Smoke from ongoing wildfires in central and western Canada has drifted southward, impacting air quality across large portions of the United States, including New York City and the surrounding region.
The smoke was so intense that New York officials issued an air quality alert for the city and neighboring counties, warning of “unhealthy for sensitive groups” conditions due to elevated levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone.
New York City and some of the surrounding area are under an air quality alert Wednesday. The alert will be in effect from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.New York officials say the alert will impact the city, along with Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester counties. Long Island and the Jersey Shore are not expected to be impacted.The air quality health advisory was updated Wednesday morning to include Western New York farther upstate, including Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Niagara, Orleans, and Wyoming counties.Smoke and haze continue to drift into the Tri-State region from Canada’s prairie provinces.
While the main impacts from wildfires burning in three Canadian provinces were mainly on New York and New England, smoke from those blazes covered about a third of the U.S. by mid-week.
“Much of the smoke is aloft in the upper atmosphere, so in a lot of areas there aren’t air quality issues,” said the National Weather Service’s Marc Chenard. “But there are air quality issues as far south as New York and Connecticut where it’s thicker and in the lower atmosphere.”Scores of wildfires have spread across Canada since the start of May. More than 212 active fires were burning in the country as of Tuesday afternoon, half of which were out of control, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. So far, 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) have burned. Most of the fires were in the west-central provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Reports indicate that at least 33,400 people have been forced to evacuate their homes in three Canadian provinces due to the wildfires.
Officials have declared a state of emergency in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where crews and military forces were battling this week to try to contain dozens of out-of-control fires.Some 17,000 people got evacuation orders in Manitoba alone, many of them seeking shelter in Winnipeg, while others were put up in hotels in Niagara Falls, in neighboring Ontario province.”This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory,” Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said during a news conference on May 29.All of Manitoba was under an “extreme fire danger” warning on Tuesday, according to the regional government. The Canadian armed forces were assisting with the evacuation of two separate Indigenous communities in the province.
The fires in Manitoba are reported to be mainly human-caused.
So far, 100 of Manitoba’s 111 wildfires have been caused by people, government data shows. Six occurred naturally, probably as a result of lightning, and another five are under investigation.Lightning, which is more common in hotter temperatures, is usually the cause of wildfires that burn the most land. In 2023, scientists at Canada’s natural resources department found that lightning sparked fires that burned 93 percent of the total wildfire area, and the remaining seven percent of the area burned from human causes.This year, so far, a majority of the wildfires burning in both provinces have been caused by humans, according to officials and government data, but their effect on the total area burned has not yet been determined. It’s unclear how many of those were accidental.
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