The morning started normally. My wife and I were on the porch having a coffee. It smelled pleasant, like a campfire. It was Wednesday and I knew something was off because Toronto doesn’t allow campfires in backyards.
I knew Northwestern Ontario was burning, because I remember the same exact phenomenon before. Time of the red sun, again.
The news started coming in fast. The air quality was terrible. City programs were cancelled. People were advised to stay indoors if they could.
But work wasn’t cancelled and neither were all summer camps. On the drive to Piccininni, my daughter asked, “Why is the sun red?” Because of forest fires. “Where?” Very far away. “How did the smoke get here?” I tried to explain the jet stream, and how there was a lot of forest burning to get so much smoke from so far away over here.
My daughter is seven, so the smoke affected her immediately. She was coughing.
I investigated the smoke. It turns out this campfire smoke that smelled nice wasn’t nice at all. The particulates aren’t just carbon, they’re all kinds of chemicals, and they’re so small that they bypass our natural defenses and go directly into our lungs and bloodstream, with no filters.
We breathed in ash, dust, and soot particles. Carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. And benzene, toluene, and butene.
As I watched the news roll in and the City’s reaction, I could see that much of the information we received framed the fire as a weather event. Not a health event.
The information went something like this: the weather is hot, there’s a lot of smoke, our air quality is terrible, try not to go outside.
We didn’t get a co-ordinated response from the authorities. Toronto made its own announcement. The feds theirs. I’m not sure what the province said. But there was no single press conference explaining to folks just what we were facing.
So, many Torontonians carried on.
Jogging in the smoke. Taking their babies in strollers for walks in the smoke. Going to their appointments in the smoke.
My 84-year-old neighbour was sitting on his stoop, spending his day outside without a mask. “The smoke doesn’t affect you?” I asked him. “What are you gonna do?” He said. “ I like spending my time outside. And the smoke gets inside anyways.”
I saw my other neighbour walking fast on Glenholme. “How are you doing with the smoke?” I asked him when he arrived at his house. “Fine. A little smoke never killed anybody.”
A little smoke, true. But Toronto had reached the highest possible “very high risk” level of 10+ on Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index (AQHI). Prolonged exposure outside to the three days of smoke we had triggers an acute whole-body inflammatory response, impacting the lungs, heart, and brain.
Not good.
Just another normal day in Mars maybe.
