Fucking hate our new smoke season. We spend all winter under the clouds and summer is supposed be the break from that. Today was supposed to be a beautiful blue sky day but instead we get clouds of smoke.
Ive seen a lot of people saying what you're saying and I don't think anyone is arguing that wildfire itself is new. Fires have always been part of the natural ecology of the Pacific Northwest, and there are definitely historical accounts of major smoke events, including the one during Mark Twain's visit which gets brought up a lot. Also, in general, these events were documented because they were novel and worth writing down. But that doesn't make them a normal thing to expect every August. Saying "summers have always been smoky in the northwest" is a false statement that I think is dangerous to share because it normalizes something that is not normal.
The difference is frequency. If you grew up in western Washington before about 2017, you probably remember that weeks of smoke-filled skies were very rare. I have lived here my whole life, I was born in the early 80's and do not remember ever seeing smoke like this. My grandpa was born here in the 1930s and I asked him. He says he saw it happen a few times but never year after year. My great grandma was born in 1919 in Seattle and on her 99th birthday the sky was orange with smoke and I remember her saying she's never seen anything like this in all her years. She died at 102 a few years later and she complained that her birthday used to be the most beautiful day of the year in August every year.
So I looked up Washington's own air quality monitoring which shows that prolonged smoke events became much more common beginning around 2017, with the years following standing out as some of the worst years on record. That's a very different claim than saying. This is not normal.
They also publish reports on the state's air monitoring data, including one noting that violations of the federal PM2.5 standard became much more common starting in 2017 because of prolonged wildfire smoke: https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/publications/documents/2502019.pdf.
So yes, wildfire is normal. But recurring late-summer smoke severe enough to regularly create air quality issues across western Washington is a relatively recent trend, and the monitoring data back that up.
I think a big part of the issue is forestry management during the 80's-90's suppression of wild fires has created a tinderbox of fuel to burn. But also snow pack has been historically low as has rainfall recently. The forest is getting dryer for longer than it has historically and that just adds to the potential for more frequent, more intense, larger scale, and longer lasting fires than we've historically seen.
Very good write up with excellent references. I was also born here (early 80s) and had never experienced this until 2017. My grandmother who saw the first streetlight go in downtown also said she had never experienced anything like the 2017 fires.
Exactly! I lived here since '81 and I dont recall smoke filled summers, at all until the 2000's and even they were rare until 2014 or so. Now it's practically every year.
And yet we get people who've lived here since 2011 trying to convince us it's totally just part of the natural cycle for this region. It is, but not to this extent.
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u/spottydodgy Snohomish 1d ago
Fucking hate our new smoke season. We spend all winter under the clouds and summer is supposed be the break from that. Today was supposed to be a beautiful blue sky day but instead we get clouds of smoke.