Air quality across the Eastern US & Canada right now
(midwest.social)
Screenshot taken from PurpleAir. 150 and above is considered unhealthy, 300 and above is considered hazardous.
https://map.purpleair.com/air-quality-standards-us-epa-aqi
I went outside yesterday, and suddenly was breathing in burnt Canada. It smelled like burnt plastic TBH, and the sky looked like it was colored movie Mexico. Reminds me of a few years ago when the same thing happened. I hope nobody's died.
I came back from vacation this week, and it was quite a moment when I saw the sun rising in the morning, through a yellow haze, colored a fluorescent shade of “apocalypse pink.” Very reassuring, very comforting.
I should’ve stayed up in the mountains a while longer.
Definitely isnt a state between Ohio and New Jersey
I've always said New York City and Philadelphia ought to belong to New Jersey, and this map seems to have taken my advice.
Oof. That's horrendous. Hoping for a steady nó lightning few days to assist.
We had days of 999 (where the scale stopped) during the Australian bushfires in 2019, and anything over 150 was already brutal. Above 300 and you feel like you can chew the air.
Last year our area hit 800+. It was surreal. Apocalyptic looking skies.
I woke up thinking the house was on fire, the smell of smoke was so thick. I'm not even in the worst parts.
don't worry, USA cut all of the ability for the EPA to do anything, so this will definitely get better.
I understand the naysayers' point but a functioning EPA would work WITH Canada. We could, you know, be a good neighbor. Together both nations could help predict fires, track them, respond together, etc. The current environment of aggression is not the only possible course of action. Unfortunately, there is no hope in that changing this moment.
this 👆
I cannot stress enough that Canada is a sovereign country and not under the jurisdiction of the EPA.
Oh yeah i know lol, im just bitching that the US has no way to do anything about this.
I thought it was like a hat or something.
The EPA can't do anything about Canadian forest fires. Canadian Right wingers have cut firefighting budgets and dropped emissions laws to align with the USA, so this problem, which literally never happened before 5 years ago, will be the new summer experience for North America.
The market will regulate itself and improve air quality
What were they gonna do?
Rake the leaves!
when I was a little kid watching LotR for the first time and Boromir described Mordor by saying "the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume" I thought, okay I get what you're going for, but even for this setting that's a little over the top melodramatic, dontcha think?
now I can't leave my house because the greed of evil men has literally corrupted the very essence of the Earth and blotted out the Sun
USA = Mordor Got it
Make Mordor Great Again
Trump is working on that.
This afternoon...
Today: very unhealthy, Tomorrow: unhealthy
Eh, it gets better.
How are you alive right now? The 400 im stuck in is unsufferable.
Being outside earlier today was awful, I had an appointment I couldn't miss, but I've got a MERV13 filter in my HVAC at home running non stop to circulate and filter, one HEPA filter on each floor of the house, and one in my office. Indoor AQI got up to 40 downstairs yesterday so I set all the purifiers to max overnight and I'm down to 10-15 this morning. We are not going outside today lol staying in our safe little bubble
I travelled up to Michigan to visit family and friends for a few weeks, as well as enjoy the lake. Can't go outside because the air is, according to the news, "the equivalent of smoking 17 cigarettes for every hour you're outside".
Shits fucked up here right now.
What's hilarious is watching people smoke cigarettes in this air.
And then they complain about the other smoke.
Damn and you don't even get high what a ripoff
You get high from cigarettes?
There was a head rush that felt kinda neat at first. Guessing because nicotine binds to the ACE2 receptors, which play a role in ATP reuse (iirc), ATP being the big energy molecule that powers the current multicellular life, so it's similar to a bit of oxygen deprivation in that available ATP is reduced.
But then the body just expresses more ACE2 receptors to compensate, so you stop getting the head rushes. This happens fairly quickly, too, like you might get them for like half of your first pack of smokes before the "feels better after a smoke" is more about getting rid of nicotine withdrawal than any positive feelings (if you enjoy the altered feeling of a head rush).
It's why we smoke them if we got them.
And the cigarette break is on of the few acceptable "gimme a minutes"
I do, and it's unpleasant as fuck. That's the main reason I never started smoking. That shit fucks me up, majorly.
Your inept administration in Michigan wrote a letter to Carney about the smoke. Fucking idiots.
Uh....I'm visiting.....
Wow! We're officially the worst air quality in the world right now!
NUMBER ONE! NUMBER ONE! NUMBER ONE! WOOOOOOOO USA BABY YEEEHAW 🇺🇸🎇🔥🌡️🎆🇺🇸
Take that China!
Canada is burning.
Siberian wildfires would have the same effect in China, but with added industrial pollution.
🎉😷
There are people responsible for climate change. We should feed them to the fires. Perhaps it will appease the gods.
It won't work, but we should still try.
I don't see any downsides. Proceed
it will create more smoke, now with maga-particles in the air.
674...is there even air in there?
What is happening? Arent there air usually very clean?
canada is haivng massive wildfire, turning the air quality very poor. in MA, the sky is ORANGE. when cali had large fires in 2020, the sky was dark red , even in the morning. and it was hard to breathe.
500 where I am right now. I didn’t even have a sense of the AQI scale until today, and now it’s quite skewed.
It’s like learning what airplanes are on 9/11
I don’t know why I’m replying to myself instead of editing my first comment but, well I don’t think comments cost money, and they seemed like iterative thoughts to me. So don’t worry about it.
I swear chicago is at some sort of crux. no matter where the wildfires are we seem to get hit. north, south, east, or west.
They dont call it the windy city for nothing, you got all the cross streams.
They actually call it the Windy City because of the politicians originally. I think.
This is fine.
Welcome to what the west coast has been dealing with for many years now. There are more important people in the east maybe we'll start to think about trying to start to take this seriously.
We need to set the Ozarks on fire and get the south thinking.
We've been dealing with wildfire smoke for years now, our genius Conservative provincial government has been cutting the budget for the services that prevent and put them out.
The fires are in Ontario, just north-ish of Thunder Bay.
And the genius Federal liberals have thrown out most emissions laws and taxes to reduce carbon emissions and pollution. So the whole country can be a toxic shithole like Alberta.
Then I don't know how to be any clearer! You take that thing that's in your hand, and you-
If you say "sweep the forest" one more time-
This has been happening here for the last three years.
The problem is being attributed to the disappearance of some mystical "forest rakers" that no one has ever met.
Probably got cut by doge
cries in Washingtonian
There's also Windy for a more detailed map. Also just a cool website.
Windy is cool, thanks
The good news is the heat wave in Toronto has ended... things cooled down when the smoke blocked out the sun.
On Tuesday I was actually thinking "huh, we haven't had smoke this year, that's cool." Wednesday morning.... well shit there it is.
Reminds me of the videos people made of the smoke in San Francisco in the style of blader runner 2049 during covid times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_m9TUP_t_Y
I was in NYC today. The visibility is bad, probably down to less than a mile sometimes, but the local airport says it was 2 miles.
The Hollywood filter has come to NYC
It was so much worse in the ‘80s in the L.A. basin. This smoke is nasty, but the layer of brown hazmat that laid over Los Angeles was awful.
You lived in the 1900s?!
We breathed the brown air.
Thats why we wore onions on our belts, but not yellow onions, because of the war...
I live in southern Minnesota and had to drive up to St Paul this morning. Anything more then a few feet away looked like it had a grey filter over it. A block away and it looked like it was shot in black and white.
It was even worse last night, at least it looked smokier and stank more than this morning. Smelled like a burnt version of that awful acridity you smell when concrete's being cut.
Can people catch explosive diarrhea from this too?... But really, I'm surprised there's data on this but not that
So how long until the boreal forests burn up and this ends?
Never, cause it'll keep regrowing to burn again.
I live at 590
Like someone took a liberal knife and sliced it up
