Senegal, in particular, has endured years of unsafe levels of air pollution, which is causing asthma and other respiratory diseases, climate experts say.Ĭhemically, wildfire smoke can be more toxic than typical urban pollution, but with an asterisk: With smog, “the problem is you’re in it all the time,” says Jonathan Deason, an environmental and energy management professor George Washington University. Many African countries in and near the Sahara Desert, too, regularly grapple with bad air mainly because of sandstorms. Commuters have even been spotted walking down streets wearing plastic bags over their heads to insulate against particulates. In Beijing, for example, decades of sandstorms blowing in from the Mongolian plains have mixed with human-made pollution, sometimes making neighboring buildings invisible to one another. Wildfires aren’t the only air-quality problems that beset major population centers around the globe. President Joe Biden said Thursday that hundreds of American firefighters and support personnel have been in Canada since May, and that he’d offered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “any additional help Canada needs to rapidly accelerate the effort to put out these fires.” The two spoke Wednesday. In neighboring Ontario, a haze hung over Toronto, Canada’s most populous city, where many school recess breaks, day care center activities and outdoor recreation programs were canceled or moved inside. That’s the most important.”īut, she noted, the real solution will be a good dose of rain. Manon Cyr, mayor of the evacuated town of Chibougamau, said she advised residents to be “Zen and patient. He said there have been no reports of injuries, deaths or home damage so far from the fires, but it remained unclear Thursday when more than 12,000 evacuees from various communities would be able to return. Over a third are in Quebec, where Public Safety Minister François Bonnardel said no rain is expected until next week and temperatures are predicted to rise. “The West has always burned, as has Canada, but what’s important now is that we’re getting these massive amounts of smoke in a very populated region, so many, many people are getting affected,” said Loretta Mickley, the co-leader of Harvard University’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.įueled by an unusually dry and warm period in spring, the Canadian fire season that is just getting started could well become the worst on record. So what’s the big deal about the smoke out East? Local officials urged people to stay indoors as much as possible and wear face masks when they venture out. Environmental Protection Agency’s air-pollution scale. The fires sent plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina and northern Europe and parked clumps of air rated unhealthy or worse over the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard.Īt points this week, air quality in places including New York, the nation’s most populous city, nearly hit the top of the U.S. The conditions sent asthma sufferers to hospitals, delayed flights, postponed ballgames and even pushed back a White House Pride Month celebration. Millions of residents could see that for themselves Thursday. “This is something that we, as the eastern side of the country, need to take quite seriously.” “This is kind of an astounding event” but likely to become more common amid global warming, said Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College geography professor and climate scientist. East Coast, but it was a reminder of conditions routinely troubling the country’s West - and a wake-up call about the future, scientists say. NEW YORK (AP) - Images of smoke obscuring the New York skyline and the Washington Monument this week have given the world a new picture of the perils of wildfire, far from where blazes regularly turn skies into hazardous haze.Ī third day of unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires may have been an unnerving novelty for millions of people on the U.S. By JENNIFER PELTZ and ROB GILLIES (Associated Press)
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