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Canada looks headed for its worst-ever year of wildfire destruction and compromised air quality as warm and dry conditions are expected to persist through the end of summer after an unprecedented start to the fire season.
As of early Wednesday, northern Quebec’s largest town had been evacuated as firefighters worked to beat back threats from out-of-control blazes, now numbering above 150 fires in total.
With the blazes, air-quality concerns have hit high-population Quebec and Ontario in particular, and darkened skies have pushed down into the upper U.S. That places the very young, the elderly and those with respiratory issues potentially in danger even if they live away from the fires. And it’s not just the migrating smoke that is concerning: dry conditions in parts of the U.S. spanning Michigan to New Jersey could spark fresh fires on this side of the border.
Read: How dangerous is U.S. air from Canada’s wildfires? Here’s how to read the EPA’s Air Quality Index.
For sure, the record-breaking season’s impact in eastern Canada and the U.S. has many weather-watchers shouting warnings that wildfires, made worse by the increased drought and extreme heat linked to climate change, aren’t limited to the relative wilds of the west, where potentially devastating fires are historically more likely and controlled burns have become more challenging.
“The distribution of fires from coast to coast this year is unusual. At this time of the year, fires usually occur only on one side of the country at a time, most often that being in the west,” Michael Norton, an official with Canada’s Natural Resources ministry, told Reuters.
As for the U.S., hazy air has discolored the skies stretching from the Ohio Valley to as far south as the Carolinas. Air-quality advisories were in effect to start the week in southeastern Minnesota and parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as well as in more than 60 counties in Wisconsin.
“The smoke — making the Eastern U.S. look like California at the peak of fire season — is not normal. The air is compromised from Minneapolis to D.C. to Boston, and the worst from western [New York] to around Ottawa,” said a tweet Tuesday midday from the Capital Weather Gang, a group of researchers and journalists covering global weather as part of the Washington Post.
Coast to coast: 2023 ranks among worst known starts to Canada’s wildfire season
Canada is experiencing one of the worst starts to its wildfire season ever recorded. More than 6.7 million acres in the country have already burned in 2023, federal officials said last week.
Late Tuesday, authorities issued an evacuation order for Chibougamau, Quebec, a town of about 7,500 in the remote region of the province.
“We’re following all of this from hour to hour, obviously,” Premier François Legault told reporters in Sept-Îles, Quebec, the Associated Press reported. “If we look at the situation in Quebec as a whole, there are several places where it is still worrying.”
According to the province’s forest fire prevention agency, more than 150 wildfires were burning on Tuesday, including more than 110 deemed out of control, the AP reported.
Quebec is looking internationally for support as its firefighters are stretched to their limit.
With more than 480 wilderness firefighters on the ground, Quebec can fight around 30 fires, Quebec Premier François Legault told reporters Monday, adding that normally firefighters would come from other provinces to help.
Visit The Weather Network’s wildfire hub to keep up with the latest on the active start to wildfire season across Canada.
Canada has about 9% of the world’s forests. Each year over the last 25 years, about 7,300 forest fires have occurred, according to Natural Resources Canada. The total area burned varies widely from year to year, but averages about 2.5 million hectares annually.
More than 173,000 hectares have burned this year in Quebec’s “intensive protection fire zone” — the area where normally all fires are actively fought — compared with a 10-year average of 247 hectares as of the same date, Quebec’s wildfire prevention agency, SOPFEU has said.
“The situation remains serious,” Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said, according to the AP. “The images that we have seen so far this season are some of the most severe we have we have ever witnessed in Canada and the current forecast for the next few months indicates the potential for continued higher-than-normal fire activity.”
U.S. has its own situation: dry thunderstorms
The Capital Weather Gang said in a post Tuesday that in addition to smoke creeping down from Canada, the situation in the eastern U.S. could worsen. That’s because new fires may erupt between Michigan and New Jersey.
“Dry thunderstorms — unheard of in the eastern U.S. — could even erupt,” they wrote.
Dry thunderstorms is a term usually meant to describe thunderstorms that produce little or no precipitation at the surface. The “drier” the thunderstorm, when combined with dry vegetation (or fuel), the more efficient it is in terms of fire ignition by cloud to ground lightning.
Modern life has made it easier to communicate with the population when they must flee fire or stay out of tainted air, but real estate development has also meant that the line between nature and man-made expansion is blurred more than before. When houses are built close to forests or other types of natural vegetation, they pose two problems related to wildfires, research shows. First, there will be more wildfires due to human ignitions. Second, wildfires that occur will pose a greater risk to lives and homes, they will be hard to fight, and letting natural fires burn becomes impossible.
The National Weather Service issued its own updated map about the risk of dry thunderstorms.
The health risks of poor air quality
Air pollution from wildfire smoke has become a significant health risk in the U.S. and is growing worse. That fact hit hard with back-to-back years of record-setting wildfire destruction in California for example in 2020 and 2021, before some relief was logged last year. Stanford University researchers found that the number of Americans who experienced at least one day with unhealthy air quality because of smoke rose by 27 times over the last decade.
Read: Non-smoking lung cancer is on the rise. Blame pollution, says American Lung Association.
Small particles in smoke that are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter — about 4% of the diameter of an average human hair — are of particular concern to air quality researchers. Exposure to this kind of pollution can cause inflammation and weaken the immune system, particularly when the tiny particles penetrate the lungs and enter the bloodstream.
Particulate pollution, as it’s known, may increase risk of asthma, lung cancer or other chronic lung diseases, particularly in vulnerable groups like older people, pregnant people, infants and children.
What’s more, wildfire smoke exposure might increase the risk of respiratory disease. Increases of COVID-19 and influenza have also been linked to wildfire smoke, according to some studies.
Don’t miss: Air pollution is weakening our bones, osteoporosis study suggests
