California wildfire smoke is spreading to New York

A firefighting aircraft drops fire retardant as the Holy Fire burns near homes on August 10, 2018 in Lake Elsinore, California.
(Image credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Smoke from California's catastrophic wildfires is spreading across the country to New York City, a National Weather Service model shows. The particles are about a mile above the surface and will generally not affect air quality on the ground.

See more

California is presently dealing with three of the state's 30 largest fires on record. The Mendocino Complex Fire, now encompassing more than 300,000 acres, is California's largest fire ever.

"The trends are pretty astounding in terms of the number of acres burned, the length of the wildfire season, the numbers of structures lost," Kelly Pohl, a research analyst with Headwaters Economics, told The New York Times. "If you look at the trends over several decades, they've all gone up."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

California has spent more than half of its annual fire budget in a span of just 40 days.

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.