Smoky haze is gone — until next time
People at West Neck Beach in Lloyds Harbor on July 16 as smoke from the wildfires in Canada left a haze over much of Long Island. Credit: Rick Kopstein
The smoke is gone. But its specter lingers.
Or at least it should.
It’s been just over a week since that unsettling smoky haze from Canada’s wildfires left our region. If it feels longer ago, chalk it up to our eagerness to put such unpleasantness behind us and get on with our lives. We seem to want to dismiss this kind of incident as one of those random occurrences that come and mostly go, almost like it was a mirage.
We’ve seen this movie before and it rarely ends well. Explore the South Shore for evidence that we have responded appropriately to the ravages inflicted 14 years ago by Superstorm Sandy. Remind yourself about all the 1,000-year floods and 100-year storms that now come every few years, upending statistical models that shaped public policy and opinion for generations.
In this most recent case, our collective amnesia is about an event just three years ago, when our skies turned orange and our air became thick with soot and particulate matter from another set of Canadian wildfires. We need to remember the angst we felt then and now as we wondered whether it was safe to let our children play outside (it was not) or OK for seniors to continue their yard work (nope). We need to start connecting dots begging to be linked.
The tendency around these parts is to dismiss wildfires as an issue for the Western United States, especially California, which has been devastated by urban fires that have set records for acres burned and total damages. And it is true that most large fires in America occur out West. But three-quarters of deaths and asthma morbidity related to wildfire smoke occur in the rest of the country, according to researchers at Colorado State University, due to higher population densities in the East. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that 49% of American wildfires last year began in the East — most of them small, yes, but the number of large fires here is 10 times greater than 40 years ago.
There are many ways to measure the toll. New well-reported research shows that smoke from wildfires caused 164,000 premature deaths in the United States from 2006-2020 — and that average yearly per-person exposure to wildfire smoke was four times higher from 2020-24 than during that earlier period. A team of American and Chinese researchers concluded that the 2023 Canadian wildfires alone contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands in North America and Europe.
Meanwhile, some 900 wildfires continue to burn in Canada and more than 70 large blazes rage in the United States.
What to do?
Certainly, Canada should reexamine its firefighting strategy, a triage system that prioritizes fires that threaten people and critical infrastructure. Canada’s own lawmakers acknowledge that current policies and resources might be lacking as fire seasons get worse. But the reality is that it’s almost impossible to stop fires in Canada’s vast remote boreal forest, where an absence of roads makes it difficult to get equipment in and leaves firefighters with no escape routes.
Better forest management with brush clearing and prescribed burns in both Canada and the United States would help. We can also use new technologies for fire spotting and firefighting drones, stop building deep into the wildland-urban interface that has been the locale of many California fires, and adopt new fire standards for construction. But those will have limited effects if we don’t slow the warming climate that increases the risks of forest fires.
Since fires seem inevitable and health-harming smoke can drift thousands of miles, we also should retrofit buildings to keep smoke out, beginning with better ventilation and filters in our schools. Then again, remember the enthusiasm for doing that in the aftermath of COVID-19? Remember how little of that work was actually done?
Collective amnesia is easy. Acknowledging and adapting to reality is really, really hard.
Columnist Michael Dobie is a retired member of the editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
