Canada is burning, and we’re all inhaling the smoke. The worst wildfire season in our northern neighbor’s history began in the spring and has raged into summer, with winds carrying smoke down the northeastern United States, along the East Coast, and into the Midwest. New York City took on a horrid red Martian hue as people were once again advised to mask up and stay indoors. More than a dozen states, plus Washington, D.C., have been under National Weather Service air quality warnings simultaneously. And at one point in late June, Chicago and Detroit shared the dubious honor of experiencing the worst air quality on the planet.
The wildfires aren’t just a North American problem, though. Almost as soon as they began, the smoke made its way across the Atlantic to Northern Europe, drifting through Scandinavia and even hazing up the Western European sky.
The smoke’s descent on Charlottesville has been markedly less apocalyptic than in Washington, D.C., or New York, but the blanketing haze has still altered the course of our daily lives. Air quality changes day to day, and on the worst afternoons you can see the haze hanging over the city like a gritty smog. Some days, you can even taste it.
“Sigh,” wrote one user on the Charlottesville subreddit. “So over it.”
The wildfire smoke may be hazing up our view of the mountains, but that’s the least of our problems. Breathing it in can be dangerous. The smoke contains particulate matter harmful to our bodies, which when inhaled gets deep into our lungs and affects the way oxygen enters our bloodstream and how carbon dioxide exits.
Both the National Weather Service and the City of Charlottesville look at the Air Quality Index to judge when air pollution reaches unsafe levels. The AQI takes the form of a color-coded dial, with green indicating “good” air quality, onto yellow (“moderate”), and worsening conditions represented by orange, red, purple, and maroon.
This summer, the city made it all the way to purple—“very unhealthy.” That was on June 8, when Charlottesville Parks & Recreation canceled all afternoon outdoor activities. June 29 saw the Office of Emergency Management issue a notice that air quality levels were a notch lower—“unhealthy”—and on July 17, the city warned that the air was at least hazardous for sensitive groups, and that “those with pre-existing conditions may experience health effects and should limit their time outdoors.”
Just because the AQI seems to have dropped from the most alarming levels doesn’t mean we should be less vigilant with our respiratory health. Dr. Kyle Enfield, a pulmonologist and medical director of the medical intensive care unit at UVA Health, told UVA Today in June that even if you don’t have a condition like asthma, “poor air quality increases hospitalizations and health care visits.”
Are we all going to develop chronic ailments from the smoke? Not necessarily, said Enfield. You’d have to be breathing this stuff for months or even years. But temporary exposure, like that of this smoky summer, can up your risk of experiencing a heart attack or stroke, or being hospitalized for a respiratory illness.
That’s where the familiar mantra comes in—mask up outside and stay indoors. But it’s more complicated than protecting ourselves from a human-spread virus. The kind of mask matters—N95, naturally—but even in our homes, the air we breathe is affected by what’s going on outside (like, say, massive wildfires). Using air filters with a “MERV” rating of 8 or higher can help, according to Enfield. The city has warned residents to “keep any doors, windows, and fireplaces shut to reduce fine particle build-up indoors,” and recommended running your air conditioning on a recirculation setting.
Experts expect that this ebb and flow of smoke, where some days may be clearer and less polluted than others, will continue for the rest of the summer. As Canada has experienced a long period of drought and higher than average temperatures, the soil, trees, and vegetation have all dried out. And dry heat brings on lightning. Thus, fires.
According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, as of July 23, more than 1,000 wildfires are burning across Canada, and while hundreds are being batted back by firefighters to protect at-risk communities, the majority are considered out of control and being left to burn. Some fires are in remote locations, and Canadian officials say it would be too expensive to combat them.
While firefighters from at least 10 countries, including the U.S. and Mexico, are helping in Canada, affected international communities are left to deal with the resulting smoke. In Charlottesville, some believe this crisis has put the reality and effects of climate change directly on the public’s doorstep.
“It’s like when there used to be smoking and non-smoking sections in a restaurant. Just because you sat in the non-smoking section didn’t mean that you didn’t have smoke,” says Susan Kruse, executive director of the Community Climate Collaborative. “It’s a tangible example that climate impact is global. Just because you don’t have some of the problems that other places do doesn’t mean you won’t be impacted by them.”
“This is it, right? This is climate change,” says Emily Irvine, the city’s climate protection program manager. “It’s happening right here and right now. … This is not gonna get any better until we stop dumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.”
Irvine says that while working on the climate change risk and vulnerability assessment for the city a few years ago, “wildfire smoke didn’t even come up as a hazard that we’re looking at in our area.” (Though it is a small risk in Albemarle County, which has more tracts of forest.)
“There’s just not the data and modeling on it,” she says. “It’s not what we think of as an acute or a chronic climate hazard traditionally.”
But Irvine says that the events of this hazy summer have prompted the city and county to push wildfire smoke up on their list of climate crises to prepare for. Smoke is also a new topic that they want to engage the public with during this fall’s planned meetings on adapting to and building resilience to climate change.
For those who are wondering what they can do to alleviate the effects of the climate crisis—especially in a small town—Irvine says that help can often take the form of setting an example.
“Climate change is a collective action problem,” she says. “When we work here locally as a community to lower our emissions, and also to adapt to the climate disruptions that are coming because of the warming that’s already happened, we are contributing and doing our part to the global effort to address this issue.”
Irvine remains optimistic even now. Here at home, the city plans to launch a website on the in-progress climate adaptation plan in the next few weeks, and begin public engagement as early as September. While fires rage across Canada, she sees a bright—and hopefully less hazy—future for our city.
“Charlottesville, for being such a small community,” says Irvine, “is really being forward-thinking about how to address these issues.”
