Wildfire Smoke Is Choking America’s Cities — Is Yours on the List?

Heavy smoke from wildfires more frequently chokes the skies over the Western United States, but cities farther to the east are no longer being spared, new research shows.

Canada’s unusually intense 2023 wildfire season smothered American cities as far off as Baltimore and New York City, according to research presented Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meeting, in Washington, D.C.

“2023 was this strange year where the Canadian forests were just torched like crazy, and the Midwest got hit extremely hard,” lead researcher Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Washington, said in an AGU news release.

Cities in Oregon, Nevada, Washington and other Western states have had the highest smoke levels, on average, researchers said.

But in 2023, several Eastern Seaboard cities were flooded with unhealthy smoke.

Further, cities in Wisconsin and Minnesota bore the brunt of incoming smoke from Canadian forest fires, they found.

Smoke from forest fires impacts the health of millions of Americans each year, creating a level of haze that promotes asthma attacks and makes it harder for everyone to breathe.

This smoke can travel thousands of miles from a wildfire, depending on atmospheric conditions.

For this study, researchers tracked wildfire smoke using satellite data and ground-level measures of particle air pollution.

Three cities in western Oregon — Medford, Grants Pass and Bend — were the smokiest cities, on average, over five years.

In Bend, around 60% of asthma-related ER visits in 2023 were related to smoke, researchers found.

The smokiest city with more than a million people was Sacramento, Calif.

But states outside the West have had an increase in ER visits related to wildfire smoke.

For example, one-third of all air pollution-related ER visits in Detroit during 2023 were linked to wildfire smoke pouring in from Canada.

Overall, the entire country saw an additional 16,000 ER visits on “smoke days” in 2024, compared to earlier years.

The Canadian fires caused North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin to join the list of the smokiest places in the United States.

As scary as that sounds, it’s not likely that a repeat of 2023 will happen anytime soon, Jaffee said.

But people in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. shouldn’t breathe easy – wildfire patterns are changing thanks to global warming, with health implications for millions of Americans.

“For cities and towns, I think it’s important to be planning ahead and thinking about what’s a normal year, and what’s an extreme year,” Jaffe said.

Because these findings wre presented at a scientific meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has more on particle pollution.

SOURCE: American Geophysical Union, news release, Dec. 10, 2024