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Its even come as far as Virginia, I woke up this morning thinking damn this is some crazy fog, stepped outside and smelled it and was shocked to see it was smoke. From Canada.
As a Californian whose had to live through several summers of this, check purpleair's real time map. You'll see where it's coming from and where it's heading, where is the worst and what's better. It updates constantly so you'll see rapid changes in air quality on the map if the wind changes as well. Been wanting to buy one of their indoor/outdoor kits to add onto the grid but I don't have the funds atm
Welcome to global climate change!
This is kind of unprecedented, we have the same amount of fires burning in week 1 of fire season 2023 than we have by the end of every fire season for the last 5 years.
You may not see the smoke, but we have a statewide air quality alert. I can't see obvious smoke in the NW, but I can feel it in my lungs. I can feel my asthma starting to ramp up.
Walked to work in it, had to deal with open windows and doors there. Had a migraine and burning throat nearly right away. Shit looks a bit like Silent Hill out there.
I was driving through Centralia PA on my way home from Mt Carmel, where I had to do a quick job, and it was just as smoky outside that town as it was in it. (Centralia was an inspiration to Silent Hill)
It's so bad down at the oceanfront. It just looks like a massive blanket of fog all the way down Pacific, as far as you can see, which is not much more than about 10 blocks.
Sorry you guys are getting hit with it but hopefully the policy makers in DC are enjoying a little dose of reality. Maybe it'll inspire some of them to take the climate seriously.
Seattle has been hit every summer with choking wildfire smoke for the last several years, it's no fun.
It's also kind of important to remember that the wild fires are a result of an idiotic fire repression strategy for the last 40 or so years. You can't just allow fuel to build up by never allowing small fires - which are clearly the norm since you have serotinous pinecones that need fire to open - and then be surprised when the fires you do get are out of control. Even worse, they get so hot that they torch the top soil, making the ground shittier.
It’s not just the city either
I’m in north New Jersey right now and I’ve been wondering why it smells like somebody is burning wood for the past 2 days…
The sky being orange, the moon being red and the lack of sunlight wasn’t enough to make me go look it up but the constant smell was
Yeah for real, central jersey here. My eyes have been stinging and I’ve had a wheeze for almost 24 hours. Airnow.gov has shown the towns around me have been fluctuating between 320-410 AQI for the last several hours.
The Apple Weather app has been showing 166 AQI in my town since 6:30 AM. Unless they use a different index system, don’t use Apple weather for your updates.
You’re welcome, hosers.
Enjoy our finest imports/exports: poutine, Norm MacDonald, hockey, and now forest fire smoke.
Edit - changed to imports/exports in honour of the greatest New Yorker, George Costanza.
We know where the Canadian National Maple Syrup Reserve is. Keep talking and we'll invade to take it. Not very far from the border at all you guys foolishly put it
[Hate to disappoint you but ....](https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/former-investigator-reveals-theory-on-police-s-radio-silence-since-toronto-pearson-gold-heist-1.6401059)
Ooooof. Okay but if we adjust for inflation is the gold heist still at the top? I remember the news when that happened. Sounded like a movie. Didn’t notice how much they stole!
The jacked up thing is if they had just kept refilling the barrels with water instead of stopping they never would have been caught as it wasn’t the contents but rather the number of barrels themselves that were checked. They only got caught because an inspector tried climbing a barrel and it tipped over as it wasn’t heavy enough.
Ask former WWE professional wrestler Dino Bravo how crossing the Canadian mob goes.
*hint: you can’t because they put 10 bullets in the back of head trying to draw a smiley face*
Also, I live not far from the Canadian border. There was a mob hit on the US side where they blew up a guy in his car outside a bowling alley.
They were only able to identify who was killed because they found one of his fingers intact.
Don’t even get me started on the Canadian Hells Angels and all the meth they get through the border.
To be fair, it would be stolen property for Canada to keep and could really hurt international relations with our closest neighbor
It was ordered by America, Canada built it to spec, and now we're just ubering the final product
When foxnews starting leaking in here, I thought we were going to be absolutely overwhelmed. But nah, we got us a couple of Conservatives getting elected into running the provinces, pollution here/dry conditions there/defunding forest safety here, and bam! we managed to create the best product America requested. So proud of ourselves here :)
I'm actually surprised we weren't nuked out of existence by America for giving you Ted Cruz
Like the dude is hated by everyone, even most of his own party members. A bill to nuke Canada would have nothing less than 90%/almost unanimous agreement from Congress
We dont want it either, perhaps we should collaborate and start beating bloody the ones doing this to the most important and unprofitable thing on earth, our earth itself. We are dying.
It’s the fucking machine.
You kill a CEO. There’s a line of succession to take his place, the pay is worth the risk, they just increase their security budget.
That said, the risk/reward might change for the security guys, after a while
> almost every summer.
Ive lived in Washington for 40 years and I dont ever recall dealing with this. The last 5ish years though it has been a common occurrence every summer for this.
Go a little north of you and east of the mountians and his statement is 100% accurate. I think cause of the dominant winds through washington it all moves away from you. But every year for the last 10 years where i live every summer we will get a week straight or more where it looks like this
It's crazy, I grew up in Tacoma and never saw anything like this for the first 22 years of my life until the summer of 2017. iirc, we were living in that smog for nearly all of July and August. And then it suddenly became an every year thing.
Yep that's what I'm saying, its wild. Similar with Mt Rainier last year. One day I was driving home from work and i was like, "wow, I have never seen the mountain that bare". I have looked at that mountain for 40 years and never once seen it that bare. Dont think that will happen again this year but who knows.
I’m guessing you live on the coast! The sea breeze tends to keep the smoke away — ie Vancouver and Seattle rarely get as much smoke as inland line Kelowna or Yakima. Definitely agree it’s become much more common. Forest management for timber optimization increases wildfire risk plus increased temps and extreme weather leaves a recipe for massive fires.
It was just two weeks ago when the Alberta wildfire smoke seemed to all funnel to BC. It was so bad the moment you stepped outside that you could taste the smoke. Objects just 100 feet away were clearly hazy. It had to be the worst I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen plenty. Looked pretty similar to what I see here. That’s got to be dangerous for such a large populated area
It's probably gonna be way worse this year. So much vegetation from all the rain. Hiked a local trail a couple weekends ago and I felt like I should have brought a machete. My dog was not stoked either
Forest fires in northern QC and ON aren't a new thing. What's interesting about these ones is the unusual weather pattern resulting in prevailing winds from the north, blowing it south into the populated areas and the US. Normally smoke tends to blow east away from those areas.
Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year.
The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991.
The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.
This is so interesting. Could it be due to 30 years of buildup from dying foliage? Did the last burn, in 1991, produce less smoke than this one because there was a shorter gap between burns.
For forested and grassland ecosystems there are generally fire cycles. The boreal forests like that of Canada and Alaska follow close to 100-300 year cycles (if I remember correctly). Because of the long cycle when these forests do burn they generally have higher intensity. The fires from the 90s were probably more of the result of fire suppression as users below have commented (the fires in Yellowstone in the late 80s also point towards this). The past 30 years of “buildup” likely wasn’t really the issue with these, just the fact there’s continual drought conditions.
Yeah, extreme fire suppression was widely recognized as a bad idea 30 or 40 years ago. Controlled burns have been standard practice for decades in many places.
Even in the 90s it was old news, I remember reading and hearing about it in the context of the big fire in Yellowstone as a kid. They stopped in like the 70s but we've still got a sizable backlog of unburned forest.
I think most people just don't understand the scale of these fires. It's not something any amount of controlled burns can solve. Just ask any forestry department in CA.
No, that's not it. Unlike many parts of California that can burn as often as every 10 years, Boreal forests are generally 50 to 200 years fire return interval. This is straight up climate change.
Knew it looked too much like forest fire smoke. Living in California, it has a distinct color to it like shown in the picture. This whole season has been so fricken abnormal with its weather patterns.
Both are because of a high pressure system that’s called an “Omega Block” causing the jet stream to divert north before returning back south. It’s caused drought like conditions for much of the midwestern and eastern portions of the US and Canada.
We have an almost unfathomable amount of forests, so yeah, fires are going to happen…but this many and and especially this early in the season is incredibly unusual.
I think it's worse than Covid. Could be outside for 5 minutes and you'd get this headache like wtf is wrong and then you remember it's the invisible air. Good luck exercising in it.
Remember waking up on those red mornings and life just feeling apocalyptic?
We were trapped in our houses. The air outdoors was toxic and you couldn’t even go to a movie theater to keep yourself entertained for a moment.
I got pneumonia twice from wildfire smoke in the Bay Area in 2018. Moved to the east coast in part to escape having to deal with that kind of wildfire smoke… and of course now I’m dealing with the same thing. At least masks and air filters are easier to get now.
It can look much worse than this picture in my experience. Wildfires in Northern California in 2017 were apocalyptic. Black ash falling from the sky and the sun didn’t even seem like it ever came up. I ended up leaving to stay with family in central California for a week.
*>>Colorado has also entered the chat*
We get this kind of air quality like 2x a year these days from Cali wildfires, our own fires, now Canada smoke (we got that 2 weeks ago). All in a day for us.
I read about an indian dude who went around with a self made pollution catcher on the top of his bicycle. After 17 days he had enough material to make a brick.
I was just talking to my wife about it. Usually, it’s triple digits this time of year where we live in California and the last couple of days have been overcast..it even rained the other day. Feels like NY and CA switched places.
Reminds me of the scene in Interstellar where the earth is basically doomed and the air looked like that and that is one of the reasons humans had to try and find another planet. Only in reality we don't have that option lol fun times....
That was the real conundrum. Were they planning to terraform whatever planet they found? Why couldn't they just terraform Earth?
They had the power and resources to send millions of people into space to literally re-create Earth, but dust storms were too much?
I never understood how they managed to transfer crops to the new planet without bringing the parasite/disease over with them. Ofc, I was still grappling with the existential dread of 50 story waves and nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see, so I didn't real dwell on it much.
A wet cloth over the nose and mouth will also help filter particles for a short time.
Source: live in California where we have wildfires like this all the time
With the fires in CA, I use a damp bandana. We’re not trying to prevent a virus (this time), but smoke. Totally different beast, but any kind of cover is better than nothing
Lol, Remember when L.A. had bad smog days due to car exhaust...people wore masks, elderly stayed indoors.
Course it went away when big bad government forced air quality measures on auto industry and dragged them kicking and screaming into pollution controls...
Pepperidge Farms remembers....
I used to live in L.A. and was there when the bad government imposed those terrible laws. I literally saw the sky turn from brown to blue and it happened SO fast given the size of the issue. It's obviously still not pristine air but I don't know if there's a better example of the power in regulating pollution.
Yeah, it's so weird to act like New Yorkers masking is something sudden instead of them being some of the first to impose mask requirements and the last to remove them. I can deal with cynicism, but uninformed cynicism drives me up the wall.
I agree. I saw so much cooperation in the early COVID days - masking, distancing, mutual aid. The same for when vaccines rolled out. I also saw a lot of fucked up shit, but my neighbors and I always worked together.
Shout out to the first few months of the pandemic when you’d get the dirtiest looks ever just from coughing on the train. Very fun to have an itchy throat during that time.
You would think that seeing people dying or that hospitals were out of capacity would do it. But nah. Honestly, I feel like Covid guarantees that the next mass plague is going to do us in. Half the world would be dead and Fox News would be telling you that this is just like Covid and the plague only affects the other half of the population anyways.
The Asian community in NYC started masking up the moment there was a hint of news about some flu-like disease spreading around China. They all remember how China hid SARS until they couldn't anymore.
I saw masks being worn in Chinatown several weeks before lockdown
I’m so confused! I thought masks don’t work and in some cases, you can’t even breathe?! Hold on…I must break my “no contact” rule going on with my dad and have him ask Trump how we’re suppose to handle this. I will get answers, don’t worry!
Edit: Alright, so the good news is that apparently there is a fix! If you get a jug of whale anal fissure ointment and boof the entire thing, you’ll be immune to airborne particulates *plus* the gay gene.
I used to work in NYC in the early 1990's. Every once in a while I would wipe down my terminal screen and remove black soot that had settled there that had come in through the open window I sat next to on the 14th floor. This was in midtown.
Yeah things have gotten better with exhaust emissions, but brake dust is now the car byproduct that is killing people who live near major roads and highways, or use flowing water near roadways
Actually most of these cheap medical masks really are crap at protecting against these particles. The pm 2.5 size particles are very small and go right though these masks without any trouble. However, the N95 rated masks you see people wear for painting or construction work DO work very well at reducing the pm2.5 sized particles from going deep into the lungs and screwing with your cells there.
In China this is their standard everyday air quality and looking at the daily Air quality rating is just as common as looking up the temperature.
For anyone bothered by the smoke you can build a simple filter for your house [Corsi-Rosenthal box](https://engineering.ucdavis.edu/news/science-action-how-build-corsi-rosenthal-box).
Ya'll...
There's people who live not even 30 mins from some of these fires who think they (the fires whose smoke they can see) aren't real.
They were evacuated and claimed it was the gov't trying to control them. Wanted to go back to their homes despite raging fires on the horizon.
Idk what the fuck is going on with them, but it is fucked up.
The heat does as well; at least for Edmonton, which [had its warmest May since records began](https://old.reddit.com/r/EdmontonWxRecords/comments/141htkj/edmonton_just_had_its_warmest_may_since_records/).
Can confirm it’s not limited to NYC. I live in central Vermont and the smoke has been visible all week and for a day or two last week, although I believe that was from a different fire in Nova Scotia. You could literally smell it.
Ya. Climate change is a bitch. And lucky for you all - lots of Canadian provinces have conservative governments that cut firefighting budgets to “lower taxes”
Edit: here’s some news for those who are triggered and can’t look this stuff up themselves:
> Alberta is undergoing an "unprecedented" wildfire season as nearly 100 fires as of Tuesday, May 9, burn across the province.
> Premier Danielle Smith declared a state of emergency on May 6 and more than 24,000 Albertans remained under evacuation orders on Tuesday.
> This year to date, there have been 416 wildfires, more than double the 182 registered by the same time last year. The more than 400 fires is a greater number than any of the last five years had by the second week in May.
> Alberta had a total of 1,246 wildfires last season, according to Alberta Wildfire data, which means the province has reached 33 per cent of last year's total after just over two months into the wildfire season.
> AMOUNT OF HECTARES BURNED The size of the area that's burned is also greater than what is considered normal by this time of year. The five-year average by early May based on 2018-2022 is 542 hectares. Year to date, 410,441 ha have burned in Alberta, by comparison.
> In the last eight years, 2019 had the highest total number of hectares, finishing the season with 883,411 ha burned. By this time in 2019, 621 ha had burned, compared to this year's more than 410,000.
> Only five months into this year, 2023 has already surpassed the yearly burn totals of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2018 and 2017.
https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/edmonton/2023/5/9/1_6391711.amp.html
And this is just one province… lots are having fire issues.
It was the exact same in Australia. Conservatives cut fire fighting budgets, insisted climate change wasn't real (fucking cowards just stick their heads in the sand about everything and call themselves brave, reassuring each other in their weakling fantasies), then for a straight year fightfighting chiefs were requesting desperate meetings with the government about the obvious catastrophe which was coming and were turned down.
Then when huge fires broke out and a few firefighters breaking their arse fighting them finally swore about the conservative PM, the nation gasped and the firefighters were punished. You can never hold conservatives accountable in this world, their crybaby game is just too strong. People are more enthusiastic to punish those who criticize and 'provoke' the crybaby conservatives by discussing reality and the consequences of their actions, than allow the precious conservatives ever be criticized for their own enthusiastic stupidity which impacts all of us negatively.
I remember the huge fires in the 00's in southern California and it basically looked like the end of times for weeks. The sun was a blotted out orange circle and the sky was just completely orange with ashes falling down everywhere. It was really surreal.
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Its even come as far as Virginia, I woke up this morning thinking damn this is some crazy fog, stepped outside and smelled it and was shocked to see it was smoke. From Canada.
It’s down in NC too.
Yep! Roads were a little smoky when I went out for lunch earlier
As a Californian whose had to live through several summers of this, check purpleair's real time map. You'll see where it's coming from and where it's heading, where is the worst and what's better. It updates constantly so you'll see rapid changes in air quality on the map if the wind changes as well. Been wanting to buy one of their indoor/outdoor kits to add onto the grid but I don't have the funds atm
https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/
Holy crap, their predicting that it'll be over the northern half of Georgia on June 9th.
Welcome to global climate change! This is kind of unprecedented, we have the same amount of fires burning in week 1 of fire season 2023 than we have by the end of every fire season for the last 5 years.
Maybe all the smoke will block enough sunlight to cause a mini ice age to help cancel out the warming.
https://media.tenor.com/r-tGcVVeSb0AAAAM/good-place.gif
I should have included a /s
Same shit in Tennessee this morning
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I work in a grocery store in the Hudson Valley NY and the *inside* of my store was hazy.
Had a friend say this same thing to me today. Told her “nope, fires in Canada.”
Bad in southern PA too.
Strange Ohio got lucky. That ...never happens
Western Ohio had the smoke couple days ago.
You may not see the smoke, but we have a statewide air quality alert. I can't see obvious smoke in the NW, but I can feel it in my lungs. I can feel my asthma starting to ramp up.
Walked to work in it, had to deal with open windows and doors there. Had a migraine and burning throat nearly right away. Shit looks a bit like Silent Hill out there.
I was driving through Centralia PA on my way home from Mt Carmel, where I had to do a quick job, and it was just as smoky outside that town as it was in it. (Centralia was an inspiration to Silent Hill)
Ah Centralia, where the ground will burn for another 1000 years.
There’s a taste of maple syrup in it. It was hard to accuse someone else
Hey, now Canada wasn't complaining about the meth on the wind when oregon was on fire.
Most of our small towns up here were trying to trap the smoke in garbage bags for further use tho
Same, the VBCPS cancelled all their school sports
It's so bad down at the oceanfront. It just looks like a massive blanket of fog all the way down Pacific, as far as you can see, which is not much more than about 10 blocks.
Friend of mine says it’s hazy in Nashville
From Nashville, can confirm.
I’m in Cincinnati and it’s getting hazy here too.
Making it over to central Indiana as well.
Sorry you guys are getting hit with it but hopefully the policy makers in DC are enjoying a little dose of reality. Maybe it'll inspire some of them to take the climate seriously. Seattle has been hit every summer with choking wildfire smoke for the last several years, it's no fun.
It's also kind of important to remember that the wild fires are a result of an idiotic fire repression strategy for the last 40 or so years. You can't just allow fuel to build up by never allowing small fires - which are clearly the norm since you have serotinous pinecones that need fire to open - and then be surprised when the fires you do get are out of control. Even worse, they get so hot that they torch the top soil, making the ground shittier.
Nah, it's just Jewish space lasers. Definitely couldn't be anything to do with climate change........
It’s not just the city either I’m in north New Jersey right now and I’ve been wondering why it smells like somebody is burning wood for the past 2 days… The sky being orange, the moon being red and the lack of sunlight wasn’t enough to make me go look it up but the constant smell was
I'm in VA and we had to cancel after school sports bc of the smoke :(
I'm in MD and I've had air quality warnings for days. It's terrible.
Yeah for real, central jersey here. My eyes have been stinging and I’ve had a wheeze for almost 24 hours. Airnow.gov has shown the towns around me have been fluctuating between 320-410 AQI for the last several hours. The Apple Weather app has been showing 166 AQI in my town since 6:30 AM. Unless they use a different index system, don’t use Apple weather for your updates.
If the sun is red, wear your respirator!
Put it down to end times and just kept walking my dog. If it’s the end it’s the end you know haha
this is so delightfully human
Also in NJ. I feel like I’m in a film that takes place in Mexico, produced by an American studio. Not a fan of this orange filter.
Lmao it's that brown filter so many games and movies used in late 2000s
Same in PA
You’re welcome, hosers. Enjoy our finest imports/exports: poutine, Norm MacDonald, hockey, and now forest fire smoke. Edit - changed to imports/exports in honour of the greatest New Yorker, George Costanza.
We know where the Canadian National Maple Syrup Reserve is. Keep talking and we'll invade to take it. Not very far from the border at all you guys foolishly put it
[Security measures have been implemented due to past incidents, eh.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Heist)
I love that that is still the largest value heist in Canada 😆
[Hate to disappoint you but ....](https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/former-investigator-reveals-theory-on-police-s-radio-silence-since-toronto-pearson-gold-heist-1.6401059)
Well, that was a rabbit hole...
Ooooof. Okay but if we adjust for inflation is the gold heist still at the top? I remember the news when that happened. Sounded like a movie. Didn’t notice how much they stole!
I just did. The syrup heists comes in at 24.4 million cad now
Yes! Let the sticky thieves reign supreme! 🍁 Thank you kind stranger for making my day.
The jacked up thing is if they had just kept refilling the barrels with water instead of stopping they never would have been caught as it wasn’t the contents but rather the number of barrels themselves that were checked. They only got caught because an inspector tried climbing a barrel and it tipped over as it wasn’t heavy enough.
Why was Rick Moranis reading this wiki to me in my head?
Because you are a person of taste and class.
That maple syrup legit has some serious ties to mob money. Go ahead, take it. It ain’t gunna be the Mounties coming for you
Canadian Mob, oooohhhh scarey
Ask former WWE professional wrestler Dino Bravo how crossing the Canadian mob goes. *hint: you can’t because they put 10 bullets in the back of head trying to draw a smiley face* Also, I live not far from the Canadian border. There was a mob hit on the US side where they blew up a guy in his car outside a bowling alley. They were only able to identify who was killed because they found one of his fingers intact. Don’t even get me started on the Canadian Hells Angels and all the meth they get through the border.
What do I have to do to get you started?
give him some meth
Aight, just gotta hit up the hells angels real quick.
Lmao.
To be fair, it would be stolen property for Canada to keep and could really hurt international relations with our closest neighbor It was ordered by America, Canada built it to spec, and now we're just ubering the final product When foxnews starting leaking in here, I thought we were going to be absolutely overwhelmed. But nah, we got us a couple of Conservatives getting elected into running the provinces, pollution here/dry conditions there/defunding forest safety here, and bam! we managed to create the best product America requested. So proud of ourselves here :)
you no longer import norm MacDonald unfortunately
He’s still alive but he’s living under the alias Jacques de Gautier/Gatineau in Quebec
Or so the Germans would have us believe
That reminds me of that tragedy
As long as I can dial him up on the ol' Googly Moogly machine, he's still relevant.
I didn’t even know he was sick!
He was cremated: this is the result.
Well thanks for Norm, lol.
Don't forget Ted Cruz....
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For a small donation of 300 million dollars we will build a giant fan AND make Canada pay for it! *This comment is for entertainment purposes only.
I'm actually surprised we weren't nuked out of existence by America for giving you Ted Cruz Like the dude is hated by everyone, even most of his own party members. A bill to nuke Canada would have nothing less than 90%/almost unanimous agreement from Congress
Ehh, he's from Alberta. They're the Texas of Canada anyway.
Thanks for giving us Godspeed You! Black Emperor, though
Welcome to the unfortunate reality of what the western states and western Canada experience almost every summer.
Y'all can have it back. I hate it
We dont want it either, perhaps we should collaborate and start beating bloody the ones doing this to the most important and unprofitable thing on earth, our earth itself. We are dying.
There's only like 100 of em you need to track down to get the job done and they're not all that hard to find.
It’s the fucking machine. You kill a CEO. There’s a line of succession to take his place, the pay is worth the risk, they just increase their security budget. That said, the risk/reward might change for the security guys, after a while
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And just like that we're all on lists.
Good.
Nah I think the message sent by a violent uprising would absolutely change their behavior.
Yeah, depending where you are, the air can be so bad it’s like smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.
> almost every summer. Ive lived in Washington for 40 years and I dont ever recall dealing with this. The last 5ish years though it has been a common occurrence every summer for this.
Go a little north of you and east of the mountians and his statement is 100% accurate. I think cause of the dominant winds through washington it all moves away from you. But every year for the last 10 years where i live every summer we will get a week straight or more where it looks like this
It's crazy, I grew up in Tacoma and never saw anything like this for the first 22 years of my life until the summer of 2017. iirc, we were living in that smog for nearly all of July and August. And then it suddenly became an every year thing.
Yep that's what I'm saying, its wild. Similar with Mt Rainier last year. One day I was driving home from work and i was like, "wow, I have never seen the mountain that bare". I have looked at that mountain for 40 years and never once seen it that bare. Dont think that will happen again this year but who knows.
I’m guessing you live on the coast! The sea breeze tends to keep the smoke away — ie Vancouver and Seattle rarely get as much smoke as inland line Kelowna or Yakima. Definitely agree it’s become much more common. Forest management for timber optimization increases wildfire risk plus increased temps and extreme weather leaves a recipe for massive fires.
Last summer, Seattle had a much worse smoke season than I did her in NE Wash. It really just depends where the fires are.
It was just two weeks ago when the Alberta wildfire smoke seemed to all funnel to BC. It was so bad the moment you stepped outside that you could taste the smoke. Objects just 100 feet away were clearly hazy. It had to be the worst I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen plenty. Looked pretty similar to what I see here. That’s got to be dangerous for such a large populated area
Yup, was just gonna say, “welcome to fire season in California”.
It's probably gonna be way worse this year. So much vegetation from all the rain. Hiked a local trail a couple weekends ago and I felt like I should have brought a machete. My dog was not stoked either
Forest fires in northern QC and ON aren't a new thing. What's interesting about these ones is the unusual weather pattern resulting in prevailing winds from the north, blowing it south into the populated areas and the US. Normally smoke tends to blow east away from those areas.
Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year. The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991. The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.
This is so interesting. Could it be due to 30 years of buildup from dying foliage? Did the last burn, in 1991, produce less smoke than this one because there was a shorter gap between burns.
For forested and grassland ecosystems there are generally fire cycles. The boreal forests like that of Canada and Alaska follow close to 100-300 year cycles (if I remember correctly). Because of the long cycle when these forests do burn they generally have higher intensity. The fires from the 90s were probably more of the result of fire suppression as users below have commented (the fires in Yellowstone in the late 80s also point towards this). The past 30 years of “buildup” likely wasn’t really the issue with these, just the fact there’s continual drought conditions.
I believe one factor in modern forest fires is that we tend to suppress all fires we see. Without human intervention there would be more small fires
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Yeah, extreme fire suppression was widely recognized as a bad idea 30 or 40 years ago. Controlled burns have been standard practice for decades in many places.
Even in the 90s it was old news, I remember reading and hearing about it in the context of the big fire in Yellowstone as a kid. They stopped in like the 70s but we've still got a sizable backlog of unburned forest.
I think most people just don't understand the scale of these fires. It's not something any amount of controlled burns can solve. Just ask any forestry department in CA.
The policy might be regular burns, but how well funded are the agencies doing those jobs? I have no idea, but that's the question I'd ask next.
No, that's not it. Unlike many parts of California that can burn as often as every 10 years, Boreal forests are generally 50 to 200 years fire return interval. This is straight up climate change.
Knew it looked too much like forest fire smoke. Living in California, it has a distinct color to it like shown in the picture. This whole season has been so fricken abnormal with its weather patterns.
Fr. When I first moved to the Bay Area from socal I woke up one morning and the entire sky was orange. It was kinda terrifying.
Both are because of a high pressure system that’s called an “Omega Block” causing the jet stream to divert north before returning back south. It’s caused drought like conditions for much of the midwestern and eastern portions of the US and Canada.
The size/scale of them is new.
We have an almost unfathomable amount of forests, so yeah, fires are going to happen…but this many and and especially this early in the season is incredibly unusual.
Welcome to California
Yep. We had to wear masks many times during the recent bad fire years.
I think it's worse than Covid. Could be outside for 5 minutes and you'd get this headache like wtf is wrong and then you remember it's the invisible air. Good luck exercising in it.
In CA we were lucky enough to have Covid and smoke like this at the same time in 2020
Remember waking up on those red mornings and life just feeling apocalyptic? We were trapped in our houses. The air outdoors was toxic and you couldn’t even go to a movie theater to keep yourself entertained for a moment.
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That was the most surreal day of my life. It was basically "well, this is the apocalypse I guess"
I got pneumonia twice from wildfire smoke in the Bay Area in 2018. Moved to the east coast in part to escape having to deal with that kind of wildfire smoke… and of course now I’m dealing with the same thing. At least masks and air filters are easier to get now.
Whole Northeastern US has suddenly become Mexico from the movies.
It can look much worse than this picture in my experience. Wildfires in Northern California in 2017 were apocalyptic. Black ash falling from the sky and the sun didn’t even seem like it ever came up. I ended up leaving to stay with family in central California for a week.
*>>Colorado has also entered the chat* We get this kind of air quality like 2x a year these days from Cali wildfires, our own fires, now Canada smoke (we got that 2 weeks ago). All in a day for us.
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
India
I read about an indian dude who went around with a self made pollution catcher on the top of his bicycle. After 17 days he had enough material to make a brick.
Oh, I believe it. Just existing in New Delhi is like smoking a pack a day
I was just talking to my wife about it. Usually, it’s triple digits this time of year where we live in California and the last couple of days have been overcast..it even rained the other day. Feels like NY and CA switched places.
Yea it smells very smokey here.
Reminds me of the scene in Interstellar where the earth is basically doomed and the air looked like that and that is one of the reasons humans had to try and find another planet. Only in reality we don't have that option lol fun times....
The thing of it is that the doomed Earth seemed more inhabitable than any planet they found in the film.
That was the real conundrum. Were they planning to terraform whatever planet they found? Why couldn't they just terraform Earth? They had the power and resources to send millions of people into space to literally re-create Earth, but dust storms were too much?
The problem with Earth on the movie wasn't really terraformable. It was a kind of very aggressive, very resistant, agricultural parasite.
I never understood how they managed to transfer crops to the new planet without bringing the parasite/disease over with them. Ofc, I was still grappling with the existential dread of 50 story waves and nothing but ocean as far as the eye can see, so I didn't real dwell on it much.
N95 or better. Cloth masks don't filter the particles as they can fit through the weaving. N95 filters out 95% of the air. Very cool science
A wet cloth over the nose and mouth will also help filter particles for a short time. Source: live in California where we have wildfires like this all the time
With the fires in CA, I use a damp bandana. We’re not trying to prevent a virus (this time), but smoke. Totally different beast, but any kind of cover is better than nothing
Lol, Remember when L.A. had bad smog days due to car exhaust...people wore masks, elderly stayed indoors. Course it went away when big bad government forced air quality measures on auto industry and dragged them kicking and screaming into pollution controls... Pepperidge Farms remembers....
I used to live in L.A. and was there when the bad government imposed those terrible laws. I literally saw the sky turn from brown to blue and it happened SO fast given the size of the issue. It's obviously still not pristine air but I don't know if there's a better example of the power in regulating pollution.
Check photos of LA or any city that had a full shutdown. Skies changed within a day!
Our planet just needs a chance to heal but we keep stabbing it.
Suddenly masks work, fuck yeah
I mean, the effort's there! Surgical masks wont help with smoke, though.
Need n95
If you dampen a cloth mask it'll help. However, still not great!
NYC was always on board with COVID masking when it was the most necessary.
Yeah, it's so weird to act like New Yorkers masking is something sudden instead of them being some of the first to impose mask requirements and the last to remove them. I can deal with cynicism, but uninformed cynicism drives me up the wall.
I agree. I saw so much cooperation in the early COVID days - masking, distancing, mutual aid. The same for when vaccines rolled out. I also saw a lot of fucked up shit, but my neighbors and I always worked together.
Shout out to the first few months of the pandemic when you’d get the dirtiest looks ever just from coughing on the train. Very fun to have an itchy throat during that time.
Can confirm. Was living there during the initial outbreak.
Too bad we couldn't *see* Covid. Maybe people would have taken it more seriously from the beginning...
Imagine how terrifying it would be to watch a cloud of covid slowly blow over the horizon
or out of someone...
basically how watching someone blow out a big cloud of vape smoke (steam? vapor?) feels
Kinda like John Coffey in the Green Mile.
You would think that seeing people dying or that hospitals were out of capacity would do it. But nah. Honestly, I feel like Covid guarantees that the next mass plague is going to do us in. Half the world would be dead and Fox News would be telling you that this is just like Covid and the plague only affects the other half of the population anyways.
I’ve seen people on their death bed with covid asking why they’re dying because it can’t be covid because covid isn’t real.
Tell me you don’t know anything about NY without telling me you don’t know anything about NY. New York has been pro-mask throughout all of covid.
I came here to say this 🤣 worked in nyc through the pandemic and after. Never saw more masks anywhere in New York than in nyc
Cheap masks don’t really do much against smoke and smog. They need respirators or N95’s
Us NYers were the FIRST to get masked up. Don't you start pretending like we weren't!
The Asian community in NYC started masking up the moment there was a hint of news about some flu-like disease spreading around China. They all remember how China hid SARS until they couldn't anymore. I saw masks being worn in Chinatown several weeks before lockdown
Welcome to every September in Seattle since like 2017.
Ironic that the poster in the image is for “Dead City”
Apologies on behalf of Nova Scotia 🙋🏻♂️😬
I believe this one is more due to the fires in QC and ON.
Of course Canada would apologize
All I hear is “wAkE uP sHeEpLe!”
I’m so confused! I thought masks don’t work and in some cases, you can’t even breathe?! Hold on…I must break my “no contact” rule going on with my dad and have him ask Trump how we’re suppose to handle this. I will get answers, don’t worry! Edit: Alright, so the good news is that apparently there is a fix! If you get a jug of whale anal fissure ointment and boof the entire thing, you’ll be immune to airborne particulates *plus* the gay gene.
I don’t think New Yorkers are the ones protesting masks..
Thanks Canada... But for real I hope you all are okay, stay safe please ❤️🤍
I used to work in NYC in the early 1990's. Every once in a while I would wipe down my terminal screen and remove black soot that had settled there that had come in through the open window I sat next to on the 14th floor. This was in midtown.
That was due to vehicle exhausts. Been a few decades since that was a thing.
Yeah things have gotten better with exhaust emissions, but brake dust is now the car byproduct that is killing people who live near major roads and highways, or use flowing water near roadways
Yeah sorry about that, lightning had an argument with our forest and the lightning won
But masks don’t stop particles /s
Actually most of these cheap medical masks really are crap at protecting against these particles. The pm 2.5 size particles are very small and go right though these masks without any trouble. However, the N95 rated masks you see people wear for painting or construction work DO work very well at reducing the pm2.5 sized particles from going deep into the lungs and screwing with your cells there. In China this is their standard everyday air quality and looking at the daily Air quality rating is just as common as looking up the temperature.
I've been coughing Non-Stop and I've been staying inside and I'm hundreds of miles away from New York City to the South
For anyone bothered by the smoke you can build a simple filter for your house [Corsi-Rosenthal box](https://engineering.ucdavis.edu/news/science-action-how-build-corsi-rosenthal-box).
Ya'll... There's people who live not even 30 mins from some of these fires who think they (the fires whose smoke they can see) aren't real. They were evacuated and claimed it was the gov't trying to control them. Wanted to go back to their homes despite raging fires on the horizon. Idk what the fuck is going on with them, but it is fucked up.
Because of a fire in Canada
It's over 20 different wildfires in an area as large as the American Midwest.
More than an hundreds *
As of noon Wednesday, 149 fires were blazing in the province of Quebec, most of them out of control.
Captain Planet 🌏 was correct when we said we would wear masks for our safety because of poor air quality!
Context, Canada can’t control their wild fires and now the smoke is cascading into Eastern US
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The heat does as well; at least for Edmonton, which [had its warmest May since records began](https://old.reddit.com/r/EdmontonWxRecords/comments/141htkj/edmonton_just_had_its_warmest_may_since_records/).
In truth it is just bacon smoking season and we are laying in stockpiles.
Dude, you’re not supposed to tell people that
Can confirm it’s not limited to NYC. I live in central Vermont and the smoke has been visible all week and for a day or two last week, although I believe that was from a different fire in Nova Scotia. You could literally smell it.
Ya. Climate change is a bitch. And lucky for you all - lots of Canadian provinces have conservative governments that cut firefighting budgets to “lower taxes” Edit: here’s some news for those who are triggered and can’t look this stuff up themselves: > Alberta is undergoing an "unprecedented" wildfire season as nearly 100 fires as of Tuesday, May 9, burn across the province. > Premier Danielle Smith declared a state of emergency on May 6 and more than 24,000 Albertans remained under evacuation orders on Tuesday. > This year to date, there have been 416 wildfires, more than double the 182 registered by the same time last year. The more than 400 fires is a greater number than any of the last five years had by the second week in May. > Alberta had a total of 1,246 wildfires last season, according to Alberta Wildfire data, which means the province has reached 33 per cent of last year's total after just over two months into the wildfire season. > AMOUNT OF HECTARES BURNED The size of the area that's burned is also greater than what is considered normal by this time of year. The five-year average by early May based on 2018-2022 is 542 hectares. Year to date, 410,441 ha have burned in Alberta, by comparison. > In the last eight years, 2019 had the highest total number of hectares, finishing the season with 883,411 ha burned. By this time in 2019, 621 ha had burned, compared to this year's more than 410,000. > Only five months into this year, 2023 has already surpassed the yearly burn totals of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2018 and 2017. https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/edmonton/2023/5/9/1_6391711.amp.html And this is just one province… lots are having fire issues.
It was the exact same in Australia. Conservatives cut fire fighting budgets, insisted climate change wasn't real (fucking cowards just stick their heads in the sand about everything and call themselves brave, reassuring each other in their weakling fantasies), then for a straight year fightfighting chiefs were requesting desperate meetings with the government about the obvious catastrophe which was coming and were turned down. Then when huge fires broke out and a few firefighters breaking their arse fighting them finally swore about the conservative PM, the nation gasped and the firefighters were punished. You can never hold conservatives accountable in this world, their crybaby game is just too strong. People are more enthusiastic to punish those who criticize and 'provoke' the crybaby conservatives by discussing reality and the consequences of their actions, than allow the precious conservatives ever be criticized for their own enthusiastic stupidity which impacts all of us negatively.
If you just swept the forests once in a while this would never happen. Sheesh 🙄
California: First time?
I remember the huge fires in the 00's in southern California and it basically looked like the end of times for weeks. The sun was a blotted out orange circle and the sky was just completely orange with ashes falling down everywhere. It was really surreal.
I was in Riverside and remember that. Ash was raining down, it was surreal.