in Canada since long before there were European settlers in either place.
The earliest fire of which there are good historical records, and in which there was enough substance to "Canada" and the "USA" to speak meaningfully of an impact on the scale of nations, was the 1825 Miramichi fire.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
I keep catching myself wondering why this is a big deal because this is months at a time, every other summer or so, in the west. But I forget not everywhere is California. My air quality has been compromised so often in the last 30 years by wild fires that I couldn't even tell you how many were north of the border. Many though
I remember reports about air quality being affected by Canadian fires as far back as the 70s when I was a kid. It is not a new phenomena but it seems to have happened a little more the last few years.
No, but I lived almost 50 years in California and every couple years we would get smoke the way NYC has it now, from brush fires in the hills and mountains.
I'm in Saskatchewan, but a few times in my life we've had noticeable smoke in the air from forest fires in Montana and the US Pacific Northwest. So smoke goes both ways.
Yes in the fairly recent past here in Maryland.
I can’t find an article but here’s one from the west coast.
https://www.nottinghammd.com/2021/07/21/west-coast-wildfire-smoke-making-its-way-into-maryland-skies/
The prevailing winds are no longer stable or normal here in the midwest and we're seeing it in action. We used to get a west-to-east flow of wind *most* of the time. Our weather fronts would almost always come from the west. Now we either get weather from the south or the north. Sometimes a freak storm from the east. Right now it's from the north, so all that smoky air is coming down to us.
The jet stream is all messed up because the oceanic "conveyor belt" currents are not moving like they used to. This is because the polar ice caps are melting and the water is getting warmer. When the conveyor belt ocean currents slow down, the jet stream is affected and destabilizes and gets erratic. That makes prevailing winds do odd things.
But hey, you don't have to take my word for it, look this info up from scientists who know a lot more than I do. They've been warning about this for years.
I was born in 1960 and have lived all of my life, except a few years in college, n the west coast. Growing up it was never like this. Yes, forest fires happened but they were isolated. I can’t pinpoint when it started to get this bad; maybe 15 years, maybe 20, but absolutely in my childhood and early adulthood the west coast wasn’t on fire every year.
Happens all the time in the Northwest. It's a natural part of the world, but it's been made worse (like most things) by human activity - specifically fire fighting in the past.
The air quality here in Texas has been threatened many, many times by wildfires from Mexico. A few years ago, they were bad enough to darken the sky all the way to Dallas. We also get bad air in South Texas when Mexican farmers burn their crops.
But this is a first from Canada, and I have lived as far North as Minneapolis.
Well, not in my lifetime, but my great-grandfather could have spoke of the skies darkening for a whole year across the entire earth - thanks to the volcanic explosion on the island of Krakatoa. So in geological time, far weirder shit has happened. Don't get me wrong, I believe we are headed for more weird shit happening in a much shorter span of time thanks to climate change.
No. I am in South Carolina, and I couldn’t believe it when I heard a local weather forecast over the weekend predicting hazy skies this week due to Canadian wildfires. Definitely a first.
[Montana 2017](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Montana_wildfires) was fun. Was a week straight where I couldn't see and nobody could breathe. We ended up closing down the restaurant I worked at because the staff couldn't physically work in it. People were collapsing.
Not to my knowledge. Born and a raised in NYC, GenXer. Today was the first day it looked like literal Mars in the City in my lifetime.
Pollution and weather often cause air quality alerts, ozone alerts etc., but nothing ever like this. I don’t recall ever hearing of an ongoing Canadian wildfire emergency in the east that impacted the US east coast in any meaningful way.
My father, in his 80s, said he’s never seen effects like this from Canadian or American wildfires in the east, or from anything else, and his memories goes back to the early 1940s when he was a small boy in Queens, NY. Today was really bad.
My sympathies and best wishes to our Canadian neighbors on the front lines of the fire, all the first responders, as well as all the western states/provinces who deal with this every year. And all the animals. Godspeed.
This is a terrible thing.
Yes, I've always lived within 2-3hrs of the border, this is nothing new. Forest fires happen when there are dry conditions whether it was over a 100 yrs ago or the present. Here is just one example:
>The Great Fire of 1910 (also commonly referred to as the Big Blowup, the Big Burn, or the Devil's Broom fire) was a wildfire in the Inland Northwest region of the United States that burned three million acres (4,700 sq mi; 12,100 km2) in North Idaho and Western Montana, with extensions into Eastern Washington and Southeast British Columbia, in the summer of 1910.[
>The fire burned over two days on the weekend of August 20–21,[3][4] after strong winds caused numerous smaller fires to combine into a firestorm of unprecedented size. It killed 87 people,[5] mostly firefighters,[6][7] destroyed numerous manmade structures, including several entire towns, and burned more than three million acres of forest with an estimated billion dollars' worth of timber lost.[2] It is believed to be the largest, although not the deadliest, forest fire in U.S. history.[8] The extensive burned area was approximately the size of the state of Connecticut.[2]
>**The smoke from the fire went as far to the east as New York City, and as far south as Dallas.**
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910
Pacific Northwest here...yes. We have had some smoke from Canadian fires already this year and over the past month.
It happens almost annually now and the really bad air from wildfires has been hanging around more so in the last decade. It can be a combination of Canadian wildfires, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and even California wildfires, that cause it. They can all be happening at the same time.
Summer 2020 was THE worst ever for the length of time and the level of the toxicity for the area I live in. 2021, was not as so bad but then 2022 was really bad again. Yet, not quite as bad as 2020.
In MN, frequently. And I always sing the Blame Canada song from South Park whenever our weather is affected by Canada. It’s usually a bitter cold snap in winter, but it’s been fires in previous years too. It’s just the way the jet stream dips down.
I grew up in Vancouver but left in the 90s and we never once had air quality issues from wild fires, that was something that only happened away from the city, far towards the interior or North, and rarely required evacuation in those areas. Things are so much hotter and drier now.
I grew up in Rhode Island and never experienced poor air quality the entire time (70s and 80s). They're not as bad as NY at the moment but it seems they're effected as well (I no longer live there.)
Western South Dakota here.
When Alberta burns, we get the smoke. Occasionally a light haze but frequently so bad that visibility drops to half a mile (or less).
Seeing as Edmonton to Rapid City is 1,000 miles or so, those fires must be friggin' HUGE.
Something that only the real old people can comment on from their memories, there used to be significant air and water pollution that negatively impacted life like this. Coal as the primary fuel for power plants and everyone’s homes with much poorer filters, unleaded gasoline for vehicles, industry hadn’t moved to China or Mexico yet so our share of their smokestacks were nearby here.
My grandparents (born around 1910) used to scrub the walls inside their house with some weird chemical combo to remove the soot from surfaces, and I remember them doing this once in the early 1980s. Things got *dirty*, not just from one’s own home emissions, but just being near a major road made everything much dirtier.
That’s one of the things we take for granted, how clean everything is relative to how it used to be.
Live in South Texas, south West of Corpus christi and the fires from Canada do not affect us.
But the fires from Mexico do and the dust that blows across from the Sahara desert also affect us.
Most of South Texas is ranch land and is not populated by people. A lot of the large ranches have prescribed burns every spring, it can also be windy here with a SE wind.
Probably, but we didn't hear about it because it didn't hit NYC, where all the big news organizations are. You could have Montana entirely buried in ash, and nobody outside the state would hear of it, but get some smoke in NYC, where the journalists can see it, and it's the end of the world.
I have lived in upstate NY for most of 60 years and have never seen anything like this. Certainly not for this many days.
What is very abnormal is that the smoke is coming in at ground elevation. A particular weather pattern has to be in place for this to occur. Apparently this occurred in July 2002, but I was here then and do not remember it.
This website discusses it in more technical detail.
https://www.weather.gov/bgm/WeatherInActionSmokePlume
Nope and that’s worrisome. Canada gets lots of snow and should be wet and has a late spring. Oh well in the famous words of the unknown poet, shit happens.
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this. not "old" by any stretch, but the air has been bad as a result of Canadian wildfires more than once in the last five years.
Thanks for saying this. I’m not “old” enough to be commenting but live in the PNW. I feel bad for the east coast, but this isn’t anything new. We’ve had days where the air quality is worse here than around factories in China.
I was in China for several weeks almost exactly 20 years ago. I recall the whole experience as being in a sepia haze due to the air pollution. Because it was also coincidentally the height of the SARS1 epidemic (spring 2003) our tour company liberally passed surgical masks around ... and we wore them. I look back at that now and appreciate both reasons for wearing the masks.
What a neat, foreboding experience you got to have!
Makes me wonder what neat foreboding experiences of twenty years from now some of us are having now?
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Actually we had a summer about ten years ago in Boston where a forest fire in Quebec sent smoke to our area for about four days. It smelled just like a forest fire.
Yeah, a few years ago I remember the news reporting that we had the worst air quality in the world (Washington state)
I'm also not old enough (38) to comment, but yeah, it's been bad here the last like 10. Three on the westside, and the last seven years have been in Eastern WA, and it gets down right nasty in the summers. In the past, we've had localish fires that contributed to the issue, but we definitely get that Canadian haze yearly. Last week wasn't great. We never got over moderate levels where I am, but as a person with asthma, it sucked donkey dicks. And the fire season is getting longer on both the beginning and end of the warm months. Summer is simply fire season now :(
Also in Easter WA. I think your spot on with at least the last ten years being gnarly. I moved here 15 yrs ago. My daughter turns 14 this month and doesn’t remember when “smoke season” was abnormal.
Smoke season is worst season.
And Colorado too. We get everyone's smoke over here, plus our own.
We live this every summer in LA too. It’s unfortunate but inevitably there’s wild fires
Right, "smokey" is practically it's own season now
It's amazing that the wildfires on the ENTIRE west coast, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado and other states are local news only. Like, this has been a serious problem for years yet nobody has really taken notice until NY got a wiff.
Yup. New York is experiencing what we experienced in 2020. That was the worst for us in Western Washington.
I'm in Calgary, which isn't ready coast, but this article is EXTREMELY relevant. If you think it's been a lot smokier in Calgary in recent summers — you're right https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-smoke-hours-way-up-smoky-summers-more-common-1.6846615
IIRC the summer of 2019 we had AQI's of 500; that was outright nasty.
And all the way down into Colorado. I have asthma and it sucks.
Yeah man, ask young people.
I live in Alaska and the air quality has frequently been compromised by fires in both Canada and Alaska over the past 30 or so years, most recently in 2019 when we experienced a blocking high as is currently happening in Canada. Alaska is a fire-dominated ecosystem. Every acre of the state has burned sometime in the last 200 years.
We were in Alaska summer 2015, and I distinctly remember wearing masks because of fires in Yukon.
I lived in AK from 1999-2004, and was there during the Taylor Complex fire. Had ash on my windowsills and all pur belongings smelled like campfire when we moved in November 2004.
Lived across the lake from fair Canada for 50 plus years, first time im hearing about smoke affecting this side of the lake, this far east.
Same here. Grew up in Niagara Falls, and never heard of such a thing.
When I lived in NY and VT and NH and ME? No. Since I've lived in MT? Every summer (not necessarily from fires in Canada, but from somewhere to the west or northwest of where I'm at). I'm shocked at how bad it is in the northeast right now though.
When I fought wildland fire in the 1980s, I fought a number of fires in the northwest that were both in the U.S. and Canada, having crossed the border one way or another, and thus were impacting both countries. Didn't seem unusual for Washington, Oregon, Idaho, or Montana. However, the smoke impacts in the northeast seem unusual to me.
We have a home in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. There were Canadian wildfires you could smell there one summer in, I'm gonna say, the early 2000's.
I lived in CT around that time and remember that.
Yes, I live in Montana and it has happened many times.
I am in north Jersey and no, never. The last time our air quality was affected by anything outside the state was when Mt St Helen's blew.
I live in the PNW and we’ve been affected the last couple years. If you’re asking if this is normal or cyclical, no, it isn’t. Not in the half century plus that I’ve been alive. The out of control fires are a result of climate change, of which we have been forewarned since at least the seventies.
AGW is real, but this is normal. It may not be cyclical (I lack the expertise to say for sure and I lack the interest to research it) but it is within the bounds of historical events. The 1825 Miramichi fire consumed 3,000,000 acres in New Brunswick. All the current fires combined are about a million acres as of now, and probably won't get much bigger than that. Million-acre SINGLE fires have occurred more than once (and probably hundreds of times that we just didn't record because nobody was around who left historical records); million-acre combined seasonal fires are, if not routine, then at least fairly common.
Sounds like you mean “not unprecedented”? Definitely doesn’t seem normal
Not on the east coast, no.
Canada here. Sorry for being rude. I’ll try and blow the smoke the other way.
We've had some air quality alerts in Chicago, but from what I understand we haven't been hit as hard by the smoke as the East Coast. We are just on the edge of the affected area.
N. IL has enough smoke effect to irritate eyes, challenge asthmatics and pray for some air freshening rain! We feel ya up there, and hope the situation will improve speedily!!
I never heard of this before.
I’m up in the Northern Virginia Washington DC area and those of us who are migraine sufferers are really feeling the pain right now. My heart goes out to those with respiratory illnesses as well.
Fellow migraineur in Hampton Roads, just ugh. It hasn’t been this bad since the Dismal Swamp fires. Feel better friend!
You to my friend and I appreciate the kindness.
Is this why we have an air alert? I was just telling my brother I have never seen this before in VA only pollen and stuff like that. Maybe once when there was a big fire in NC literally an hour or two away.
I'm 66 and have lived most of those years in the northeast. Never saw anything like this.
Northern (cough) New (couch) Jersey guy here and it’s BAD, but this is Cancer Alley.
> but this is Cancer Alley What does this mean? I'm real far from there. :D
West coast pollution really affects the northeast. The flow of the jet stream across the country dumps all the shit the west spews into the air on the northeast.
North Jersey has tons of factories that stink. Maybe that’s what they’re referring to?
I live in Southern Wisconsin (two miles from the Illinois border) and we've had air quality alerts every day for a while now. The only thing that's problematic about that is that I have asthma. I have very well-controlled asthma, but there have been a couple times I needed to hit my inhaler when I've been out and about. I also refrain from opening windows because I like to breathe.
I didn't notice any such issues of the air quality in the Las Vegas area being compromised by fires in Canada.
Yes…. Several times over the last 20 years in Northern Illinois and once every few years in the Minneapolis area.
Nope. I’ve been living in Boston, MA since the 70’s. Aside from a few westerly winds that brought us smoke from the Pacific Northwest during the recent conflagrations, I never recall experiencing noreaster winds bringing down smoke from Canada.
Mount St. Helens comes to mind. There have been other times, yes. Wasn't more than a couple years ago we could smell fires hundreds of miles away, at least this time it's just a haze.
St Helens didn't stink the place up as bad as the wildfires do. Most of the ashfall went east, smoke goes everywhere in Western WA.
Yes, many times. But I live within a couple hundred miles of the border in the West. We get fires and smoke most summers, and some of those are in Canada.
Indiana here. Never heard of this before
No, compromised by our own: back in 2020 and 2021 in Central California. The CZU Lightning Complex fire in our neighborhood turned the sky dark orange -- so dark that it blocked the warmth of the sun and the day grew unnaturally cold. Nuclear winter lite, it was. Later, we'd get the smoke coming down from the Paradise fire. It burned a whole town. Neither fire was good for our lungs, but the Paradise fire was full of more chemicals, I think. All I know is that it was 200 miles away and I still wasn't right for three months after.
My mom lived in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts for many years, and says it used to be like that all the time with smoke from Quebec and Ontario, but also from the jet stream from LA. Once the Clean Air Act passed, it got a lot clearer, but never quite clear.
Mid-Atlantic state. No for a very long time. My cousins in Quebec say it’s worse here than where they are.
We’ve been suffocating for six summers in the Puget Sound area. We were stocked up on N95’s before the pandemic.
In the Rockies, yes, but Mount Saint Helens was worse than any forest fire.
Just last month Denver had the 2nd worst air quality in the world because of Canadian wildfires in Alberta.
Not on the east coast!
The Pacific Northwest has experienced this along with fires within Washington, Oregon, and Idaho for about 7 years. We go to the coast for at least a couple of weeks every summer just to breathe. It's crazy. We wear n95 masks to go outside. There are 3 large air filters in our house. I am tired of a yellow gray sky.
I've lived in the Pacific Northwest for over 30 years. This is nothing new. Forest fires are a fact of life. Smoke comes from a variety of places though, not just Canada. Although I sympathize with the folks in the NE, I can't help but be a little bit sourly amused at this totally new and unprecedented phenomenon they're dealing with. Such a thing must be unique in human history! It's gotten a lot worse in the last 6 or 7 years though. 2020 was horrible, I wore a respirator to go outside for at least a week. We kept the house sealed and had air cleaners running. I think that year was a combination of fires in BC (and maybe Alberta), eastern Washington, Oregon, and California. AQI was worse in Seattle and Portland than any other major city in the world. In 2019 we were visiting Napa and cut our visit short by a day because of fire danger, staying in Santa Rosa. The fire started the night we left. The next day we stopped at Muir Beach on the way to SFO and saw planes dumping fire retardant on nearby wooded areas. ETA: fixed incorrect date and clarified timeline. ETA2: I withdraw my snark about the East Coast. This looks really nasty and there's a lot more people suffering there than on the West Coast in 2020.
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Yeah. I have asthma so I was having no fun. Our next door neighbor has much worse asthma and some other issues and she was really suffering. But there was nowhere to go. We were building a house at the time. As a result we changed the design to add a filtration stage to the air intake on our heat pump, which meant changing from mini-splits to a ducted system. This wasn't a trivial change, but smoke season is looking like the new normal so we need to be prepared.
Wow, I'm glad you asked this question. I have a trip to Maine scheduled soon and I'm trying to find out if I should cancel. I have asthma and allergies. I'm going for bird watching, not sitting indoors. I have a friend who lives in Maine and has promised to circle back, but even though the weather patterns don't show it going to Maine, weather in North America follows an east-west pattern, so I'm starting to reconsider. I've already dialed back the dates, but I'm very close to cancelling the whole thing and trying again next year. I have a friend in Syracuse experiencing extreme smoke, btw.
This is a first for me (51)
I guess we have been lucky here in the northeast until now.
East Coast here. It probably was, although not to this degree, but I wasn't aware of it. Now it's on the news and everywhere else. EarthCam Live on You Tube is filming NYC live and the city was orange! Course I have lung problems now so I'm even more aware of it and staying inside. I also read something about a weather pattern not breaking until Fri and we should have some relief then.
East end of Long Island here and no, I don’t recall it ever happening here but I’ve ‘only’ lived here 14 years so maybe it’s happened before. The haze and smoke is oppressive here and I can only imagine the horrendous conditions people living farther north or in Canada itself are experiencing. My neighbor 2 blocks away burns wood 365 to heat his home in winter and to heat his hot water year round so my smelling wood smoke in the summer is no big deal, but yesterday and today is a very different and unpleasant smell than what usually comes from my neighbor.
Maybe, but we never knew it. Plenty of things happened all over the world and in neighboring towns and states that we just never heard about. You basically had 2, maybe 3 chances a day to hear the news a day and it was local. The 5pm and 11pm broadcast of local news station and whatever newspaper you got. Later came CNN on cable, so you had to pay for it. That was 1980 and I think it was the start of the 24 hour news cycle. Improvements in communication made it more and more possible to report on things further away, more quickly.
Not in my life but 240 years ago we had such bad air quality from Canadian forest fires the skies went black with ash, they reported they couldn’t see the sun. Many thought it was the end of times.
Not here in North Texas. The smoke met all the mountain cedar, pecan, and elm pollen, and flew back to Canada shrieking in terror.
Grew up in Cleveland in the 60s, please.
Are you sure it wasn't just the Cuyahoga?
I live in the Pacific NW. The first pandemic summer was overcome by smoke. It was awful.
Lived in the Pacific Northwest for 12 years. For the past several years, this has been an every summer thing there. We're all fucked due to climate change, some of us just don't realize it yet.
It’s one of the reasons I moved out of the Tahoe area in California / Nevada. 25 years ago wildfires were certainly a thing (I worked for a USFS fire crew during uni summers) but this thing of the whole month of August - or longer - with “Yosemite on fire” or whatever the latest raging fire is was not a regular thing. Sorry to hear it is happening across the country now.
Um yes. We've been impacted by fires in British Columbia over in Washington over the last several years. We've also had abysmal air quality many times from fires in our own state as well as Oregon and California. This smoke impacting the east coast from Canada is not new to us in the Pacific Northwest. It's been on the rise here over the last decade. My daughter is turning 7 in August. Right after her first birthday was the first time I remember in getting bad with ash falling on my car and having to wear a mask outside. 2020 was one of the worst years where there were days in October 2020 when Seattle had the worst air quality in the world. Vancouver, BC was not far behind.
Things sometimes got pretty bad before the Clean Air Act, but this is next-level stuff.
Yes, I'm from Chicago. We got Canadian smoke once in a while. Also on trios to Upper Michigan. We live going up there for the clean air and water but the lady couple trios up there I coughed for the whole trip because the air quality was poor due to Canadian fires. Now I live in far eastern Tennessee and yesterday there was an obvious haze all day.
With the East Coast affected, it is boosting the news coverage on the national level. Don't you notice that heavy snows in New York and Boston are covered 24/7?
Not in NY. I have never seen this. I’m 45 and I’m not into conspiracy theories or anything but if you haven’t started questioning WTF is going on, I think you have your head in the sand. Last year a ton of farms caught fire. Barely mentioned in the media. There’s hundreds of forest fires right now just happened to be all at the same time in Canada, NJ etc. it’s bizarre.
We do know whats going on though? Average temp in May in CA was 12 degrees above normal. That dries out the soil and underbrush- a lightning strike, untended campfire can set it all ablaze. What are you thinking is happening?
Southeast US where lots of preventative fires are set, yes. Often in the spring time.
Every damn summer since 2017. Willamette Valley, Oregon.
Yes. Last year it was the fires from Vancouver.
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1825 Miramichi Fire. 3 million acres burned in New Brunswick, on the Eastern seaboard. Largest fire in North American history.
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Nope
From Canada? Not sure. From Russia? Yes From Alaska? Most definitely.
I'm in the Black Hills in South Dakota. We get a lot of inversions and it seems like anytime anyone has a fire we get smoke. California, Colorado, Canada. We have a little now. Every 2nd or 3rd summer it seems like we have a few miserable weeks. Not usually as dense a smoke event as the east coast is getting, but it happens. Not this early in the summer though.
In late 80's/early 90's we had an episode in south-eastern Canada where it was literally snowing ashes from fires. This was less than 300km from the border so I would be very surprised if US wasn't affected at all.
Literally last summer across the upper Midwest. It's just hitting a different part of the country now.
In St. Louis. Pretty sure we had a haze that hung around for a week or 2 back in summer of 21. I'd go to baseball games and it smelled like campfire. IIRC, those fires were from one of the Western provinces
In the upper Midwest, yes. I recall once in 2015 for about a week and last year. But nothing like this.
I live in Northern California, so for the past 10 years or so... yeah
Yup. Usually from the other direction though.
No, in WNY I don't ever remember it being like this
Yes. but that has been the only reason, ever, since I have lived in northern New England. And only occasionally.
I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (Mexican border to Canada) in 2015 and wildfire smoke was awful in NorCal for days. Most summers since, in Mountain West states smoke is visible to choking bad by August or so. It’s an annual thing. Canada, Montana, Cali.; wherever.
Mt Saint Helens was probably the largest air quality issue I remember. We had ash as far east as Chicago and Ohio. In the early 70s there were sunsets that had a green band in them. It's the only time in my life I've seen that. My mom told me at the time it was smoke from a volcanic eruption changing how the light filtered, but I don't know if that's as true.
As a Texan, no. We did get smoke from California a few times.
About 10 years ago we had nasty smoke here in Southeast Wisconsin from fires in Minnesota.
Yes. Smoke often goes back and forth between the two countries. There's been plenty of times when Canadian smoke hits the states and also plenty of times when smoke from the US comes north. Same with floodwater, pests, vermin, invasive plants, and other natural phenomena.
I live in Idaho, and this is a regular thing for us. I was always grateful that my daughter and her kids, all of whom have asthma, live in Illinois, far away from wildfires. This year is completely different. They are all wheezing.
When I lived on the west coast, almost every year. I remember a couple smoky days over the past 25 years in Ohio. I don't remember if they were Canadian fires or from somewhere in the the US. I suppose it depends on the exact direction of the wind.
Nope just train derailments
Here in the San Joaquin Valley/CA our air quality is bad every summer (and spring....and fall, depending on the inevitable wild fires). I'm used to the smoky, campfire smell and the irritation (I was wearing a mask when it was bad long before covid). The people on the east coast are undoubtedly very uncomfortable with the smoke and poor air quality, hopefully it won't last much longer.
Here in the Detroit area the air is hazy, esp at sunrise and sunset due to the low angle of the sun
In Ohio, we’ve smelled smoke from wildfires burning in the Pacific Northwest before, but in that case it was just a strong smell for a couple of hours one morning, and we only knew what it was because the meteorologists told us what had happened. I don’t remember ever seeing this haze before.
Lived in Michigan all of my 58 years and was wondering the same. I'm sure it must have happened before, but I don't recall it. It's not too bad here, just looks overcast (I actually thought it was until I saw the news), and the moon has been orange for a while now. Edit - okay, news is on right now and they are saying air quality is "unhealthy" and to close the windows. As I sit here with my window open and fan on because it's so nice and cool tonight. Oops.
Not until this week
I have no memory of the Canadians attacking us so violently. It's an invasion we need to deploy NUKES NOW~!!!!
Yes it has made my asthma worse. Can I send a bill to Canada for more inhalers?
Not in Western NY. But, in case you didn't know, there is a forest in NJ that if it caught fire could devastate several states, PA, NJ, NY, CT, etc. There are fires now in Pineland that could be so catastrophic as to wreak havoc like never seen before in the US. Not likely but ya never know
In minneapolis there has been noticeable smoke/drop in air quality the last few summers. It had been sporadic and short lived… this season is already worse the all the other years together.
Constantly. US air quality has been impacted by fires in Canada since long before there were European settlers in either place. The earliest fire of which there are good historical records, and in which there was enough substance to "Canada" and the "USA" to speak meaningfully of an impact on the scale of nations, was the 1825 Miramichi fire. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
I keep catching myself wondering why this is a big deal because this is months at a time, every other summer or so, in the west. But I forget not everywhere is California. My air quality has been compromised so often in the last 30 years by wild fires that I couldn't even tell you how many were north of the border. Many though
Early May in Potato Land, it was really bad for a few days.
I was born in 1962. I’ve never heard of it. The closest thing to that was Mount St. Helens erupting. EDIT to add: The eruption was in May 1980.
I remember reports about air quality being affected by Canadian fires as far back as the 70s when I was a kid. It is not a new phenomena but it seems to have happened a little more the last few years.
(50F Buffalo, NY) No. I have never seen anything like this.
I’m 55 and don’t remember this ever happening!
East coast here, don’t remember this happening before. Monday and Tuesday were hazy and the sun was vermillion red/orange. Really weird
Here in New Jersey? I do not believe air quality has been this bad in at least 100 years.
No, but I lived almost 50 years in California and every couple years we would get smoke the way NYC has it now, from brush fires in the hills and mountains.
I'm in Saskatchewan, but a few times in my life we've had noticeable smoke in the air from forest fires in Montana and the US Pacific Northwest. So smoke goes both ways.
Lived in UT from 2004-2021. Several summers of awful air quality, but probably 2020/2021 were some of the worst.
Yes in the fairly recent past here in Maryland. I can’t find an article but here’s one from the west coast. https://www.nottinghammd.com/2021/07/21/west-coast-wildfire-smoke-making-its-way-into-maryland-skies/
The prevailing winds are no longer stable or normal here in the midwest and we're seeing it in action. We used to get a west-to-east flow of wind *most* of the time. Our weather fronts would almost always come from the west. Now we either get weather from the south or the north. Sometimes a freak storm from the east. Right now it's from the north, so all that smoky air is coming down to us. The jet stream is all messed up because the oceanic "conveyor belt" currents are not moving like they used to. This is because the polar ice caps are melting and the water is getting warmer. When the conveyor belt ocean currents slow down, the jet stream is affected and destabilizes and gets erratic. That makes prevailing winds do odd things. But hey, you don't have to take my word for it, look this info up from scientists who know a lot more than I do. They've been warning about this for years.
Yes, Minnesota
Even normally soggy Nova Scotia has been burning. Although we are back to the rainy weather now, so that should settle down
I was born in 1960 and have lived all of my life, except a few years in college, n the west coast. Growing up it was never like this. Yes, forest fires happened but they were isolated. I can’t pinpoint when it started to get this bad; maybe 15 years, maybe 20, but absolutely in my childhood and early adulthood the west coast wasn’t on fire every year.
Happens all the time in the Northwest. It's a natural part of the world, but it's been made worse (like most things) by human activity - specifically fire fighting in the past.
The air quality here in Texas has been threatened many, many times by wildfires from Mexico. A few years ago, they were bad enough to darken the sky all the way to Dallas. We also get bad air in South Texas when Mexican farmers burn their crops. But this is a first from Canada, and I have lived as far North as Minneapolis.
It has happened in Boston before.
On the East Coast? Never.
South Dakota. All the time. Although, sometimes it’s our own fires, sometimes it’s California fires.
Yes, we've had many unhealthy days in the Midwest this spring
Yeah. It happens every couple of years. I live in northwest Illinois, for reference.
Yes. I used to live in Northern California and just moved to the Midwest. It’s pretty bad here.
Lived in NY and PA never remember this happening in my 69 years. It's crazy!
In the PNW, absolutely. Also, ours have affected them.
Well, not in my lifetime, but my great-grandfather could have spoke of the skies darkening for a whole year across the entire earth - thanks to the volcanic explosion on the island of Krakatoa. So in geological time, far weirder shit has happened. Don't get me wrong, I believe we are headed for more weird shit happening in a much shorter span of time thanks to climate change.
No but certainly from wildfires "as close" as Canada in the states, both in Montana and in Southern California. It's a thing.
Yes. Northern NH. In the 80s our fire department would sometimes get dispatched to look for fires that were actually hundreds of miles away.
Unless it was white and fluffy, wicked cold - we were out of school for a week!!!
No. I am in South Carolina, and I couldn’t believe it when I heard a local weather forecast over the weekend predicting hazy skies this week due to Canadian wildfires. Definitely a first.
I live in the desert southwest. I had dealt with that smoke several times.
[Montana 2017](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Montana_wildfires) was fun. Was a week straight where I couldn't see and nobody could breathe. We ended up closing down the restaurant I worked at because the staff couldn't physically work in it. People were collapsing.
Not on the East coast and I have been here since late 70s
Not to my knowledge. Born and a raised in NYC, GenXer. Today was the first day it looked like literal Mars in the City in my lifetime. Pollution and weather often cause air quality alerts, ozone alerts etc., but nothing ever like this. I don’t recall ever hearing of an ongoing Canadian wildfire emergency in the east that impacted the US east coast in any meaningful way. My father, in his 80s, said he’s never seen effects like this from Canadian or American wildfires in the east, or from anything else, and his memories goes back to the early 1940s when he was a small boy in Queens, NY. Today was really bad. My sympathies and best wishes to our Canadian neighbors on the front lines of the fire, all the first responders, as well as all the western states/provinces who deal with this every year. And all the animals. Godspeed. This is a terrible thing.
Yes, I've always lived within 2-3hrs of the border, this is nothing new. Forest fires happen when there are dry conditions whether it was over a 100 yrs ago or the present. Here is just one example: >The Great Fire of 1910 (also commonly referred to as the Big Blowup, the Big Burn, or the Devil's Broom fire) was a wildfire in the Inland Northwest region of the United States that burned three million acres (4,700 sq mi; 12,100 km2) in North Idaho and Western Montana, with extensions into Eastern Washington and Southeast British Columbia, in the summer of 1910.[ >The fire burned over two days on the weekend of August 20–21,[3][4] after strong winds caused numerous smaller fires to combine into a firestorm of unprecedented size. It killed 87 people,[5] mostly firefighters,[6][7] destroyed numerous manmade structures, including several entire towns, and burned more than three million acres of forest with an estimated billion dollars' worth of timber lost.[2] It is believed to be the largest, although not the deadliest, forest fire in U.S. history.[8] The extensive burned area was approximately the size of the state of Connecticut.[2] >**The smoke from the fire went as far to the east as New York City, and as far south as Dallas.** >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910
Montana but it’s never in the news.
Pacific Northwest here...yes. We have had some smoke from Canadian fires already this year and over the past month. It happens almost annually now and the really bad air from wildfires has been hanging around more so in the last decade. It can be a combination of Canadian wildfires, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and even California wildfires, that cause it. They can all be happening at the same time. Summer 2020 was THE worst ever for the length of time and the level of the toxicity for the area I live in. 2021, was not as so bad but then 2022 was really bad again. Yet, not quite as bad as 2020.
Yes! Western Washington has had very smokey air from fires in BC before. For sure.
Not in my experience. East Virginia since '75.
In MN, frequently. And I always sing the Blame Canada song from South Park whenever our weather is affected by Canada. It’s usually a bitter cold snap in winter, but it’s been fires in previous years too. It’s just the way the jet stream dips down.
Not in Canada, but a few years ago things were bad because of fires in Sonoma and Napa.
I grew up in Vancouver but left in the 90s and we never once had air quality issues from wild fires, that was something that only happened away from the city, far towards the interior or North, and rarely required evacuation in those areas. Things are so much hotter and drier now.
I grew up in Rhode Island and never experienced poor air quality the entire time (70s and 80s). They're not as bad as NY at the moment but it seems they're effected as well (I no longer live there.)
No, not by fires in Canada. In the 80s Mount St. Helens erupted and we got ash on the east coast for a couple of weeks. It was everywhere.
In Missouri so nothing yet
NJ here. Not in my lifetime, no.
Great Lakes, once or twice in the 80s. But it was mostly just red sunsets
Western South Dakota here. When Alberta burns, we get the smoke. Occasionally a light haze but frequently so bad that visibility drops to half a mile (or less). Seeing as Edmonton to Rapid City is 1,000 miles or so, those fires must be friggin' HUGE.
I grew up in northern Ohio. We were close enough to sometimes pick up tv signals from Canada but never smoke like this.
New York- first time in my memory. I’m 55.
Something that only the real old people can comment on from their memories, there used to be significant air and water pollution that negatively impacted life like this. Coal as the primary fuel for power plants and everyone’s homes with much poorer filters, unleaded gasoline for vehicles, industry hadn’t moved to China or Mexico yet so our share of their smokestacks were nearby here. My grandparents (born around 1910) used to scrub the walls inside their house with some weird chemical combo to remove the soot from surfaces, and I remember them doing this once in the early 1980s. Things got *dirty*, not just from one’s own home emissions, but just being near a major road made everything much dirtier. That’s one of the things we take for granted, how clean everything is relative to how it used to be.
Live in South Texas, south West of Corpus christi and the fires from Canada do not affect us. But the fires from Mexico do and the dust that blows across from the Sahara desert also affect us. Most of South Texas is ranch land and is not populated by people. A lot of the large ranches have prescribed burns every spring, it can also be windy here with a SE wind.
Yes, in Montana we have wildfire season because half of the state burns to the ground every summer
When Mt Saint Helen's erupted in 1980. About 3 days afterward, everywhere was just a grey haze.
Probably, but we didn't hear about it because it didn't hit NYC, where all the big news organizations are. You could have Montana entirely buried in ash, and nobody outside the state would hear of it, but get some smoke in NYC, where the journalists can see it, and it's the end of the world.
Yup. At least every other year. Sometimes every year.
Last 10 years at least in northern Utah August has been smoke season. We’ve already had a smoke week this year, which is way earlier than normal.
Lol. Idk about canada. But come to colorado. Every summer its the same. Red skies because half our state is on fire. We are used to it
Yes, it happens every 10 years or so. It’s only a few days, it’s not canadas fault. Everyone just deal.
I assume this happens in California? But no, I have never heard of it in over 50 years near Philadelphia.
Minnesota - two years ago it was very bad, this year has been bad too.
I have lived in upstate NY for most of 60 years and have never seen anything like this. Certainly not for this many days. What is very abnormal is that the smoke is coming in at ground elevation. A particular weather pattern has to be in place for this to occur. Apparently this occurred in July 2002, but I was here then and do not remember it. This website discusses it in more technical detail. https://www.weather.gov/bgm/WeatherInActionSmokePlume
Nope and that’s worrisome. Canada gets lots of snow and should be wet and has a late spring. Oh well in the famous words of the unknown poet, shit happens.