Wildfire smoke from Canada that plagued New York weeks ago now clouds the third-largest city in the United States. This year’s wildfire season is the worst on record in Canada, with some 29,000 square miles burning.
A closely tracked global website ranked Chicago as the worst for air quality in the world on Tuesday owed to hovering smoke from Canada, where the drought-hindered fight against wildfires has persisted for weeks.
The U.S.-based Environmental Protection Agency offers its own numbers-based and color-coded air-quality scale for severity. By one estimate, even exposure to an AQI of 150 for longer than just a few minutes is equivalent to smoking seven cigarettes a day. And, since most cigarettes sold today are filtered, the consumption of wildfire smoke more closely resembles the impact of smoking unfiltered cigarettes.Chicago has its turn Fifteen of the past 30 days in Chicago have seen air qualities affected by Canadian smoke and the buildup of other pollutants.
But manmade activity, including forestry budget cuts, human negligence and climate change are disrupting the natural fire ecology in many regions, says the National Interagency Fire Center. Although some wildfires occur naturally — sparked by lightning strikes, for instance — the vast majority of wildfires can’t be considered “natural.
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