Graeme Carvlin said Monday that Seattle air quality could slide from smoke overhead to ground-level impacts by afternoon, with conditions worsening overnight across most of the Puget Sound region. A wildfire smoke alert was issued for the area as air quality was expected to turn unhealthy on Tuesday.
Carvlin, an air quality scientist with Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, said, "Currently, we're seeing some smoke overhead, but that could start to mix down to the ground over the course of this afternoon, and we expect further smoke coming in at ground level overnight." He added, "So, today looks like maybe moderate to unhealthy for sensitive groups. Tomorrow, it's more likely to be unhealthy for sensitive groups to unhealthy [for everyone]."
Puget Sound on Monday
The alert covered most of the Puget Sound region and came as smoke from Eastern Washington and fires in British Columbia spread west. Anna Lindeman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle, said, "We’re kind of getting hit from two sides." She said the highest concentration of wildfire smoke would likely come Tuesday, and that the pattern would not let up until onshore airflow moved in Friday.
Lindeman also said the combination of smoke and hot weather could make outside activities more dangerous for infants, children, people over 65, people who are pregnant, or those who have heart or lung diseases. Seattle was expected to top out near 90 degrees Wednesday and Thursday, while Olympia was forecast to have highs in the mid-90s.
Western Washington and the smoke source
Western Washington had been good west of the Cascades so far this summer, but Beth Friedman, an air quality forecaster with the Washington State Department of Ecology, said smoke from Central and Eastern Washington had changed that. She said many of the fires there had grown substantially with extremely critical fire weather over the weekend, and that air quality in much of Central and Eastern Washington had been poor for weeks.
That smoke included the Little Giant Fire, which had burned about 50,000 acres in the Cascades northwest of Leavenworth. Dennis Burns, a fire behavior analyst with the California incident team working the Little Giant Fire, said people from Lake Wenatchee, Plain, Entiat, Lake Chelan and down to Wenatchee were probably noticing the smoke. He said ash was falling out of the sky in Plain, after firefighters were unable to prevent the fire from skipping across mile-wide Lake Chelan in strong wind.
Bob Ferguson's emergency
Gov. Bob Ferguson declared a statewide wildfire emergency Saturday after extreme fire weather with dry winds gusting up to 50 miles per hour fueled explosive fire growth in central and eastern Washington. Three fast-moving fires in the Spokane area burned through more than 7,000 acres, destroyed at least 700 structures and forced the evacuation of about 65,000 people.
Carvlin said the smoke alert was expected to keep air quality poor throughout the week before clearing Friday. For people in the alert area, Tuesday looked like the day when conditions were most likely to cross into unhealthy territory.
