Canadian wildfire smoke jars New York with ‘movie of the future’

Late Tuesday afternoon, a group of executives from the Related Companies, one of New York’s largest real estate developers, ascended the Edge observation deck on the top floor of 30 Hudson Yards, offering what is often the city’s most spectacular view one. They were shocked by what they found.

“You don’t see anything right now,” said Jeff Blau, Related’s chief executive. “I’ve never seen anything this bad.”

Hazy air wafting from Canadian wildfires hundreds of miles away will turn dangerous by the next day, prompting health warnings for millions of people in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States for everything from air travel to schools to Broadway shows Everything is disturbing.

New York City health officials are reporting an increase in visits to hospital emergency rooms with asthma as anxious residents find themselves reaching for Covid-19 masks they no longer think they need. They also consulted weather maps and fiddled with smartphone apps that showed the city’s air pollution had surpassed Delhi’s as the world’s worst. Even without data on particulate matter in the air, the otherworldly orange and yellowish skies tinged with apocalyptic hues made it clear that nothing was right.

“I went outside and basically said, what the hell is this?” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday.

Commuter Helen Mannion from Long Island was also stunned. “It went so fast yesterday. It was horrible,” she said Thursday as she waited for a bus outside New York’s Penn Station. The wearing of masks, official warnings and the sudden realization that one is in greater danger is all too familiar. “Everyone is suffering from PTSD from COVID-19,” Mannion said, before asking, “Why does all this disaster always happen in New York?”

People in the world’s media capital habitually struggle to look beyond their own shores — as Northern Californians long accustomed to pollution from wildfires complained loudly this week. If they do, they may find that others are worse off. In Quebec in particular, emergency services were overwhelmed with more than 150 fires burning Thursday, most of which were thought to be out of control. Many are in remote locations, or are often served by volunteer fire departments. The whole town was evacuated.

“Some fires are under control and some are not,” Quebec’s public safety minister François Bonnardel told reporters on Thursday, a day after U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to send more firefighters Go and help. “We’re watching these fires every hour and we want to tell Quebecers they’re going to be able to go home, but in the short term, that’s not going to happen.”

From the boreal forests of Canada to the furthest reaches of the southeastern U.S. with air pollution, a common question emerged this week: Is this an anomalous event on the Eastern Seaboard or the start of a chronic summer sickness?

Adams is pessimistic. “While this may be the first time we’ve experienced something of this magnitude, let’s be clear, it won’t be the last,” the mayor warned, blaming climate change. Many scientists agree with this view. Still, as with most problems involving the interaction of weather, climate, and human activity, accurate forecasts are harder to come by.

The smoke was produced by a particularly intense Canadian wildfire season. Earlier this spring, fires in the western province of Alberta, Canada’s main oil-producing region, forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Recently, fires have spread through forests in the eastern provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia. The 4.3 million hectares that have burned are well above the annual average for the past decade, according to Canada’s Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

“It’s been an unusually bad and unusually early fire season across all of Canada’s provinces,” said Carly Phillips, an ecosystem scientist with experience in wildfires and forest carbon dynamics who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Protection Agency. Advocacy groups. “It’s been a very warm and very dry spring. If the vegetation had more opportunities to lose moisture, it would have ignited more quickly.”

That doesn’t necessarily affect the New Yorkers and Phillies. But a combination of northerly and northwesterly winds and an unusually persistent area of ​​low pressure over New England has pushed the smoggy air toward the northeastern U.S., according to the National Weather Service.

It predicts that the weather pattern will continue over the next few days, bringing more concentrated and dense smoke over the mid-Atlantic over the weekend before a new weather system arrives early next week.

NWS meteorologist Zack Taylor warned that while there may be a brief reprieve in the Northeast, the smoke could return this summer.

“The immediate source of all this is clearly the fires in Canada. Until those fires are contained or better controlled, the smoke will continue to drift into the atmosphere. Depending on wind direction and weather patterns – some of these may fall into the US at times .”

Phillips of the Union of Concerned Scientists points out that timely rain will help. But she also has a longer view. “The bigger issue is that these patterns are not just going to happen for a few weeks, but for decades to come. There could be an increase in fire activity in the future — it might vary from year to year, but the trend will be increasing.”

Meanwhile, those on the ground – away from fire and statistical models – can only cope as their means allow. Some in New York City heeded the mayor’s plea to stay home, or enjoy the luxury of working in modern high-rises, like Hudson Yards, with advanced air filtration systems.

Others were working at a construction site on Hudson Street downtown where a new office building was being built for Disney. Construction workers said they were given masks and told about safety precautions. By noon Thursday, many had abandoned them and work seemed to be going on as usual.

Gustavo Ajche, a founding member of Los Deliveristas Unidos, an association of delivery workers in New York City, said he had a headache and eye irritation after his shift on Tuesday. Still, he got on his bike on Wednesday — this time wearing an N95 mask. He was handling more takeout orders than usual, presumably because so many people were sheltering indoors.

“It felt like we were under attack, like any other epidemic,” Ajche said of the smoke. He added that the city “looks like a movie about the future”.

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