When lightning sparks a fire in a Quebec forest, people living as far as 1,000 kilometres away can end up breathing polluted air.
A new study has found air pollution levels in northern New York state jumped last summer as more than 50 forest fires burned around La Tuque, about 300 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
Researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., found the amount of fine particulate matter, one component of air pollution, soared to 18 times its normal level because of smoke blown south from Quebec.
Fine particulate matter is about one-30th the diameter of a human hair, and is linked to premature death from heart and lung disease, as well as to heart attacks, respiratory problems, asthma attacks and bronchiolitis.
The study looked at pollution levels in May and June 2010 at Whiteface Mountain near Lake Placid, N.Y., in Adirondack Park near Long Lake, N.Y., and at Clarkson University. It found levels of several pollutants – including organic and elemental carbon – increased by a factor of five to 50 on June 1, the day after forest fire smoke from Quebec was blown southward.
In May, 57 forest fires were burning in Quebec, covering 109,500 hectares of forest in the Abitibi and Mauricie regions. The fires were blamed on dry weather and lightning. On May 31, hundreds of people in Montreal called 911 when they smelled smoke from the fires hundreds of kilometres away. The smoke was blown as far away as Boston and Cape Cod, Mass., 600 kilometres from Montreal.
Yungang Carl Wang, a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering at Clarkson University, noticed the change in air quality that day. “We normally can see a whole blue sky in upstate New York,” said Wang, one of five researchers who did the study, published in the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology. “The sky looked smoky and hazy.”
Wang has been doing urban-air quality studies for the last five years. He said while he expected to see some deterioration in air quality because of the forest fire smoke, he didn’t expect it to be as large as it was.
“At this point, I would say long-range transported forest fire smoke could really cause the reduction of visibility and induce adverse health effects to the people living 1,000 kilometres away from the sources,” he said.
In 2002, smoke from forest fires in Quebec travelled as far as Massachusetts, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Flames burned through 223,357 hectares of forest in Quebec last year, the second-worst year for forest fires since 2007, when 278,000 hectares were destroyed.
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