Bad Air.

[katster]

It’s ugly out there. This is a picture I just took about fifteen minutes ago, as the sun was going down here in Antelope, which is roughly twenty miles northeast of Sacramento proper. (I’m near Roseville, for those familiar with Sactown geography.)

The air’s been nasty all day. Every night, we hope it’ll get better as it clears enough to see stars in the sky. But the daytimes are just nasty. I had to take my mom into Roseville this afternoon, and our car doesn’t have air conditioning. My lungs are still feeling it. Every time I step out into the murky, ugly air, it starts to hurt to breathe. And I’m not in any sensitive group.

I’m in Sacramento. I can only imagine how bad it is in my old stomping grounds up in Redding, where there’s fires burning all around. I have vague memories of 1987, and stepping outside to see a blood red sun hanging in the air. My dad still has pictures somewhere.

Never expected I’d be snapping my own in Sactown, though.

A thousand fires. My lovely state is burning. And more dry lightning predicted.

And it’s only June.

That’s the scariest part.

(More sunset pictures on Flicker here.)

Originally published at retstak.org. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I grew up on a series of US Forest Service bases and in the in Central Valley back when rice field stubble was routinely burned off with no controls. I think the smoke we have around here in the Bay Area is the second-worst I've ever seen. (The worst was when two very large forest fires burned into each other less than ten miles from the USFS base on which I lived -- it was like a volcano without the earthquake, including the ash falling from the sky a few minutes later.)

[spitgirl.livejournal.com]

The sun was red yesterday down here. I've been trying to keep the windows closed.

[salinn.livejournal.com]

Sac is bad, and Redding and Chico are HORRIBLE.

The train came through there yesterday morning and it was so hazy and my eyes started to be affected, even though I was inside the train. It was like this horrible yellow fog. Last night I also saw the red sun, which my cousin (from San Jose) explained to me about it.

This is serious.

[kathryn-ironic.livejournal.com]

Kevin,

I also remember those rice-field-burning days. You'd see the giant columns rising up and then hitting the inversion layer = that smoke wasn't going anywhere.

Air quality people say that the valley has a "ring around the collar" at 2-3000 feet, where all the trees are weaker from the pollution that concentrates there.

I can't imagine what Redding is like--there's many more fires and less air circulation than further south.

(note: I've got a post up about air pollution and health--I've been taking extra O3FA (via fish oil), and think it's probably a good idea for most people in the smoke zone.)