Day turns to night in the US and Canada due to smoke from forest fires

In New York and Washington, the authorities have asked the population to try to spend as little time as possible on the street, and when they do, wear masks.

• album New York, completely covered by smoke from the fires in Canada: the authorities ask the most vulnerable not to go out

Tens of millions of people in Canada and the United States They have been living an apocalyptic scenario since yesterday. The blue sky of days gone by has turned into a kind of grayish or even reddish haze. The sun has disappeared. And in cities like New York it is impossible to see the other side of the famous bridges that cross the East River because visibility has been reduced to 500 meters which has even affected the LaGuardia airport, located in that city. In New York and Washington, the authorities have asked the population to try to spend as little time as possible on the street, and when they do, wear masks.

The reason is the more than 200 forest fires that have been declared hundreds of kilometers from those cities, in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Two thirds of the losses could not be controlled last night, which is partly due to the unusually high temperatures and dry air in the deciduous and Laurentian forests – a type of ecosystem typical of that region, which mixes in deciduous forest and the taiga, made up of conifers – which are burning like firebrands. At the moment, more than 10,000 people have had to be evacuatedmostly in Quebec.

Air pollution has thus reached spectacular heights. Yesterday, New York was the most polluted city in the world, behind only the Indian capital, New Delhi, and followed by Toronto. Even in the city of Atlanta, some 2,500 kilometers from the fires, the authorities had recommended that people still with respiratory conditions be prudent if they had to go outside.

This type of ecological catastrophe is becoming relatively commonplace in North America, to the point that tourists who want to visit the Canadian Rockies in summer and some of its national parks -especially Banff or Jasper- as well as Alaska know that their plans can be blown up by fires that are not of this world (the author of these lines had to ‘swallow’ 20 hours by car in August 2019 in Alaska to avoid one of these accidents).

Dystopian movie images of cities made night in the middle of the day by smoke are not unusual. In 2020, San Francisco was engulfed in a billow of smoke from a series of massive fires in California that threatened several species of redwoods, the world’s tallest trees. The dimensions of the fires were so large that even in Washington4,000 kilometers away from the area of ​​the accident – the distance that separates Madrid from Baghdad -, the sky darkened.