Millions of people in the western Canadian province of British Columbia were under air quality warnings on Monday as hundreds of wildfires filled the skies with smoke and turned the sun orange.
In the cities of Kelowna and Kamloops, the air quality index was above 350, a "hazardous" level, real-time air quality information platform IQAir showed. AQI measures major pollutants including particulate matter produced by fires.
Wildfire smoke is a seasonal occurrence for much of heavily-forested British Columbia, but the number of wildfires and amount of land burned is trending higher as aForecasting service BlueSky Canada said nearly the entire province was covered by smoke, with the highest concentrations in the southern interior region where fires have"This type of extreme smoke event covering all of our province does not happen every year," said Jalena Bennett, smoke information specialist with BlueSky...
Environment Canada issued air quality advisories for much of the southern half of British Columbia, home to the majority of the province's 5.1 million inhabitants, including the densely populated Metro Vancouver region where smog hung in the sky."Ash has been falling from the sky, my throat is itchy, my eyes are itchy," said Marie-Eve Hervieux, 31, a customer support manager living in Revelstoke, about 550 km northeast of Vancouver.
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