The smoke and the smell of burnt wood spread to New York City and as far south As Virginia. On Sunday, July 7th, 2002, in Washington, D.C., it was impossible to see Virginia across the Potomac.
According to story featured this weekend on the CBC ...
Quebec forest fires burn out of control,
but finally a change in wind direction is clearing the air along parts of the East Coast and in Ontario, but now the smell of burnt wood and the smoke is covering Montreal. Not only the Western forests are burning, but the drought is also severe in the Northern Eastern forests in Canada, leading to a huge forest fire that sent such a cloud of smoke into the air that it literally darkened the sun, and the burning smell and smoke cloud travelled over a thousand kilometers. According to reports the smoke cloud was so thick that it was like a dark overcast day, but it was not clouds, but rather the smoke from these fires that created this effect. The fire was started by dry lightning and is travelling at about the speed a person walks and in the last week has consumed hundreds of square miles. Over 50 fires are burning in Northern Quebec, and dry lightening has also started a couple of dozen new large fires in the Western United States in the last few days, (hundreds of fires were started by lightning in the American west, but only a couple of dozen have escaped to become new large scale fires.
However in both Canada and the United States there is a drought, flooding sandwich, with the flooding being the filling in the middle, leaving a strip up the center of the continent water logged.
According to this story, the water logged conditions have led to a fierce outbreak of mosquitoes, a sell out in bug repellant, and now West Nile Virus monitoring is being expanded.
The latest visible satellite photo (July 8th) shows the smoke plume heading east over the Atlantic - might be paying a visit to Europe in a few days (the clouds are white the smoke plume is the grey looking plume pulling away from the Eastern North American coast)...
The BBC version of the story states that "Smoke has blanketed the city of Montreal, leading city officials to warn children, the elderly and people with respiratory problems to remain indoors due to health fears. The US states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania also advised residents with respiratory and heart conditions to stay indoors, with New York and New Jersey's warnings extending state-wide, Pennsylvania's extending to 20 counties. Since the fires began last week up to 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of land have been destroyed, officials from Quebec's forest fire protection service said.
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