Lady Bug, Lady Bug, Fly Away Home – Your house is on fire and your children are burning…… Remember that one?
As children, we gleefully chanted this every time we saw a lady bug. As an adult, I thought – how horrible – just like many other mother goose rhymes. Yet this week when I spotted a lady bug, it felt like it was time to say it again as smoke was pouring in from Canada.
Twenty one years ago, in the summer of 2002, we were 30 miles at sea, when we woke up one July morning to what seemed to be heavy fog, but the smell made us realize that something else was happening. It was a 200 mile wide smoke plume from Quebec wildfires moving southward along the eastern seaboard. I distinctly remember the sense of wonder that a fire raging 500 miles away could reach our shores.
I thought it was a one off, until a new smoke plume moved in last week from Nova Scotia, sending photographers out to capture the sunrise and sunsets that were glowing red from the Rayleigh scattering effect. This week another, larger plume is is enveloping the east coast – Hazy skies, low visibility and poor air quality have spread from the Ohio Valley as far south as the Carolinas. A plume of smoke from Canada has been covering Colorado since May, where the Rocky Mountains can act as a defacto wall, stopping wildfire smoke and trapping it, until the wind shifts.
Pandemic masks are re-emerging as officials are urging residents to stay indoors and to wear high quality masks if they have to be outside as air quality indexes rise into Code Purple – Very Unhealthy – Ranges.
It turns out that New England’s Dark Day which occurred in May of 1780 – an unusual darkening of the daytime sky – we now know was a combination of smoke – from a Canadian wild fire, fog and cloud cover.- In those days, before meteorology, many interpreted it as a day of judgement.
The 1950 Great Smoke Pall across eastern North America and Europe produced blue moons but was mostly in the upper atmosphere and could not be smelled, the result of a forest fire in northern British Columbia – at the time – the single largest recorded fire in North American History.
Likewise – Orange Skies Day in San Francisco in 2020. Was the result of 20 wildfires burning to the east of the Bay Area.
What will go down in the history books as the fires of 2023 has reminded me of the northeast blackout of 1965 as friends and family are all checking in with one another to see how much smoke there is – sending photos and how they were coping – as well as the scene from the Wizard of Oz, where the wicked witch calls out “What a World” as her last words as she is melting.
Be safe out there