Smoke from the massive wildfires in Canada is drifting across the border into the United States, setting off air quality alerts for about 70 million people in a dozen states, including cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York.
“Unhealthy” air was detected as far south as northern Alabama on Monday. One of the cities affected by air quality alerts was St. Louis, Missouri, which has been experiencing smoke and haze from the Canadian fires for almost a month.
State officials urged residents in the affected areas to stay indoors as much as possible, especially those close to the Canadian border. Officials also asked residents to minimize vehicle use and avoid activities that could add more pollutants to the air, such as burning firewood or yard waste, smoking, barbecuing, or even using hairspray or paint indoors.
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The most insidious threat of the wildfire smoke is high concentrations of fine-particle pollution, which can be a serious threat to people with heart or lung disease, the elderly, and pregnant women. Some of the Canadian smoke plumes could contain toxic pollutants from burning metals and chemicals in addition to woodsmoke.
Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Fargo all spent the weekend under air quality alerts, as smoke was pushed south from Canada by a cold front. Similar weather patterns are expected to send occasional clouds of smoke into Midwestern cities throughout the week.
Those same weather patterns are producing hot and dry weather in western Canada, increasing the risk of more blazes in what has become Canada’s worst fire season on record. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC) estimated over the weekend that nearly 100,000 square kilometers of land have been burned so far.
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Dozens of new fires were reported on Monday morning in British Columbia, prompting the Canadian government to mobilize its armed forces and Coast Guard to join firefighting and evacuation efforts.
Two Canadian firefighters have been killed fighting the wildfires so far. The first was Devyn Gale, 19, a female firefighter killed by a falling tree on Thursday in a remote area near her hometown of Revelstoke, British Columbia. Far-left Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called her death “heartbreaking” in a public tribute.
The second fatality was a firefighter from Fort Liard in the Northwest Territories who died on Saturday while fighting a blaze that was touched off by a lightning strike. Local officials said his name will be withheld from the media until his family is notified of his death.
Canadian and American officials are eager to blame the wildfires on climate change, but, in truth, a great deal of the disaster can be attributed to the Trudeau administration’s policies. Canada has remarkably lax forest management policies; it lacks a national fire service, and its regional firefighting agencies are chronically underfunded. Canadian officials have made some very odd calls as the crisis unfolds, such as Quebec refusing to accept help from Montreal because it preferred to wait for additional firefighters from France and the United States.
During the disastrous 2021 fire season, Canada’s Globe and Mail fumed that massive wildfires are “the result of decades of bad decisions” and said Canada’s forests “have not been in a natural state for a long time.” In addition to government mismanagement, fire suppression policies have long been focused on putting out smaller blazes, which left the forests choked with deadwood that could fuel massive conflagrations.
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