Air quality is so bad that it’s like smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day
As firefighters battled to contain the historically deadly and destructive Camp Fire that has raged near Chico for the past week, the smoke that has blanketed the Bay Area thickened into a unhealthy haze that prompted air warnings, a run on filter masks and school shutdowns.
The National Weather Service on Thursday reported air quality in the Bay Area was “as bad or worse than any other time” since the Camp Fire began, based on satellite imagery and
unofficial air quality sensors.
The Bay Area Air Quality Management District said air quality levels across the Bay Area registered “unhealthy,” and extended its “Spare the Air Alert” through Tuesday, prohibiting wood burning. Air quality in Livermore, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Redwood City registered “very unhealthy.” The district advised people throughout the region to limit outdoor activity, as air quality reached levels equivalent to smoking half a dozen cigarettes during the day.
“Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it,” said Natalie Dorrell as she hurried through the acrid air in downtown San Jose.
Many Bay Area colleges, including San Jose and San Francisco state universities, Cal State East Bay and Mills College, canceled classes for the week. School districts kept students indoors Thursday and many in the East Bay, including all of Alameda County along with San Jose’s private Presentation High, decided to close Friday. An annual parade Saturday in Brentwood was canceled.
Visibility fell below 2 miles in the East Bay and 3 miles in San Francisco, San Jose and the Peninsula, the weather service reported. In Walnut Creek, a usually prominent Mount Diablo was invisible behind the smoke.
It didn’t help that a 20acre brush fire erupted Thursday east of San Ramon.
Across California, air pollution ranked among the world’s worst, with levels Thursday near Chico and Oroville far in excess of conditions in cities such as Delhi, India, notorious for its poor air quality.
An Ace Hardware store in Pleasant Hill had just a couple of packages left of N95 masks, which are recommended to filter out most particulate matter. There were none on the shelves at the Home Depot in Campbell.
Hyun Gyu Park, who was at the San Jose-Diridon station on his way to UC Santa Cruz, where he is a student, said it reminded him of the air in Korea, where he is from, and he wondered whether he should be wearing a mask.
“I see a lot of people wearing gas masks,” Park, 23, said, “and I feel I should be doing the same thing, too.”
Air quality levels throughout the Bay Area were in the “unhealthy” range of 151 to 200 on the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index, where prolonged exposure is considered harmful even to healthy people. Fine smoke particles can lodge deep in the lungs when inhaled, increasing the risk of asthma, heart attacks, bronchitis and other respiratory problems. The “very unhealthy” levels are between 201 and 300, and any outdoor activity should be avoided. Levels above 300 are deemed “hazardous.”
In Oroville and Chico, where unofficial air quality levels were around 500, breathing the air for 24 hours brought the equivalent health risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, according to a calculation done several years ago by Richard Muller, a professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley. The “very unhealthy” levels in parts of the Bay Area would be like smoking half a pack, and the “unhealthy” levels reported elsewhere would be like five or six cigarettes.
Walking in downtown Livermore for a quick er- rand, Maryann Martinez said the air made her “feel dirty.” She sat for a while in her car’s air conditioning just to get some air that felt clean.
Thursday had been expected to bring some smoke relief to the Bay Area. But the onshore winds that would have cleared the skies never came, weather service meteorologist Spencer Tangen said.
“We’ve got high pressure over us right now acting to compress the air and prevent the smoke from mixing up,” Tangen said. “It’s kind of getting trapped near the ground. We’re actually not expecting a lot of improvement in the next couple of days.”
Manoela Kruger of Fremont has been keeping her two children, Ellen, 7, and Ben, 5, cooped up inside the house as much as possible because the bad air really irritates her son.
“He is coughing a lot,” Kruger said. She usually limits the kids’ screen time, but after they made arts and craft projects, visited the library and went to the dollar store on Thursday, she bent the iPad rules because of the smoke.
“Today for the first time I’m actually considering having at least the kids wear masks,” she says. “It’s really bad out there, and unfortunately it just seems to be getting worse.”
The weather service is not predicting any significant improvement until next week, when a series of storms could bring muchneeded rain to Northern California and help wash out pollution in the air.
“Luckily the models continue to show a good chance of rain starting on Wednesday and into Thanksgiving, and then hinting at a potentially stronger one on Friday,” Tangen said.
For Bay Area residents looking to escape the sooty conditions, the places in California with the cleanest air Thursday were Lake Tahoe, Santa Barbara and, incredibly, Los Angeles, where despite two fires still burning, strong winds were blowing the smoke out to sea.
The Camp Fire, which started the morning of Nov. 8, has burned more than 140,000 acres and was 40 percent contained Thursday morning, according to Cal Fire.
It has become the deadliest wildfire in California history, claiming the lives of at least 56 people, with many more still unaccounted for, according to authorities.