A very gray day

Houghton July 16

The smoke from the Boundary Waters and the north shore of Lake Superior is still hitting us. Not sure just what the air quality index says but it hit about 1,000 on Wednesday. It's probably lower now, although not by much, because it's raining. Anything above 300 is Bad, as in Really Bad. The local weather guys gave the predicted rain a mixed review. On the one hand, the rain will knock particulates out of the atmosphere. On the other, that might simply cause particulates to be more of an issue at lower altitudes. I don't know and don't especially care. It's going to be gray and smell like smoke outside no matter what our weather is doing here. I'm just going to hope it's raining hard in northern Ontario because a good soaking rain is about the only thing that will stop wild fires in a bone dry boreal forest. 

Our perpetually brain dead idiot of a Congress critter, the Louisiana carpetbagger, was shooting off his mouth yesterday about Canada needing to do something. Right. Like right now the Canadian natural resources people, their equivalent of the Forest Service and similar land management agencies, are just sitting back and saying, yep, let the entire Lake Nipigon/boundary waters region burn. Natural disaster, just let it go, sooner or later the fires will exhaust the current supply of spruce, balsam, and peat bogs. 

Minor digression: peat bogs burn forever, or it can seem that way. It's like when a fire starts in a seam of coal. It'll keep smoldering for months and years. There's a coal seam in Centralia, Pennsylvania, that's been smoldering for over 60 years now. No one knows how that fire started but current estimates are that it'll take another 200+ years for the fire to burn itself out. A bog fire isn't going to last centuries but it's also not going to be easy to extinguish.

Anyway, while Michiganders (and a Louisiana carpetbagger) are busy bitching about bad air, people in northern Ontario are living with apocalyptic scenarios with towns being evacuated and homes being destroyed. I saw a video filmed from a CN freight train that I was hoping was AI but was definitely real and definitely terrifying. Intense fire on both sides of the track and smoke so thick visibility was effectively zero. It's rather petty of Michiganders to complain about smoke when they're not living so close to the fires they can feel the heat. It is also, as my S.O. noted, remarkably chickenshit for people like Jack Bergman (carpetbagger) to complain that Canada is somehow to blame for aggravating asthma in Michigan when Canada has always been really fast in assisting U.S. firefighting efforts. A Canadian pilot died recently in Colorado while assisting with fighting wildfires there. Instead of complaining to Prime Minister Carney about Canada's supposed fuck-ups, Congress critters like Bergman should be asking what the U.S. can do to help. 

Of course, Begman and other Republicans can't go after the real problem that's leading to massive wildfires globally: climate change. Admitting climate change is real would piss off their fossil fuel mega-donors. Besides, Mango Mussolini has declared climate change a hoax which means, of course, that every Republican has to parrot the same line. 

It's also rather stupid for any Congress critter to bitch about Canadian fires when huge chunks of the U.S. are burning right now. If you want to depress yourself, check out the statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center. 

It is for sure an odd feeling to keep smelling smoke when the closest fire is on the other side of Lake Superior anywhere from 50 to 100 miles from here. Going by the maps I've seen on local news, the bulk of the smoke we're getting is coming from the Boundary Waters area so maybe Bergman should be writing nasty letters to Tom Schulz about how the U.S. Forest Service screwed up instead of lobbing insults at Mark Carney.