“My windows have now been completely sealed for six days”
Juhea Kim, a journalist for The Independent talks about his daily life in Portland, Oregon, while the fires are devastating the West Coast – and leaving the city covered in ash and smokes :
1. ''My family and I were just returning from a Labor Day camping trip in beautiful Newport, Oregon, when we first noticed the eerie amber atmosphere. The smoke was so thick that I could stare directly at the blood-red sun shining high in the sky. When I came home to Portland, the floor of my condo was covered in a sinister layer of ash.
2. My windows have now been completely sealed for six days and counting. Outside, Portland is currently the city with the most polluted air in the world, with an air quality index (AQI) of eye-popping 518 as I write this. By comparison, the most polluted city of 2019, Ghaziabad in India, scored an average daily AQI of 110.2. I don’t know when it will be safe to open my windows again, and my oxygen is already depleted. Although I have stopped all unnecessary physical exertion, I feel like breathing through a straw. But my struggle is nothing compared to that of over 40,000 Oregonians who have fled their homes, lost their properties, and in some cases lost their lives. One of them was thirteen-year-old Wyatt Tofte of Lyons, Oregon, who went back to save his 71-year-old grandmother who’d been left behind.
3. The Oregon Coast’s normally rain-soaked evergreen forests began burning just hours after we left the beach on Labor Day. A diabolical red light has since saturated Newport, Lincoln City, and Depoe Bay, where just two months ago I was overjoyed to spot a couple of resident gray whales spouting above azure waves. From bald eagles and black bears along the coast to elks, coyotes and cougars in Mount Hood and gray wolves in the high desert, Oregon’s animal residents have lost their homes and are fleeing the fires like their human counterparts.”
1. to seal sceller / ash cendre(s) / Labor Day (US) = Labour Day (GB) fête du Travail fixée au 1er lundi de septembre aux E.-U. et au Canada / to notice constater / eerie étrange, mystérieux / thick épais, opaque / to stare regarder (fixement) / blood-red rouge sang / condo appartement (en copropriété) / layer couche.
2. and counting et ce n'est pas fini / currently actuellement / eye-popping ahurissant, stupéfiant / to score enregistrer / average moyen / safe sûr, sans danger / to deplete épuiser, diminuer, réduire / exertion effort, exercice / to breathe respirer / straw paille / struggle lutte, combat / to flee, fled, fled fuir, quitter.
3. rain-soaked trempé par la pluie / evergreen forest forêt sempervirente / overjoyed ravi / to spot apercevoir / whale baleine / to spout jaillir / wave vague / bald eagle pygargue à tête blanche / elk élan / wolf loup / counterpart semblable.