Environment challenges Canada again

Pensioners and people with chronic illnesses can suffer most because of fires.

For the past weeks, we've been writing about what's been happening in Canada because of the fires: first it affected Alberta, then fires started in Nova Scotia, and now the French president is tweeting to the Quebec premier that the French Republic is coming to help. Tens of thousands of people are temporarily displaced, forest land is engulfed by fire, and schools are closed due to safety concerns.

Although environmentalists, economists, and politicians have yet to establish the damage and figure out how to put the diesel back on the road to peace, we can already speak of a huge blow to the ecology that Canada has been trying to protect for so long. This is primarily due to the air pollution with carbon dioxide.

The Environment and Climate Change Canada has published a pollution scale for several Canadian cities. As for the Canadian capital, air quality has been at its highest since Monday.

The scale is very simple: if there is no or minimal risk, it is a number 1; if the risk is critically life-threatening, it is 10 or just a "+" sign. In Ottawa on Monday and Tuesday it was 10+, and only dropped to 10 by Tuesday afternoon.

What experts say

Some of them are discouraged by the situation and are very critical of the situation today.

"Don't expect a return to normal life anytime soon. Winds from the north and northeast will carry columns of smoke from Quebec toward Ottawa. And with few signs of significant precipitation in the forecast, wildfires may actually prevent them. Unless the forest fires themselves somehow decrease, the weather will not change. So the air quality is likely to remain ... bad," this is how ecologist Monica Vaswani commented on the situation.

The current moment is especially dangerous to populations at risk: pensioners, pregnant women, people with lung and respiratory diseases.

According to the Environment and Climate Change Canada, the concentration of particles so small that they easily penetrate anywhere on Tuesday morning was 267 micrograms per cubic meter. That's more than double the average level in Delhi, India, a city known for heavy air pollution.