I don’t normally discuss breaking news – given the nature of our work, some of the topics we get most excited about are 80 years or more old – but today’s smoke from the Canadian wildfires was something else. The unretouched picture above, courtesy of EarthCam shows lower Manhattan as seen from Jersey City. Our office and my home are in that photo. That was around 2PM yesterday. The orange sky was proceeded and followed by a beige one:
Earlier (and later) there was some haze/smog but nothing overtly frightening. Here’s 8AM:
There’s one obvious engineering aspect to this frightening phenomenon: it reinforces the idea developed during the Covid pandemic that we really need better indoor air quality. More filtration and more air changes would help with both problems. That’s a mechanical engineering issue with architectural implications, needing structural engineering involvement only for relatively-minor secondary problems like “how do we support the air handling equipment?” As it happens, I replaced a broken heat-pump unit in the apartment on Tuesday, which is good because we’d have been sleeping with the windows open last night.
Some further reading:
https://www.curbed.com/2023/06/it-was-a-weird-day-in-new-york.html
https://www.curbed.com/2023/06/nyc-air-quality-canada-wildfires-haze.html
https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-air-quality-hazard-levels-latest-data-maps-and-charts
https://gothamist.com/news/how-to-protect-your-lungs-as-nycs-air-quality-suffers-from-wildfires
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