People who never had to think about wildfire before need to start

 

 

 Right now, eastern North America sits under a blanket of choking smoke and an eerie orange haze more appropriate to the surface of Mars than the Great Lakes or Atlantic Seaboard.

The cause: an unprecedented number of spring wildfires burning in the Canadian province of Quebec — 164 of them as of Monday morning. It was a similar story two weeks ago, when drifting smoke from an intense outbreak of wildfires in western Canada cast a pall over much of the east.

The result is a battle on multiple fronts: in the fire zones, where firefighters and residents are struggling to contain the blazes and stay safe; in communities downwind, where poor air quality is closing schools and businesses; and on the dockets of emergency planners and researchers tasked with determining what locations might be vulnerable to future wildfires, and how to better understand their broader reverberations.

 More fires are breaking out, at different times and in different places. This year, through Sunday, some 2,214 wildfires have burned through 3.3 million hectares of Canada’s forests, scrub and grasslands. The 10-year average for the same period is 1,624 fires and 254,429 hectares burned — about 13 times less...more