The response came too late and all wrong.
By the time New York City had provided guidance to and marshaled resources for the public, the acrid, eye-burning, and otherworldly wildfire smoke had been choking the city for days. The smoke arrived Monday. “Our team is coordinating,” Mayor Eric Adams said on Wednesday, “but at the moment, we recommend vulnerable New Yorkers stay inside and all New Yorkers should limit outdoor activity to the greatest extent possible.”
To help encourage New Yorkers to do that, public facilities shut down and events were canceled. Theaters, beaches, stadiums, and zoos closed, sure. But so did public libraries, vital indoor gathering places for the unhoused. And so did some public schools, leaving thousands of kids in apartments and houses that might have been overventilated, letting the toxic air in, and unfiltered, leaving it there. What were people supposed to do? Where were they supposed to go?
Masks, scientists said: People should wear masks. Suddenly they were hard to get. (I know because I wandered around in the amber haze, trying and failing to buy ones that would fit my small children.) The government would be providing a million of them, the good kind, N95s, Governor Kathy Hochul announced. But this is a city of 8.5 million people. The masks were not available when the air-quality index hit its peak—the worst air ever recorded in the city, the worst air in the world at one point in time. Plus, to get the masks, folks would have to travel, exposing themselves to the grotesque air. Who was going to schlep to Grand Central Station or the Port Authority Bus Terminal for the chance of picking one up? Would the masks even be there?
Filter your air, scientists said: Families should run high-quality HEPA purifiers at home. Those were hard to get too. Not that many stores carry them. And they often cost $100, if not more. Stores sold out. Jury-rig one with a box fan and an air filter, folks said, as if everyone had the know-how, or an air filter in the first place.
By Friday morning, the air was finally clearing up. But it had been, as usual, a disaster here in America. It was apocalyptic: the sky orange, the air a migraine-inducing fug that smelled like ash and burned vinyl siding, scratching up throats and fogging up brains and irritating eyes. The longer-term health consequences are likely to be just as awful: more asthma definitely, more cancer perhaps. All along, the guidance was too late and unclear. Resources were difficult to access. People sensed that there was no real plan and thus no follow-through. Individuals were left to manage it on their own.
It did not need to be this way. “Despite days of warnings that smoke from Canadian wildfires would make its way here to New York City, the City has issued limited, often confusing public guidance,” Lincoln Restler, a member of the New York City council, said in an email to constituents. “It’s the government’s job to lead in a crisis—the public should not be asked to come up with their own solutions. We need a full accounting and oversight hearing on why the City failed to respond to these conditions in a timely manner to ensure we aren’t caught unprepared again.”
Everywhere needs to be prepared for smoke. That is one takeaway. Families and municipalities in the western states, where fire season runs year-round now, are already well aware. Those in the East and South need to be better prepared next time. Smoke requires not just closures, but openings. It requires safe spaces where people can go to get out of the choking haze. And it requires infrastructure, including HEPA filters in public buildings and masks at the ready, in all sizes. (Medicare might want to start thinking about covering air purifiers.)
Everywhere needs to be prepared for everything. That is another takeaway. The climate catastrophe is screwing with the weather and the seasons. It is amplifying unpredictability—ginning up freak storms, early fires, unexpected mudslides, sudden heat waves. By the time a crisis hits, it is too late for places to plan, and the results will be what they always are: Everyone is rendered vulnerable, though people with money have options that people without money do not.
Our country’s response is too late and all wrong at a fundamental level. This is the underlying issue, of course: We should have started weaning ourselves off fossil fuels earlier. We need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels faster.
But we are in an emergency now. We need better wildfire-suppression policies, better smoke-mitigation practices, better public-health communication, and more expectation of the unexpected. Next time, the libraries should be open and the masks should be ready.