Tens of millions of people in Canada and the United States have been living an apocalyptic scenario since yesterday. The blue sky of the past few days has turned into a kind of grayish or even reddish haze. The sun has disappeared. And in cities like New York it is impossible to see the other side of the famous bridges that cross the East River because visibility has been reduced to 500 meters which has even affected the LaGuardia airport, located in that city. In New York and Washington, authorities have asked people to try to spend as little time as possible on the street, and when they do, wear masks.

The reason is the more than 200 forest fires that have been declared hundreds of kilometers from those cities, in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Two-thirds of the accidents had not been brought under control last night, which is partly due to the unusually high temperatures and dry air in deciduous and Laurentian forests - a type of ecosystem typical of that region, which mixes deciduous forest and taiga, formed by conifers - that are burning like teas. So far, more than 10,000 people have had to be evacuated, mostly in Quebec.

Air pollution has thus reached spectacular levels. Yesterday, New York was the most polluted city in the world, behind only the Indian capital, New Delhi, and followed by Toronto. Even in the city of Atlanta, about 2,500 kilometers from the fires, authorities had advised people with respiratory conditions to be cautious if they had to go outside.

This type of ecological catastrophe is becoming relatively normal in North America, to the point that tourists who want to visit the Canadian Rockies in summer and some of its national parks – especially Banff or Jasper – as well as Alaska know that their plans can be blown up by fires that are not of this world (the author of these lines had to 'swallow' 20 hours by car in August 2019 in Alaska to dodge one of these accidents).

Dystopian movie images of cities being made dark in the middle of the day by smoke are not unusual. In 2020, San Francisco was buried under a wave of smoke from a series of huge fires in California that threatened several species of redwoods, the tallest trees in the world. The dimensions of the fires were so large that even in Washington, 4,000 kilometers away from the area of the accident - the distance that separates Madrid from Baghdad - the sky darkened.

  • Canada
  • United States
  • New York

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