Firestorm British Columbia: The Thread.

Nicole Alderman (on  Aug 20, 2018) wrote:The smoke from the fires in BC has come down to us. Air quality is at 155. My neighbors are in an RV as their house is being built, and their daughter is really struggling to breath. I can't find anything about clean air shelters.

We spent yesterday going from store to store and enjoying their air conditioned/filtered air. Can't cool the house down today, because it would bring all the smoke inside. We've been using our garage as an airlock. We enter the house through the person-sized garage door, and then enter the house from the garage. We've got the air running through the air filter through our central air (our heater allows us to push air through it), but I don't think it's clearing the air much. My throat is getting tighter and tighter. I think I'll probably go and turn it off, since it might be drawing air from outside, and even filtered, it's worse than the air inside.

It's weird to think that, 8 years ago was the first time we ever really had smoke. How little did I know how much worse things would get, and how this would become "the new normal". The air quality today got up to 230. In previous years, we spent weeks over 250.

When I was a kid, we never had "smoke season." My grandmother--who's over 90--had never had smoky air until that first time 8 years ago.

Since then, we've had some smoke almost every year. My son said yesterday, when the smoke started blowing in, "Smoke season is early this year! The termites haven't even emerged" (every year, the termites emerge from the ground and fly around in a big swarm of termites. It's usually late-August, early September). My son is 12. He's had smoke in the summer for 3/4ths of his life, and almost all of his memory. My daughter is 9. Only one year of her life didn't have smoke in the summer/fall.

Anyway, we're all hiding inside now from the smoke. We've got a box fan filter going as well as a Honeywell air filter my husband saved from the dumpster at work.