Last week, Chicago woke up to a hazy orange sky and some of the worst air quality in the world, for one day, even worse than cities known for heavy smog. The smoke came from wildfires burning over a thousand miles away in Canada. This week on Chronversations, host Stella Huang talks to students who were caught off guard, a biologist who explains how it traveled here, and a meteorologist who reveals why it might happen more often than we think — and what you can do about it.
TRANSCRIPT:
0:07: Welcome back to Chronicle Chronversations.
0:10: I’m your host, Stella Huang.
0:15: Last week, Chicagoans woke up to something unusual: a hazy orange sky and an air quality warning that made us one of the most polluted cities in the world for the day, for thousands headed to Lollapalooza.
0:27: It wasn’t just music in the air.
0:29: It was wildfire smoke drifting hundreds of miles from Canada.
0:33: So, I woke up that morning, and I thought it was my allergies, and I actually went to Lolla that day.
0:38: It’s very crazy, just because I didn’t know what was happening, so I didn’t think to protect.
0:43: I kind of figured it was like fires, but I didn’t know from where or like, like if it was actually from fires.
0:49: Because I didn’t hear about anything on the news or anything.
0:51: I was sneezing a lot, coughing, and then it went away towards the end of the day.
0:55: I think I got used to it, but at the beginning of the day, it was like rough going outside.
0:59: Both Jordan Yarbrough and Nicole Vandewalker are Columbia students who were caught off guard.
1:04: Neither got alerts before heading out.
1:06: And for Jordan, that meant being outside all day at the start of Lolla.
1:11: Like it was the first day of Lolla, and I remember it being so like hazy, and the sky was really dark.
1:16: I tried to stay in like more shaded areas.
1:17: I didn’t have a mask with me.
1:19: It was kind of hard to like breathe because we were on the baseball fields, so it was just already like a lot of smoke.
1:24: The two of them share something else in common.
1:27: They both walked away thinking more about environmental pollution, climate change.
1:31: And whether things like this could have been prevented.
1:34: And I think they, it could have been more like announcements, so like I feel like this one could have probably be like prompted out better because there was also hundreds of thousands of people outside.
1:47: I know Hurricane Katrina has been like something that people have been talking about and how that could have been prevented, so I think like a lot of things that are happening in like climate change, could be prevented, yeah.
1:56: And it’s like affecting not only one country, but it’s affecting at least 2 countries in multiple states.
2:02: It’s like it’s crazy, yeah.
2:04: So, how does smoke from fires burning in another country end up hanging over the Chicago skyline?
2:09: I asked Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Berg, a professor of biology here at Columbia, to break it down.
2:15: So I would say it’s not just Chicago, it was all of the Midwest because of the way air currents work.
2:22: From what I was reading to sort of catch up on a little bit about how smoke and wildlife works, winds can also really affect where the smoke ends up going, and there’s just a lot of smoke when there’s a wildfire.
2:33: And so once we’ve got all that smoke in the atmosphere, it moves around until it slowly dissipates away.
2:39: So, Chicago got unlucky that we got covered for a few days.
2:43: And so if it’s just a campfire or you know just normal forest, it’s going to be mostly trees and other detritus and everything else, but depending how hot it is, it may be other things that are coming out of the soil.
2:56: It may grab other pollutants on the way from what The NOAA website was saying one of the problems is because the smoke is hot, different chemicals can sort of be grabbed on by smoke being kind of sticky, and any of us who spent time around a campfire know that that smoke likes to attach to things like your hair and skin and you smell like you’ve been by a campfire sometimes even after you bathe.
3:20: And so I think we can all think about just different chemicals being stickier than others, and so I think part of the problem is it’s going to grab other things as it goes through the air.
3:31: While Dr. Davis-Berg explained how wildfire smoke can drift into Chicago from another country, I wanted the bigger picture.
3:38: The weather patterns, the science behind how smoke travels and whether this is something we should be more aware of.
3:44: So I turned to Professor Richard Di Maio, meteorologist and adjunct professor in Columbia’s math and science department.
3:51: Well, wildfire smoke is composed of a mixture of a bunch of different things.
3:57: First off, gaseous pollutants such as carbon monoxide, that’s the stuff that’s left over after you burn things that are carbon-based, you also have.
4:05: Hazardous air pollutants, which could be, you know, things coming from smokestacks, even water vapor, whenever you have a really humid day, you’ll always notice that the sky seems to be a little bit hazier, typically early in the morning and especially late in the afternoon or during the like sunset period, you’ll notice that the sun always has a little bit more of a reddish color.
4:28: That’s because higher levels of humidity hold on to more air pollution.
4:32: And then there’s particle pollution.
4:34: Particle pollution basically represents things like smoke from wildfires, and sometimes it’s, it’s best to think of these as two different types of particle pollution.
4:47: You can have coarse particles, and then you can have fine particles.
4:51: So whenever you hear about the parts per million, they’re really talking about two different types of particles.
4:57: that are being measured in the atmosphere.
5:01: From both short and long-term exposure, it’s really important to keep in mind that wildfire smoke is kind of a bunch of different things all put together.
5:11: As I mentioned before, the smoke is coming from an area 1000 miles away, but again, when it’s combined with pollutants from manufacturing and agriculture, and you have hot and humid weather,
5:22: all of those things combined produce, you know, health effects for people, particularly of sensitive, you know, risks, meaning that asthma, maybe very, very young or very, very old, that they need to be aware of.
5:38: What people really need to understand is, is what type of air quality is bad for them.
5:44: So, the best way to do this is when you start to feel.
5:48: A little bit irritated in your eyes, a little bit irritated in your throat.
5:51: Check the air quality.
5:53: And if it’s reading 150, and the day before, it was only 100, that to me tells you in the short term that when it gets to about 150, you personally should probably limit your outdoor activities at that particular time.
6:09: So that would be short-term.
6:10: Long term would be something.
6:12: If you’ve been diagnosed with asthma, if you’re chronically, you know, getting sore throats and scratchy throats and scratchy eyes, maybe you should kind of, you know, take that threshold down to maybe 125 or 100 on your quality, but it’s really something that, that’s very personal and something that people have to be aware of their own conditions.
6:34: Hearing from Professor Di Maio made it clear, understanding the science is only half the story.
6:39: The other half is what we do with that knowledge.
6:41: So I asked both him and Dr. Davis-Berg,
6:43: how students and really anyone in Chicago can take action, whether that’s through learning, volunteering or getting involved in local climate initiatives.
6:54: So, for climate-related advocacy, Chicago has a whole lot of environmental groups.
6:58: There’s, you know, there’s Friends of the Chicago River, there’s the group that works with the plowers, the zoos all have volunteer groups, so I would say, look up environmental volunteering and internships.
7:09: We have a minor in environmental studies.
7:12: We have a minor in biology, a minor in health and wellness, and so there are ways, and there’s a minor and sustainable fashion.
7:19: There’s also independent projects and things like that.
7:23: What I would recommend to, you know, students of Columbia College, is research the site Chicago Climate Action Plan.
7:31: it was a plan that was implemented by the city’s
7:34: Department of Environment back in 2008.
7:37: once you get on that site, you can actually look up one of the links that says air and natural resources, and I think that’s one of the better things to do is to really look at that and see all the different ways that the city is keeping up with what the state is doing, what the Midwest is doing and what the country is doing.
7:55: to foster some, some higher level of understanding that usually leads to a higher level of advocacy as well.
8:06: Make sure to stay up to date with campus and metro news at columbiachronicle.com.
8:11: And sign up for our newsletter at columbiachronicle.com/newsletter.
8:17: I’m Stella Huang.
8:18: Thanks for listening.
Copy edited by Vanessa Orozco