Photo by PurpleAir. Nov 17, 2018.
Between 2017-2020, we had seasonal wildfires every summer and fall in Northern California that resulted in hundreds of thousands of acres being burned each time. In 2020, the August Fire Complex burned a collective 1,032,648 acres or 1,614 square miles, an area greater than the state of Rhode Island. This resulted in the mass exodus of much of Nor Cal several times, and I remember housing distant relatives and other folks we barely knew because their homes were in the evacuation zone and/or had escaped while watching it burn down.
Down in San Rafael, we were decently outside the burn area or fire spread zones, part of why we were a heavy evacuation area, but I remember the fires well for a different reason. All that fire made a lot of smoke, and it had to go somewhere.
Sep 9, 2020. Golden Gate Bridge. Philip Pacheco, Getty Images.
In 2017 and 2018, we were wearing masks similar to the pandemic, but it was instead for the purpose of not breathing in the particulate smoke suffusing the air. During 2018 due to the Camp Fire, it was particularly bad, with AQI reaching over 200 from airnow.gov. AQI, Air Quality Index, is a tool used for communicating measured air pollution to the wider public. However, the airnow.gov AQI is an averaged index of several major pollutants. Another monitoring body, purpleair.gov, tracked only 2.5PM particulate pollution, relevant because "Fine particles (PM2.5) are very bad for your health, triggering or worsening chronic diseases such as asthma and heart attack, causing 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide per year in 2016" (WHO).
National Park Service. 2.5PM Hazard Indicator.
They measured our 2.5PM AQI in the 400s. Seven days into the major smoke front, they finally cancelled school and had us stay home. It was very eerie and reminded me a lot of Fallout New Vegas as you could only go outside wearing a mask, for which even doing so wasn't advised for prolonged periods. It collected on cars as well, so you had to clean your windows before going on the road, which you couldn't see more than 200 feet in front of you. Once the fires were eventually contained the smoke dissipated and we were able to go back to classes. But we were smoked over for the better part of November, though the extreme AQI high was only for a brief period. I do remember the discussions on the best air quality monitoring app to use, and frustration for having to go to classes while having the worst listed air quality on the planet. Who would've thought we'd be using the very same masks again quite soon.
Photos of the neighborhood from my GF, Nov 2018
Works Cited
Brennan, D. (2018, November 19). San Francisco, Bay Area Air Quality Update, forecast. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-bay-area-air-quality-update-air-still-unhealthy-due-wildfires-1220603
Alex, & Alex, A. (2019, February 6). Air Quality Index (AQI) and you. Healthy Building Science, Inc. https://healthybuildingscience.com/2019/02/06/air-quality-index/
The World Air Quality Index project. (n.d.). World Air Quality Historical Database. aqicn.org. https://aqicn.org/historical/
U.S. Department of the Interior. (n.d.). A low-cost air quality sensor for measuring particulate matter (U.S. National Park Service). National Parks Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-low-cost-air-quality-sensor-for-measuring-particulate-matter.htm
Those pictures are crazy! It's very worrying to read about the effects of poor air quality, and I imagine we'll be dealing with even more bad wildfires as climate change intensifies the dry seasons. It's interesting to hear about your experience with the wildfires and how dangerous they can be for our health beyond just the effects of the flames themselves.
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