East Coast Wildfire Experience Shows Limits of Air Regulations

Intense wildfire smoke billowed over the Canadian border into the eastern US last week, spotlighting a harmful pollution problem with no regulatory solution.

The haze that blanketed the eastern US caused panic in New York and Washington, cities that aren’t used to widespread air quality alerts that deem the air unfit to breathe.

New York City briefly topped the list as the city with the worst air quality in the world, triggering Code Maroon alerts indicating “hazardous” levels of pollution.

But what many viewed as an exceptional event is actually part of an unregulated pollution issue, leaving states and private citizens to take on the bulk of harm mitigation. And the problem is only getting worse with climate change, according to clean air experts.

“We’ve had the luxury of being detached until now,” especially among white, high-income, educated populations, according to Gillian Mittelstaedt, executive director of the Tribal Healthy Homes Network, an organization that advocates for healthy indoor air in tribal communities.

“Climate change has created something akin to a really busy intersection where we have no stoplights,” Mittelstaedt said. “And now we have these catastrophic weather and climate events, smoke, heat, flooding, that are like trucks flying through the light and wreaking havoc.”

Under the Clean Air Act, states are required to create plans to maintain national air quality standards, including controlling emissions that wander into other states. But the agency’s Exceptional Event Rule relieves states of responsibility for air quality issues stemming from wildfires, wind dust, and other similar occurrences.

“Exceptional events, in the common definition of ‘exceptional,’ is probably the wrong word,” said Paul Miller, executive director of Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management. “If it’s routine, it can’t be exceptional.”

That exceptional label plays a part in diminishing the severity of spikes like these for people who don’t fully understand the impacts of cumulative air pollution—and its connection to worsening climate change, said Gail Carlson, environmental studies assistant professor at Colby College.

Asthmatics and those with underlying conditions were the most at risk of immediate adverse health impacts last week, but the brief surge added to cumulative air pollution issues in urban areas that already deal with largely invisible toxic emissions from fossil fuel sources.

“Don’t just look away as soon as the air clears,” Carlson said. “This wasn’t just a one-time thing.”

Unregulated Issue

Wildfire pollution drifting across borders has become a summertime regularity in parts of the US, prompting the EPA to add resource lists and a fire map to its website, which tracks wildfires and subsequent pollution in real-time.

“EPA encourages people living in these areas to check their Air Quality Index (AQI) throughout the day to see their local air quality and steps to take to reduce smoke exposure and protect their health,” according to a statement issued by the EPA last week.

But that’s about all the agency can do without any regulations at its disposal to mitigate smoke pollution. The Clean Air Act was built to stem only emissions from sources like pipes and smokestacks.

For US-based fires, the Forest Service can try to limit uncontrolled blazes through strategic management of public lands, which includes prescribed burns of dense forest that acts like a tinder box during accidental fires. The smoke from those burns, unlike wildfires, count against a state’s air quality attainment under National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

“We have a source that we cannot control through regulation, and we can’t really even incentivize it through technological innovation,” Mittelstaedt said.

She sees healthcare safeguards like Medicare and Medicaid as a potential way to “triage” fire pollution harms through at least some type of regulation.

This would look like providing income-qualified people with medical monitoring devices, home air filters, filter cleaners, and vouchers for things such as weatherization of their homes—where we experience the most pollution exposure.

“We still have decades of potential harm in this unregulated intersection,” Mittelstaedt said.

State Responsibilities

With no regulatory framework to guide emergency response to events like wildfires, states often employ a two-pronged strategy: monitor the air closely, and then try to inform and warn the public, Miller said.

In Rhode Island, which struggles with high levels of ozone pollution, there’s already a “pretty good system” for warning residents about air pollution, said Darren Austin, a senior air quality specialist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. Much of it is grassroots—email chains with TV meteorologists, press releases, and website updates.

Rhode Island has six PurpleAir monitors concentrated around its most-populous centers, but it could use more, especially for tracking smoke events like the Canada fires, Austin said. The monitor data is uploaded to airnow.gov, the EPA’s website and smartphone app that gives users hyper-local forecasts.

Austin says there’s a small but critical flaw in the EPA air quality app, though: lack of push notifications.

“I’ve been talking about it for four years,” he said. “You can see the current air quality, but it does not give you a notification if there’s an alert issue.”

Beyond monitoring the air and relaying the results, state agencies have a few other options at their disposal, at least in theory. They could distribute N95 masks, which filter out the fine particulates that can worsen health risks for vulnerable populations, or use existing public hurricane or heat wave shelters for air pollution events, Miller said.

Those kinds of measures could be especially effective for low-income or homeless residents who rely on leaving windows open to cool down apartments in hot weather, or can’t go inside much at all, Miller said.

In Washington, D.C., agencies canceled outdoor recess for school children, suspended outdoor parks and recreation programming, and halted some trash and recycling activities during the worst of the air pollution, said Christopher Rodriguez, director of the district’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.

Intense wildfire smoke hasn’t plagued the Northeast and mid-Atlantic historically, but global warming increases those chances, Miller said. With certain types of climate disasters, such as fires, drifting outside their normal geographical bounds, state agencies will have to think of emergency response differently.

“It’s always hard to respond to something you have no control over,” Rodriguez said.

The Canada wildfires inspired Rodriguez to start “doubling down” on staff training and interdepartmental public messaging, he said.

“We’re all emergency managers now.”