5d ago

Smoke from Canada’s wildfires killed nine-year-old Carter Vigh – and 82,000 others around the world

www.theguardian.com

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TheDwZ @lemmy.world

5d ago

Smoke from Canada’s wildfires killed nine-year-old Carter Vigh – and 82,000 others around the world

www.theguardian.com /environment/2025/sep/10/smoke-from-canadas-wildfires-killed-nine-year-old-carter-vigh-and-82000-others-around-the-world

10 comments

Yet fossil fuel infrastructure is dubbed "nation building projects" by the government.
Canadian wildfires killed 82,000 people in 2023
I'm not surprised. I don't live near the wildfires, but our air quality was often in the danger zone these past few years. Yet I saw people out walking, jogging, cycling... without any kind of mask or respirator, as if they were oblivious to the dangers.
I mean, FFS, even the photo in the article, of the guy spraying the ground. The SKY IS ORANGE, and he's out without a mask or anything. Dude, WTF?
Any weather app would give you a notification about air quality pretty early in advance, so it's not like most people would be caught-out unexpectedly.
And it's not like we haven't normalized "masking up" by now, since the pandemic. So it's such a small inconvenience to save your lungs. Just do it.
- The mask that you would wear to protect yourself from wildfire smoke is not some flimsy surgical mask. Those only minimized aerosols coming out of your mouth, it's not a filter, it doesn't make wildfire smoke air safer to breath.
  
  Right, I didn't try to imply the same masks, but there are so many options for cutting back on wildfire smoke particles.
  N95, N99, P100... Any hardware store would carry these.
  
  I think most people learned that because of COVID, didn't they? N95s (worn properly) block 95% of pm2.5, which takes a danger level of 400 μg/m³ (well into the hazardous range) down to 20 μg/m³ (about half the cutoff for "unhealthy").
  Yet only a handful of people locally were wearing N95s when the levels were that high, locally. People just don't care about their health, I guess? Not sure how else to interpret it.
Well, we should probably stop having massive wildfires then.
- Better start raking those forests ....
- Just like the Novia Scotia guy said, just stop going into the forest, it's fine, gosh.
  
  Yah, that ought to do it, eh?
  Problem solved.

10 comments