After repeated blasts of smoke last summer and one of the driest winters on record, Chicago enters the 2024 wildfire season with trepidation

Across the United States, wildfire smoke has been rising for decades as a percentage of the PM2.5 pollution that plagues industrial cities like Chicago.

After repeated blasts of thick and smelly wildfire smoke last summer and one of the warmest and driest winters on record, Chicagoans can be forgiven for anticipating the 2024 wildfire season with a sense of dread.

In fact, governments in both the United States and Canada say they’re correct to feel this way.

“The conditions are ripe for another bad fire season,” said John Mooney, air quality director for the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in Chicago.

“The snowpack was down. The ice cover on the lakes was down. If the wind blows in the right direction, we’re going to get hit in the eastern half of the United States again,” Mooney said in an interview.

“We need to prepare for the worst,” he said, noting that significant wildfire risks exist in the northern forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Half a century after Congress passed the Clean Air Act, industrial, vehicular and power plant pollution remains a significant health threat in the Midwest, particularly in Black and brown communities.

In Chicago and other industrial towns, smoke from past wildfires and those that lie ahead will make the pre-existing pollution deadlier and harder to control.

The smoke will intensify EPA crackdowns on PM2.5, or small particle pollution, and nitrogen oxide, which helps form ground-level ozone.

These crackdowns, in turn, could slow economic growth.

While some experts don’t expect a repeat of the unprecedented eruption of wildfires in Canada last year, they’re still skittish about making predictions for 2024.

For one thing, they didn’t anticipate the extent of last year’s fires, either.

“Herein lies the problem with climate change,” said Zac Adelman, executive director of the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium, or LADCO.

“It’s blowing up our ability to forecast the weather.”

Adelman’s consortium coordinates air quality research and planning for Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Ohio.

Public Safety Canada, which oversees that country’s homeland security, said that because of warm temperatures and a widespread winter drought, “we may be facing another catastrophic fire season.”

Canada exploded last year with 45.7 million acres burned, more than eight times the long-term annual average, according to Paul Pastelok, an AccuWeather meteorologist.

The fires blanketed the United States with smoke as far south as Virginia.

Pastelok predicts the Canadian total could drop to 12 million to 18 million acres this year.

Mooney said he puts little stock in forecasts that look much further than 48 hours into the future.

To add some spice to the mix, scientists will have to wait until Memorial Day to get an idea of how many of the 2023 fires that continue to burn beneath Canada’s boreal or northern forest will roar back to life on the surface.

And about a dozen of the Quebec fires that helped send smoke to the United States last year, including one that burned 2,000 acres, were  set by an arsonist.

Whatever the 2024 fire totals turn out to be, Chicagoans already have plenty of reason to be worried.

Wildfires have devastated parts of Australia, Chile and the Texas Panhandle in recent months, as the world set one record after another for hot air, superheated oceans and accumulated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Across the United States, wildfire smoke has been rising for decades as a percentage of the PM2.5 pollution that’s never absent from industrial cities such as Chicago.

PM2.5 is a devilish form of pollution to control because it’s not one thing. Instead, it’s a gumbo of particles and liquid droplets with at least one thing in common — they’re so small they can penetrate the human lungs and circulatory system.

Some building blocks for PM2.5 are released directly into the air, such as dust from a construction site.

Others are formed when chemicals such as ammonia from farms, feedlots and chemical plants react in the atmosphere with soot and nitrogen oxides from gasoline and diesel engines and other forms of combustion.

According to EPA data, in 2023, wildfire smoke contributed 13.6% of U.S. emissions of the volatile organic compounds that help form PM2.5 and ground-level ozone, up from 3.5% in 2000.

The agency said that wildfire smoke contributed 13.5% of carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. last year, up from 10.5% in 2000. Carbon monoxide can impede the body’s ability to transport oxygen to cells and tissues.

These increases offset some of the substantial gains the U.S. has made in controlling other pollution sources, such as power plants and cars and trucks.

They make it harder for state and local regulators to comply with the new PM2.5 standards even as the Biden administration drives the national tailpipe and coal-plant limits lower and lower.

PM2.5 exposure increases the risk of heart and respiratory disease and lung cancer, according to the World Health Organization.

It’s so deadly that the EPA is cutting its allowable annual average exposure to 9 micrograms per cubic centimeter of air, down from the current 12.

Within two years, the agency will order states that fail to comply with the lowered limit to begin preparing mandatory corrective action plans.

These could include stricter permitting requirements for new and existing factories and bans on new construction until an offsetting amount of pollution can be cut elsewhere in the region.

“What the county could say is ‘you’re more than welcome to double the size of your factory, but you have to incorporate pollution controls such that your emissions do not exceed what you’re permitted for now,’ ’’ said Christi Chester-Schroeder, a scientist with IQAir.

Based in Goldach, Switzerland, IQAir released a global PM2.5 study in March.

“The big outfits, your automotive factories and your power plants, they know what’s coming. They’ve got a whole army of consultants and environmental people working on this,” said Jim Haywood, a meteorologist for the state of Michigan.

“But ‘Acme Industries,’ the guy with a machine shop who wants to put in a new grinding booth, he has no idea what’s coming,” Haywood said.

‘Anomaly within an anomaly’

Even if wildfires don’t shroud Chicago with smoke again this year, they’re already making it harder for the city to comply with the EPA’s new PM2.5 limit.

Cook County, for example, reported a three-year PM2.5 average of 10.5 micrograms per cubic centimeter for 2020-2022. Will County reported 9.7.

To comply with the EPA’s new limit, they’ll need to bring these numbers below 9.

But because of the wildfires, Mooney said that the audited 2021-2023 numbers they’ll report in a few weeks will be higher for PM2.5, not lower.

He said the same is true for every county in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Ohio, where a total of 53 million people live.

Forecasters are still scratching their heads about why all this happened. Adelman, in fact, describes 2023 as “an anomaly within an anomaly.”

The first anomaly was the number and size of the Canadian fires.

Some towered over the towns they were devouring and raced forward 30 miles a day, fueled by the hurricane-force winds they helped generate.

Some occurred within a few hundred miles of Midwest population centers. That meant never before had so much smoke hugged the ground as it inundated cities such as Chicago and made their pre-existing pollution more lethal.

The second anomaly was one of recent memory’s most persistent high-pressure systems.

This trapped the smoke near the surface. Along with an extended drought, it helped fuel hot, dry and windy conditions that forecasters describe simply as fire weather.

In Michigan, the fires forced regulators to declare an unprecedented series of action alerts — the first-ever alert for PM2.5 pollution, the first-ever simultaneous alert for both PM2.5 and ground-level ozone, and the first alert to cover the entire state — including Michigan’s sparsely populated Upper Peninsula.

Pablo Toral, an environmental studies professor at Beloit College, started using borrowed monitors to study air quality in his town in 2022.

He’s since used charitable donations to buy five monitors, with two more coming, that upload their data continuously to PurpleAir.com.

Toral installed one of the monitors at the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house.

“The monitors look like little mushrooms,” he said. “They’re not very impressive.”

But as the 2023 totals rolled in, Toral suddenly discovered that IQAir, the Swiss company, had used his data to label Beloit’s PM2.5 pollution as the worst in the country.

An old factory town north of Rockford, Beloit ended 2023 with an annual PM2.5 average of 14.8, according to IQAir.

Chicago reported 13.0 for the year. But according to IQAir, this included an average of 28.4 in June.

The company said that New Delhi had the world’s worst PM2.5 pollution with an average of 92.7 in 2023.

IQAir makes air filters. To compile its report, the company used data from 30,000 monitoring stations in 134 countries.

IQAir and the EPA use different methods to calculate PM2.5 but measure the same basic trends, Chester-Schroeder said.

Toral said in an interview he believes PM2.5 pollution could be worse in towns surrounding Beloit. But nobody’s monitoring it, he said.

“The main sources of this pollution are pretty much the burning of fossil fuels,” Toral said. “You’re looking at tailpipe emissions, power plants and manufacturing.

“Some communities have one or two of these. Beloit has all three,” he said.

Toral said that wildfire smoke makes all this pollution worse and, in an industrial town such as Beloit, threatens everybody, not just those whom the EPA classifies as belonging to “vulnerable populations.”

These include the young, the old, women who are pregnant and people who work outdoors or who suffer from chronic disease.

With a population that’s about a third Black and brown, Beloit’s unemployment and poverty rates consistently rank among the highest in Wisconsin.

Yet some of the pollution these residents are breathing comes from the electricity the Beloit area exports to richer cities.

Alliant Energy has said it has or will use its natural gas-fired power plant north of town to send electricity to Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and even St. Louis, Toral said.

Some of Toral’s students come from overseas countries, including Liberia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.

He said they’re eager to take their knowledge of U.S. technical and regulatory standards with them when they return home.

“Air pollution is an issue in their countries,” Toral said. “It’s not like anybody is hiding it. But they’re finding it difficult to engage in active policy work to fix it.”

Around the world, Toral said, people can expect more forest fires that will be bigger and last longer.

They can expect more intense bursts of precipitation interrupted by longer periods of drought.

This pattern leads to more flash flooding rather than giving parched land and vegetation time to absorb the moisture. It increases fire risks, he said.

Despite all the complexity, scientists are certain of two things: air pollution is dangerous and controlling it is hard.

And Illinois has repeatedly shown it’s not very good at doing what’s necessary.

For example, the state took 14 years to comply with the EPA’s 2008 ozone limit.

Even today, the agency lists Chicago, East St. Louis and parts of surrounding states as failing to attain the 2015 ozone limit.

According to the Sierra Club, nearly three-quarters of Illinois residents live in these noncompliant areas.

In 2014, the EPA discovered that a lab run by Cook County had failed to properly measure pollutants captured in air quality monitors across Illinois.

At the time of the discovery, nearly half of the county’s monitors were poised to flunk the EPA’s 2012 limit for PM2.5 pollution.

However, since the EPA needs verified data to build a legally binding mandate, it had to simply stop enforcing its PM2.5 limit across Illinois for four years.

This exposed residents across the state to pollution that could have been cleaned up if Cook County had handled the measurements correctly.

It robbed the county’s regulators, businesses and residents of a chance to develop the shared language and understandings they’ll need to confront the new and even lower PM2.5 limits the EPA finalized in February.

Spokeswoman Natalia Derevyanny declined to comment on the county’s culpability or whether any employees were disciplined.

By the time the EPA could obtain verified data in 2018, long-term changes such as the closure of coal-fired power plants had already helped the state comply with the EPA’s 2012 PM2.5 standard.

Meeting the 2024 standard of 9 micrograms per cubic centimeter will be difficult in part because each of the building blocks of PM2.5, including volatile organic chemicals, nitrogen oxide and ammonia, requires a different technical solution, Adelman said.

The mix among these precursors can vary over time and neighborhood by neighborhood, with the wildfires making everything more erratic.

Meanwhile, states eager to protect their ability to grow economically will retain their right to challenge the EPA’s findings on these shifting crosscurrents in court.

“We’re just starting to get our heads around how all this is going to work,” Adelman said.

Adaptation vs. action

Despite all the difficulties, the EPA’s John Mooney counts the new rules as a victory for human health. He points to the quadrupling of U.S. economic output since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970 to discount claims that the new rules are too onerous.

“Motor vehicles are getting cleaner and we’ve issued a whole bunch of regulations on coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources,” Mooney said. “In the Midwest, we’ve been able to meet every ambient air quality standard that has been set since the Clean Air Act was passed, and I’m optimistic we’ll be able to do it again.’’

Since most of the precursors for PM2.5 pollution stem from fossil fuel combustion, the EPA’s new rules will intensify familiar debates about electric car and truck mandates.

The state legislature is holding hearings on a bill requiring warehouses to report their ownership, truck trips and pollution to Springfield. Rep. Dagmara Avelar, D-Bolingbrook, is the chief sponsor.

In the short run, regulators and environmental groups are still arguing over how to measure the impact of wildfires.

Adelman, for example, is helping provide smoke measurements to as many as 20 states preparing to petition the EPA to exclude some of the smokiest days from their legally binding scorecards for 2023.

They could do so under a Clean Air Act provision allowing them to exclude wildfires and other events they didn’t cause and can’t stop through their own regulations. The act refers to these as “exceptional events.”

What Adelman is researching would amount to the biggest collection of “exceptional event” declarations in Clean Air Act history.

But it would be a controversial step.

In the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, the Sierra Club is fighting the EPA’s approval last year of an “exceptional event” application for just two days at a single monitor on Detroit’s east side.

According to the Sierra Club, the agency failed to prove that wildfire smoke, and not local Detroit sources, had caused pollution to spike.

Without being able to exclude these two days from a single monitor, the state may have to impose a mandatory vehicle inspection program on 4.8 million residents in southeast Michigan.

Important as they are in the short run, these debates raise much deeper questions.

“Wildfires are becoming more frequent, intense, and widespread, and we’re seeing more and more transboundary migration of the smoke,’’ said IQAir’s Chester-Schroeder.

“So at what point are they no longer exceptional events, and do they need to be considered in the state implementation plans submitted to the EPA?”’ she asked.

Meanwhile, organizers at Michigan’s oldest grassroots environmental group worry about sparking “eco-anxiety” that could drive people back into isolation.

Some Grand Rapids residents, for example, thought last year’s smoke came from a local landfill or factory that caught fire and were surprised to learn it had traveled all the way from Canada, said Bill Wood, executive director of the West Michigan Environmental Action Council.

“For some folks, their first experience with the environmental movement is to find out, `Hey, the world is burning,’ ” Wood said.

“We try to make sure they know it’s normal to feel upset, angry, frustrated, hopeless, whatever,” he said. “We’re here to work with them on that. And if they want to start calling their state senator, we’re a vehicle for that too.”

Wood said he’s focusing mainly on helping people get rebates from local utilities for high-quality air filters.

He’s also teaching people how to make do-it-yourself filters out of ordinary window fans and layers of woven fabric.

“It’s frustrating because what we’re talking about is adaptation rather than actively cutting down on air pollution,” Wood said.

“But in the short term, I feel like the best we can do is try to protect people and to give them tools to be as safe and healthy as they can be.”