Forest fires in Canada raise alerts in New York and cover metropolis with smoke – 06/07/2023 – World

Millions of people across the eastern US and Canada received health warnings from environmental agencies as smoke from northern wildfires spread through cities from Ottawa to New York.

Canada has been battling a wildfire season across most of its 10 provinces and territories, and smoke from the fire drifted south this week to some of the region’s most populous cities.

This Wednesday (7), New York’s air quality was ranked as the worst of any major urban area in the world, according to the IQAir World Quality Index, surpassing New Delhi, India.

New Yorkers have returned to wearing face masks, abandoned after Covid recedes, and schools have canceled outdoor activities, with the city urging vulnerable populations to stay indoors and keep windows closed as air quality hit all-time lows. since the 1960s.

“Yesterday [terça]New York residents have seen and breathed something that has never impacted us on this scale before,” said Mayor Eric Adams, noting that the event generated “shock waves through the city.” Afterwards, the Democrat also recommended that all residents limit their activities during the day, saying that this Wednesday “is not a day to train for a marathon”.

After conditions improved in the morning, New York officials predicted they would worsen again in the afternoon and evening and called it a “multi-day event”. Washington public schools also suspended outdoor activities because the city’s environmental regulator issued a “code red” air quality warning for the District of Columbia.

The Canadian environmental regulator, in turn, ranked the air quality in the capital Ottawa as the highest level of health risk. Large areas of Quebec and Ontario have been placed under an alert by Canadian authorities. Earlier this spring in the Northern Hemisphere, wildfires in Canada’s main oil-producing province, Alberta, forced tens of thousands of people from their homes and more than a dozen oil and gas companies to temporarily close or reduce operations.

Fires have already gripped forests in eastern provinces such as Quebec and Nova Scotia, and more than 400 blazes were active across Canada on Wednesday, according to the Interagency Center on Wildfires. Scientists have observed that fires in boreal forests have increased in intensity over the past decade, with average temperatures in the global north rising faster than near the equator due to the climate crisis, with melting reflected snow and Arctic ice.

Wildfires north of the equator are becoming more frequent and intense as the planet warms and summers get longer. May 2023 ranked as the second hottest May on record, according to the EU observation service Copernicus.

Heat records were broken in parts of Asia, in particular China and Vietnam, where exceptionally hot weather began months earlier than the usual summer in July and August. Parts of Siberia also broke all-time records last week. Sea surface temperatures were the highest on record for the month and are at near record levels since March.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves.