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They left California to escape wildfires. Then New York turned orange. [1]

['Joanna Slater']

Date: 2023-06-09

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Three years ago, Nate Salpeter was sitting in his office in Half Moon Bay, Calif., when he saw a mushroom cloud of smoke explode over a nearby hill. It was the edge of a devastating wildfire that forced him and his wife to evacuate their farm. Want to know how your actions can help make a difference for our planet? Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter, in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday. ArrowRight This week, they were in their new home in the Finger Lakes region of New York. The couple had moved there last year to get as far from wildfires as possible. It wasn’t far enough.

An acrid smell filled the air. A grayish-orange haze obscured the view. All the old anxieties came rushing back. Anna Sweet, Salpeter’s wife, turned to him and said, “I thought we moved away from this.” He felt speechless, too stunned to respond.

Among the tens of millions in the path of this week’s unprecedented wildfire smoke in the northeastern United States were a group of people who had already changed their lives to avoid it: Californians driven away by the western state’s increasingly intense fire seasons and now at the mercy of Canada’s.

They are unique in a way they never expected, having experienced all four of the worst days for smoke pollution on record. Two occurred in California in 2020, and the other two were Wednesday and Thursday, according to researchers at Stanford University.

When Justin Hibner saw photos of the orange sky over Manhattan on Wednesday, it reminded him of the day in September 2020 when he decided to leave San Francisco. The smoke blotted out the sun and the sky turned ocher. “That was the moment when we just said, ‘That’s it, we’re going to move,’” said Hibner, 43.

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Hibner and his wife and two children relocated to Rochester, N.Y., in 2021. On Wednesday morning, they returned home after a trip. When they stepped out of the plane in Buffalo, there was an all-too-familiar smoky smell. The family put on N95 masks, drove home and spent the rest of the day inside.

“It’s such a strange feeling,” he said Thursday. “I’m back in California in a way.” He was hopeful that the smoke would disperse quickly and wouldn’t linger for months on end. “Because then where do we go?”

According to various climate models, central and western New York will experience fewer negatives due to the changing climate compared to many other parts of the planet, said Lee Murray, a professor of environmental science at the University of Rochester. But “there’s no place on earth that is safe from potential negative consequences of climate change.”

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Murray and other climate scientists say that it’s too soon to attribute the fires in Canada directly to climate change. However, there is a broad scientific consensus that climate change is making such fires more frequent and intense.

The future risk of fire was what pushed Salpeter and Sweet to consider a move. They first founded Sweet Farm in 2015 in Half Moon Bay as a nonprofit animal sanctuary and incubator of agricultural technology.

But drought conditions made their work increasingly difficult and expensive. Then came the CZU Lightning Complex fire in 2020. The farm was in the evacuation zone. In four hours, they moved 140 animals: cows, pigs, llamas, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese and one stallion.

In the end, the fire didn’t reach their property, but they knew they might not be so lucky next time. They began looking at the central part of New York state, where Sweet grew up. They found a 50-acre property in Himrod, next to Seneca Lake, a 4.2 trillion-gallon body of water they can pump whenever needed. The risk of wildfires was exceedingly low.

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As the smoke rolled in this week, however, Salpeter felt himself go on high alert. Where was the fire? How far away? How should they react? Once he realized the wildfire was in Canada, he began treating it not as a direct threat but as a breathing hazard. He and Sweet buttoned up the house, something they hadn’t done since they left California.

For Salpeter, the lesson from the past week’s wildfire smoke is clear. “No one is immune from climate change,” he said. “We’re just going to have to continually adapt, collectively.”

Jon Randall, another former Californian, found his thoughts veering in a grimmer direction. He and his wife, Mariane, spent 23 years in the Bay Area before moving to a small town near Rochester in late 2020. They’ve spent the past few days huddling inside the house, watching the air-quality numbers and hoping for rain. “It feels like the world is sick somehow,” said Randall, a retired engineer.

The couple left Danville, a community they loved, because of the growing risk from wildfires. “I never wanted to find my home reduced to ashes,” said Randall, 71. “But you could see all the ingredients were right there.”

He can’t help wondering if this week’s pollution is a harbinger of things to come. “Imagine that the summer becomes the smoky season. I mean, what’s that going to feel like?” he asked. “No more blue skies, or a blue sky once in a great while. It’s really frightening.”

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AJ van Tine and his wife, Ada, moved to Rochester from the Sacramento Valley in 2021. Van Tine, 30, is a Unitarian Universalist minister; the couple spent two years in California before the persistent wildfires made them rethink their choice.

When they began looking for a new home, they wanted a location that would be resilient to the impacts of a changing climate. Rochester, a city of 200,000 on the shores of Lake Ontario, fit the bill.

“We didn’t think that meant there would never be any ill effects from climate change,” van Tine said. But “it’s going to be a more habitable place than many other places in the country” over the long term.

They brought four air purifiers with them from California, and when the haze appeared this week, they put the machines on their highest settings. Van Tine is hoping the pollution is a temporary aberration, but he also acknowledges the unknowns.

Randall, too, is trying to focus on the fact that this is not the norm. Just a few weeks ago, he and Mariane were sitting outside in the evening near one of the two creeks on their property, listening to the sound of the water and the wind in the trees.

“We just remind ourselves this is why we moved here,” Randall said. “For days like that.”

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/06/09/east-coast-air-quality-california-wildfires/

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