Massive wildfires in West bring haze to East Coast

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Wildfires in the American West, including one burning in Oregon that's currently the largest in the U.S., are creating hazy skies as far away as New York as the massive infernos spew smoke and ash into the air in columns up to 6 miles high.

Skies over New York City were hazy Tuesday as strong winds blew smoke east from California, Oregon, Montana and other states. Oregon's Bootleg Fire grew to 616 square miles — half the size of Rhode Island.

Fires also grew on both sides of California's Sierra Nevada. The Dixie Fire, which broke out near the site of the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people in the town of Paradise, ballooned to more than 133 square miles, with 15% containment. More than 800 structures were threatened. In Alpine County, known as the California Alps, the Tamarack Fire caused evacuations of several communities and grew to 61 square miles with no containment.

The smoke on the U.S. East Coast was reminiscent of last fall when multiple large fires burning in Oregon in the state's worst fire season in recent memory choked the local skies with pea-soup smoke but also impacted air quality several thousand miles away.

"We're seeing lots of fires producing a tremendous amount of smoke, and ... by the time that smoke gets to the eastern portion of the country where it's usually thinned out, there's just so much smoke in the atmosphere from all these fires that it's still pretty thick," said David Lawrence, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. "Over the last two years we've seen this phenomenon."