Fires burning in Canada are turning Boston’s skies yellow and creating unhealthy air quality issues for seniors and children.
Millions of people across the Northeast and Midwest are breathing in air pollution from Canadian wildfire smoke.
“You could see it yesterday,” said Glenn Keith, the director of the air and climate programs at Massachusetts’ Department of Environmental Protection.
While Keith said the fine particulate pollution was “up much higher in the atmosphere” yesterday, it reached the ground level on Wednesday.
With the poorer air quality, the state is warning seniors, children, and people with health conditions such as asthma to limit their time outdoors. Keith is expecting to issue another alert Thursday.
“The key thing is to avoid exposure,” he told GBH News. “Stay indoors with windows closed so that you’re breathing indoor air and not the external air. Limit outdoor activity. If you have to be outside, choose less strenuous activities.”
People could also wear an N95 mask to filter out particulates, turn their car’s air conditioning system to “recirculate” so that it’s not bringing in outside air, and run an air filter in their homes.
The yellowed skies Wednesday are, as one expert put it, the “new normal” with more frequent wildfires and the impacts of climate change.
“I think — in this case — there’s no cause for alarm,” said Dr. Jeremy Weinberger, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Tufts Medical Center. “For those high-risk groups, it really is probably just mitigating strenuous exercise outside and making sure — if you have inhalers — to have your rescue around.
“But for common activities — going out grocery shopping, walking to the bus stop — I don’t think there need to be any changes to those,” he added.
Weinberger compared it to summer 2023, when Canadian wildfires caused pollution that was about three times worse than this week’s air quality issues.
Keith agreed: “This is certainly not the same level that we saw in 2023.”
“This is almost like if you have an extreme heat day,” Weinberger said. “You don’t need to avoid being outdoors, but you may want to modify your plans — particularly around strenuous exercise.”
While Keith is hopeful there won’t be any air quality alerts by Friday, he’s not sure what the rest of the summer has in store as the wildfires continue.
“It’s hard to predict longer term,” he said. “We will be monitoring that. Hopefully we won’t have too many, but that’s something that we’ll be keeping an eye on.”
