ACROSS AMERICA — More than 140 active wildfires are burning in Canada, an early spring harbinger of the dystopian haze that enveloped multiple U.S. cities last year.
Smoke from the fires wafting down into the northern tier of U.S. states triggered air quality alerts in Minnesota and Wisconsin issued air quality alerts Monday, with air reaching “unhealthy” levels in southern Minnesota Monday morning, including Minneapolis-St. Paul, according to AirNow.gov.
Of 144 active Canadian wildfires Monday, 39 have been labeled as “out of control,” according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Center. Those fires included one that broke out Friday in British Columbia that has forced the evacuation of thousands of people from Fort Nelson and the Fort Nelson Indian Reserve.
Find out what’s happening in Across Americawith free, real-time updates from Patch.
The majority of the fires, 90 of them, are in the British Columbia and Alberta provinces.
Below are three things to know:
Find out what’s happening in Across Americawith free, real-time updates from Patch.‘Zombie Fires’ Burned Through Winter
Canada’s 2023 wildfire season, the most destructive on record with 6,551 fires scorching nearly 71,000 square miles of land from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts, never really ended during a record-warm winter, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Center.
Some of the fires, including some in British Columbia, have been smoldering since last year. Canada’s 2023 wildfire season never really came to an end during the winter. Embers from so-called “zombie fires” continued to burn under the snow, with clouds of white smoke flowing from the ground.
It’s not uncommon for a few fires to overwinter, and British Columbia normally has about half a dozen that survive the season. However, there were 106 active zombie fires in January and 91 were still burning by spring, raising concern among scientists about the upcoming wildfire season.
“This continued smoldering through the winter, I think, is very alarming to see,” Jennifer Baltzer, a professor of biology at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Canada Research Chair in Forests and Global Change, told BBC.
Generally, Canada’s wildfire season runs from May to September, “but our first did not stop burning in 2023,” Baltzer told CBC, Canada’s public broadcasting service. “Our fires went underground, and have been burning pretty much all winter.”
Could 2024 Be A Repeat?
Experts are divided on whether the wildfire season will be as extreme this year as it was in 2023.
Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, told USA Today it’s “extremely unlikely that the 2024 fire season will be as extreme as 2023, as 2023 was a record-smashing year.”
Rebecca Saari, an associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, told USA Today that forecasts for continued drought conditions and a warmer-than-normal summer are “similar patterns to last year.”
Canada’s Drought Monitor shows that much of western Canada, swatches of the Northwest Territories, central Ontario and much of northeastern Quebec and Labrador are in moderate to severe drought. Pockets of British Columbia are experiencing “exceptional” drought after spring snowfall was only about 63 percent of normal, CBC News reported.
“The impacts of climate change are arriving faster than predicted, and alongside the task force, we are supporting the wildland firefighters who work tirelessly to protect us under the most extreme conditions,” Bruce Ralston, Canada’s Minister of Forests, said in a statement. “
You Haven’t Seen (Or Smelled) Anything Yet
Wildfire smoke is common in California and the Pacific Northwest and does drift across other states, but for the most part, Americans living outside wildfire-prone areas haven’t given a lot of thought to air quality indexes, or AQIs, Jeremy Porter, head of Climate Implications research for the climate data provider First Street Foundation, told ABC News.
“All of a sudden, it’s on the news. Every day, the weatherman is putting the AQI up at the beginning of the day; we became really familiar with an issue that people in the West have been dealing with for decades,” Porter said.
Air quality warnings are expected to become more commonplace, putting about 125 million Americans at risk by mid-century, according to a study published in February by the First Street Foundation.
Right now some 83 million Americans, more than 25 percent of the population, are exposed every year to AQIs that are considered “unhealthy” by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Among those people, nearly 10 million are at risk of exposure to “very unhealthy” AQIs and 1.5 million may experience “hazardous” AQIs. The severity of air quality is designated by color, with the unhealthiest air assigned red, purple and maroon colors.
Over the next 30 years, the population exposed to “unhealthy” red days could increase by 51 percent, while the population exposed to “very unhealthy” purple days and “hazardous” maroon days could increase by 13 percent and 17 percent, respectively.
Porter told ABC that, despite progress due to the Clean Air Act, wildfires are “wiping away 20 years of air quality improvements.”
“It’s a little bit disheartening to see that sort of shift, in this statistical trend,” Porter said. “We’re now seeing air quality worsen over time with more pollution in the air.”
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Publish date : 2024-05-13 03:00:00
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