Wildfire Smoke Is Choking the Northeast. Here Are 6 Ways to Protect Yourself.
Have you noticed it’s a little cloudier than usual? You’re not alone. More than 400 wildfires in Canada have resulted in large swaths of the Northeastern U.S. to be enveloped in a thick blanket of smoke. It’s gotten so bad that the IQAir World Air Quality Index rated New York City’s air quality worse than any other city in the country on Tuesday.
“It’s common for air from Canada to reach the U.S.—winds don’t care about country boundaries,” Shantanu Jathar, a mechanical engineer at the Laboratory for Air Quality Research at Colorado State University, told The Daily Beast in an email. A spike in fires will naturally produce a ton of smoke that makes its way down to the U.S.
And that means significant health concerns for American residents. So much so that officials have recommended that older and at-risk New Yorkers stay inside and wear masks as they expect the smoke to remain for days.