Screenshot taken from PurpleAir. 150 and above is considered unhealthy, 300 and above is considered hazardous.

https://map.purpleair.com/air-quality-standards-us-epa-aqi

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[–] 91 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Wow! We're officially the worst air quality in the world right now!

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  • [–] 60 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    I travelled up to Michigan to visit family and friends for a few weeks, as well as enjoy the lake. Can't go outside because the air is, according to the news, "the equivalent of smoking 17 cigarettes for every hour you're outside".

    Shits fucked up here right now.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    There are people responsible for climate change. We should feed them to the fires. Perhaps it will appease the gods.

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  • [–] 31 points 3 months ago

    This is fine.

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  • [–] 89 points 3 months ago

    when I was a little kid watching LotR for the first time and Boromir described Mordor by saying "the very air you breathe is a poisonous fume" I thought, okay I get what you're going for, but even for this setting that's a little over the top melodramatic, dontcha think?

    now I can't leave my house because the greed of evil men has literally corrupted the very essence of the Earth and blotted out the Sun

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  • [–] 22 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I swear chicago is at some sort of crux. no matter where the wildfires are we seem to get hit. north, south, east, or west.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    They dont call it the windy city for nothing, you got all the cross streams.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago

    The good news is the heat wave in Toronto has ended... things cooled down when the smoke blocked out the sun.

    On Tuesday I was actually thinking "huh, we haven't had smoke this year, that's cool." Wednesday morning.... well shit there it is.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    How are you alive right now? The 400 im stuck in is unsufferable.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Being outside earlier today was awful, I had an appointment I couldn't miss, but I've got a MERV13 filter in my HVAC at home running non stop to circulate and filter, one HEPA filter on each floor of the house, and one in my office. Indoor AQI got up to 40 downstairs yesterday so I set all the purifiers to max overnight and I'm down to 10-15 this morning. We are not going outside today lol staying in our safe little bubble

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago*

    I was in a very drafty house during two big fires in california, and of course close enough to both our air quality was severely impacted. We had visible smoke in the hallways. A HEPA filter on the back of a box fan in our rooms did wonders. If anyone is in need of cheap option.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    There's also Windy for a more detailed map. Also just a cool website.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago

    674...is there even air in there?

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    500 where I am right now. I didn’t even have a sense of the AQI scale until today, and now it’s quite skewed.

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  • [–] 37 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    Welcome to what the west coast has been dealing with for many years now. There are more important people in the east maybe we'll start to think about trying to start to take this seriously.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    We've been dealing with wildfire smoke for years now, our genius Conservative provincial government has been cutting the budget for the services that prevent and put them out.

    The fires are in Ontario, just north-ish of Thunder Bay.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago

    I came back from vacation this week, and it was quite a moment when I saw the sun rising in the morning, through a yellow haze, colored a fluorescent shade of “apocalypse pink.” Very reassuring, very comforting.

    I should’ve stayed up in the mountains a while longer.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    I live in southern Minnesota and had to drive up to St Paul this morning. Anything more then a few feet away looked like it had a grey filter over it. A block away and it looked like it was shot in black and white.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    Reminds me of the videos people made of the smoke in San Francisco in the style of blader runner 2049 during covid times

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_m9TUP_t_Y

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    I woke up thinking the house was on fire, the smell of smoke was so thick. I'm not even in the worst parts.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    Can people catch explosive diarrhea from this too?... But really, I'm surprised there's data on this but not that

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    I was in NYC today. The visibility is bad, probably down to less than a mile sometimes, but the local airport says it was 2 miles.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    The Hollywood filter has come to NYC

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    It was so much worse in the ‘80s in the L.A. basin. This smoke is nasty, but the layer of brown hazmat that laid over Los Angeles was awful.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    If people are in the affected areas, check out https://worldwide-maskbloc.org/ to see if there's a mask bloc near you! I'm a part of one, and we've been giving a lot of masks the last two days.

    Take care!

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  • [–] 25 points 3 months ago (11 children)

    don't worry, USA cut all of the ability for the EPA to do anything, so this will definitely get better.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I cannot stress enough that Canada is a sovereign country and not under the jurisdiction of the EPA.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I understand the naysayers' point but a functioning EPA would work WITH Canada. We could, you know, be a good neighbor. Together both nations could help predict fires, track them, respond together, etc. The current environment of aggression is not the only possible course of action. Unfortunately, there is no hope in that changing this moment.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago

    The EPA can't do anything about Canadian forest fires. Canadian Right wingers have cut firefighting budgets and dropped emissions laws to align with the USA, so this problem, which literally never happened before 5 years ago, will be the new summer experience for North America.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    Last year our area hit 800+. It was surreal. Apocalyptic looking skies.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    Oof. That's horrendous. Hoping for a steady nó lightning few days to assist.

    We had days of 999 (where the scale stopped) during the Australian bushfires in 2019, and anything over 150 was already brutal. Above 300 and you feel like you can chew the air.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    I live at 590

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Bro, wtf.. that's gotta be a typo.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    So how long until the boreal forests burn up and this ends?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Never, cause it'll keep regrowing to burn again.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    At some point a dust bowl or flood will rip away the topsoil after a fire, and the forest will stop growing back. It'll just be a barren desert.

    Of course then the dust and sand storms can still give you dust pneumonia, silicosis, and lung cancer, but technically that's not the forests.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    What is happening? Arent there air usually very clean?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    I went outside yesterday, and suddenly was breathing in burnt Canada. It smelled like burnt plastic TBH, and the sky looked like it was colored movie Mexico. Reminds me of a few years ago when the same thing happened. I hope nobody's died.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (4 children)

    Definitely isnt a state between Ohio and New Jersey

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (3 children)

    I've always said New York City and Philadelphia ought to belong to New Jersey, and this map seems to have taken my advice.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Thank makes zero sense to me, but it did make me giggle.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago

    Like someone took a liberal knife and sliced it up

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