It wasn’t yet clear whether the Triple Crown race itself might be affected Gov. Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, opened spaces usually used as hot-weather cooling centers so that residents could escape the unhealthy air.Ī Chris Stapleton concert at a Syracuse amphitheater was pushed back, fireworks were canceled at Niagara Falls and racing was canceled at New York’s Belmont Park two days before the famed Belmont Stakes. Philadelphia ended trash collection ended early, for the sake of sanitation employees. Local officials closed public parks and suspended some road work. In Washington, a big Pride Month celebration on the White House’s South Lawn was moved from Thursday to Saturday, and a Washington Nationals-Arizona Diamondbacks game was postponed. Motorists even got a break Thursday and Friday from having to move their cars for street cleaning. The city public school system - the nation’s largest - said Friday’s classes would be conducted remotely, a decision that mostly affected high schoolers because most other pupils already had a scheduled day off. In New York City, Health Department spokesperson Pedro Frisneda said emergency rooms were seeing a “higher than usual” number of asthma-related visits from the blanket of smoke, estimating patients were in the “low hundreds.” Manon Cyr, mayor of the evacuated town of Chibougamau, said she advised residents to be “Zen and patient. He said there have been no reports of injuries, deaths or home damage so far from the fires, but it remained unclear Thursday when more than 12,000 evacuees from various communities would be able to return. Over a third are in Quebec, where Public Safety Minister François Bonnardel said no rain is expected until next week and temperatures are predicted to rise. “The West has always burned, as has Canada, but what’s important now is that we’re getting these massive amounts of smoke in a very populated region, so many, many people are getting affected,” said Loretta Mickley, the co-leader of Harvard University’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.įueled by an unusually dry and warm period in spring, the Canadian fire season that is just getting started could well become the worst on record. So what’s the big deal about the smoke out East? Officials have opened smoke shelters for people who are homeless or who might not have access to clean indoor air. The hazardous air has sometimes forced children, older adults and people with asthma and other respiratory conditions to stay indoors for weeks at a time. Since 2017, California has seen eight of its 10 largest wildfires and six of the most destructive. West Coast, where residents were buying masks and air filters even before the coronavirus pandemic and have become accustomed to checking air quality daily in summertime. Such conditions are nothing new - indeed, increasingly frequent - on the U.S. It also contributed to delayed arrivals at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. The Federal Aviation Administration paused some flights bound for LaGuardia Airport and slowed planes to Newark Liberty and Philadelphia because the smoke from wildfires in Canada was limiting visibility. The fires sent plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina and northern Europe and parked clumps of air rated unhealthy or worse over the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard.Ī Southwest airliner approaches LaGuardia Airport in New York, Wednesday, June 7, 2023. The conditions sent asthma sufferers to hospitals, delayed flights, postponed ballgames and even pushed back a White House Pride Month celebration. Millions of residents could see that for themselves Thursday. “This is something that we, as the eastern side of the country, need to take quite seriously.” “This is kind of an astounding event” but likely to become more common amid global warming, said Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College geography professor and climate scientist. East Coast, but it was a reminder of conditions routinely troubling the country’s West - and a wake-up call about the future, scientists say. NEW YORK (AP) - Images of smoke obscuring the New York skyline and the Washington Monument this week have given the world a new picture of the perils of wildfire, far from where blazes regularly turn skies into hazardous haze.Ī third day of unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires may have been an unnerving novelty for millions of people on the U.S.
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