The Empire State Building was lit up in Knicks orange during the NBA Finals last week. But there’s no championship parade for finishing first in the world’s worst air pollution rankings. On Wednesday, city officials reported the local air quality index (AQI) climbed over 480 on a 500 scale due to smoke traveling south from the ongoing Canadian wildfires, the worst since the 1960s.
“301 or higher is a hazardous condition,” said Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan on Wednesday. “In consultation with our environmental health experts, our air quality experts, those at the state and at the CDC, they note that there isn’t a number after which we make specific recommendations. We have to take each situation clearly, but this is extremely dangerous air outside.
“What is the result of that? Lung conditions exacerbated, heart conditions exacerbated, mucosal membranes from the eyes, the nose, the ears, irritated, burning, throat burning.”
Dr. Micaela Martinez, Director of Environmental Health at Harlem’s WE ACT for Environmental Justice, says New Yorkers should avoid the toxic chemicals and particles contained in wildfire smoke. Particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5), or fine particles smaller than two and one half microns, is notably dangerous when inhaled, as it can get deep into the lungs and transfer into the blood via diffusion. One micron is around 1/25,000 of an inch.
While last week’s air pollution drifted evenly across the five boroughs, the health impact is not as democratized. Martinez mentions studies about cardiovascular issues that arise after smoke events, an added concern for Black and brown New Yorkers who experience higher rates of heart disease. Childhood asthma—for which the air pollution reportedly can trigger symptoms—is also more prevalent in neighborhoods of color, and babies face the most risk when breathing in particulate matter, potentially exacerbating the already higher rates of infant mortality for Black and brown New Yorkers.
“If you expose a community that has an underlying vulnerability to an acute event like the smoke, versus a community that doesn’t have those underlying vulnerabilities, you are going to see a larger effect in that more vulnerable community,” said Martinez.
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Inequity also surfaces in housing and employment. Martinez says much like the COVID-19 pandemic, delivery app workers and street vendors—most of whom are low-income and nonwhite—could not isolate themselves indoors during the smoke. And older buildings, especially in Black and brown neighborhoods uptown and in the Bronx, frequently lack self-containing air conditioning systems, which means more air pollution coming inside.
But for New Yorkers, wildfire smoke seems like an aberration. Garima Raheja, a Columbia Climate School researcher and doctoral candidate, says she’s frequently fielding questions on whether recent events are a product of climate change.
“We cannot link any one specific event to climate change,” she said. “But it is definitely a symptom of worsening climate change [like] drought, increasing heat, and changing ecosystems.
We’re gonna see more of this. So we’re gonna have to buckle up and we’re not going to get through this just by protecting ourselves.”
She adds that even on a normal day, there are major air pollution disparities in Black and brown neighborhoods.
“Even if the entire city of New York is experiencing the same level of air pollution, the communities that have historically been hardest hit are going to be affected more by that same level of air pollution because they have higher rates of asthma [and] respiratory problems,” said Raherja. “So they’re going to be suffering worse on the same day in the same air pollution conditions. Another big problem is that the amount of air pollution monitoring that we have is really disproportionate. Rich white communities have way more air pollution monitoring than lower income communities of color.
“Last Wednesday, we can see from models and satellites that the exposure is similar [for] everybody but [there’s] way less information in communities like Harlem [or in] Queens and the Bronx.”
Martinez says there’s a lack of public education linking climate change to wildfires.
“The main driver of these increased fires that we’ve seen over the last decade or so has mostly been because of decreased precipitation and then the secondary causes is warming weather,” she said. “Because things are so dry, then you have the buildup of fuels—dried grasses, shrubs, trees, dead leaves, dry pine needles—then this fire weather. You can have warm conditions, the humidity is just right and the wind is blowing.
“All of these things are impacted by climate change. But then they all come together to kind of set up the ideal conditions for these big fires.”
While the jury is still out on whether last week is the new normal, both Martinez and Raherja recommend New Yorkers to take steps to protect themselves by wearing the same masks used during the COVID-19 pandemic—N95 and KN95, instead of surgical cloth masks, will help prevent ingesting particulate matter from wildfire smoke. They also recommend air filters and box fans for ventilation.