You know things are bad when you have to go inside to catch some fresh air. After about 48 hours of the cleanest air Spokane has seen this month, the county’s air quality declined all the way to hazardous on Sunday. That is the final category on the six-category scale.
The air quality caused Eastern Washington University and Gonzaga to cancel home soccer games they had scheduled.
Mark Rowe is the Monitoring Section Manager for the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency. He says the wind shifted and brought in smoke from fires in Idaho and Montana. This is in addition to the smoke that was already in the air from Canadian and Washington fires.
As of 4:15 this afternoon, the air quality was at 161 on the Current Air Quality Index, way down from over 300 this morning. That is on the lower end of the “unhealthy” zone. Rowe says the improvement should continue tonight, but that will change tomorrow.
“By tomorrow the winds will die back down and there will probably be a little bit more build up then," said Rowe. "It may not be as bad as it was today, but we expect to have poor air quality at least until midday on Thursday.”
The weather forecast calls for cooler weather and a chance of rain this weekend.
Meanwhile, crews around the region continue to make progress fighting fires. One of the fires we have followed is the Horns Mountain fire. Over the weekend, that fire crossed into Canada. It is now being fought by a joint effort between British Columbia Wildfire Services and the Northwest Interagency Incident Management Team. There are currently 434 personnel assigned to the fire.