3 years ago
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U.S.|The Dixie Fire is spreading noxious fume much than 1,000 miles away.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/the-dixie-fire-is-spreading-noxious-smoke-more-than-1000-miles-away.html
Aug. 10, 2021, 1:46 p.m. ET
The Dixie Fire has devoured acre aft acre of rugged wildland to go the 2nd largest blaze successful California history. But it and different megafires successful the West person near a footprint overmuch larger than the evergreen forests they level and the towns they decimate.
Summer aft summer, California, a planetary person successful battling aerial contamination from vehicles, sends elephantine clouds of haze filled with health-damaging particles crossed the country. Even arsenic acold arsenic Denver, 1,100 miles to the east, the Dixie Fire has helped make a pall of noxious fume during an already scorching summer.
By 1 measure, wildfires — intensified by drought and climate change — are the largest root of perchance deadly aerial contamination successful California. And successful caller weeks, the accumulating haze and fume from California’s fires and precocious ozone levels person turned the aerial successful Salt Lake City and Denver into immoderate of the dirtiest successful the world, much harmful than Delhi’s oregon Beijing’s connected galore caller days.
Smoke from wildfires crossed occidental Canada, Oregon and California has stained the skies and fouled the aerial arsenic acold distant arsenic Iowa, Minnesota and adjacent New York City. Recent probe suggests that the fume whitethorn really turn much toxic arsenic it ages, undergoes chemic changes and blows crossed the country, reacting with sunlight and different molecules floating successful the air. Over time, fume whitethorn signifier reactive compounds that tin beryllium particularly damaging to the assemblage erstwhile they are inhaled.
“It gets worse with age,” said Mary Prunicki, manager of aerial contamination and wellness probe astatine the Sean N. Parker Center for Asthma and Allergy Research astatine Stanford University.
Twenty-seven days aft igniting, the Dixie Fire has yet to assertion immoderate lives, though 3 firefighters person been injured and 433 homes and businesses person been destroyed. What sets the Dixie Fire isolated from the megafires of erstwhile years is the immense country it has torn done successful the mountains northeast of the authorities capital, Sacramento. With 489,287 acres burned, the occurrence is inactive lone 21 percent contained.
And the exhausted firefighters battling the Dixie Fire successful and astir Gold Rush towns are informing that the play of fume and occurrence could grip the drought-stricken West for months to come.
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