By Wa Lone and Maria Tsvetkova<\/p>\n
TORONTO\/NEW YORK, July 15 (Reuters) – Toronto’s air quality ranked the worst among major cities globally on Wednesday as wildfire smoke from northwestern Ontario blackened skies and spread into the northeastern United States, prompting health warnings and calls for residents to limit outdoor activities.<\/p>\n
Wildfires are raging through \u200csparsely populated areas hundreds of miles from Toronto and sending smoke over a wide area, although they are not directly threatening cities.<\/p>\n
Environment Canada reported an Air \u200cQuality Health Index reading of 10+, classified as “very high risk,” for Toronto, while forecasts suggested hazardous conditions could persist through Thursday night.<\/p>\n
New York City began feeling the effects days before neighboring New Jersey is scheduled to host \u200bthe World Cup final on Sunday. Local authorities issued an alert as air quality reached an unhealthy level and urged residents to reduce strenuous outdoor activity and take extra breaks if they are outside on Wednesday and Thursday.<\/p>\n
The National Weather Service said smoke could linger into the end of the week.<\/p>\n
“We probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet for New York City. We probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet for the Great Lakes and upstate and New England yet either,” said Dan Westervelt, Lamont associate research professor at Columbia University.<\/p>\n
IQAir, a Swiss air \u200cquality technology company, ranked Toronto as having the worst air quality \u2060across the globe, surpassing Kinshasa and Delhi. New York ranked No. 5.<\/p>\n
Fires trapped two small groups of children from Minnesota who were in the Canadian wilderness on a camping trip organized by the YMCA, a worldwide Christian youth association, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported on Wednesday, \u2060citing a YMCA official. One of the groups was evacuated by helicopter in coordination with the Canadian military, the newspaper said.<\/p>\n
“Both groups have been rescued and are on their way back home to safety,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said on X.<\/p>\n
Wildfire smoke from northern Canada has been a common summer occurrence across wide swaths of the United States in recent years.<\/p>\n
A video that went viral on social \u200bmedia \u200bshowed a Canadian National train surrounded by fire near Armstrong, Ontario. Canadian National employees in the area \u200band residents of Armstrong were evacuated on Monday night, the railroad operator said \u200cin a statement. It suspended rail operations near Armstrong, more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) north of Toronto, as a precaution due to the wildfires.<\/p>\n
The City of Toronto canceled the FIFA Fan Festival and the England-Argentina World Cup watch party at Nathan Phillips Square because of poor air quality.<\/p>\n
In the New York City area, more than 80,000 people are expected to attend the World Cup final at an open-air stadium in New Jersey on Sunday. Another 50,000 plan to watch the game from Central Park in Manhattan, where skies appeared hazy.<\/p>\n
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on social media that smoke and haze from Canadian wildfires were creating unhealthy air conditions across the state and encouraged people, especially those with health conditions, \u200cto exercise caution.<\/p>\n
The Government of Canada has said wildfire season began more slowly in 2026 than in \u200b2023 or 2025 \u2014 the two worst seasons for wildfires \u2014 but warned that fires were likely, due to warmer-than-usual \u200btemperatures across the country.<\/p>\n
Some 835 active fires were burning in the country on Wednesday \u200band 112 were considered out of control, according to the government. So far, 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) have burned. Most of the fires \u200cwere in the central provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.<\/p>\n
Greg Evans, professor \u200bof chemical engineering and applied chemistry at the \u200bUniversity of Toronto, said Toronto had been simultaneously hit with severe heat and wildfire smoke.<\/p>\n
“I expect that this will occur more frequently over the coming decades so cities and residents need to prepare for this in the future,” he said.<\/p>\n
Paula Oreskovich, a Toronto resident, said she noticed the haze and smell of smoke when she \u200bstepped outside in the morning. She said the poor air \u200cquality was concerning, particularly as wildfire smoke has become a recurring feature of recent summers.<\/p>\n
“I think you have to be silly if you’re not going to \u200bbe concerned about climate change. It’s definitely here, it’s definitely happening, and it’s happening globally,” Oreskovich said.<\/p>\n
(Additional reporting by Ed White in Winnipeg; Kyaw Soe \u200bOo and Bhargav Acharya in Toronto; Editing by Caroline Stauffer, Nick Zieminski and Edmund Klamann)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Wa Lone and Maria Tsvetkova TORONTO\/NEW YORK, July 15 (Reuters) – Toronto’s air quality ranked the worst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[7015,43346,42276,43597,12727,1113,2429,4830,43596,94,48,1062,12649],"class_list":["post-131502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-air-quality","tag-armstrong","tag-canadian-national","tag-canadian-wilderness","tag-canadian-wildfires","tag-environment-canada","tag-national-weather-service","tag-new-york-city","tag-northeastern-united-states","tag-ontario","tag-toronto","tag-university-of-toronto","tag-wildfire-smoke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}