I am writing this newsletter from the comforts of my hotel room in Buffalo, NY where I am visiting my home office and my team, which I try to do on a quarterly basis. The night before, I had gone to a AAA baseball game featuring the Buffalo Bisons (AAA affiliate of the MLB Toronto Blue Jays) and the Worcester Red Sox (AAA affiliate of the MLB Boston Red Sox). As a Boston Red Sox season ticket holder, I was thrilled to see the WooSox beat the Bisons thanks, in good part, to the defensive and offensive heroics of future Red Sox superstar Cedanne Rafaela, making his AAA debut just in time for my game. I was so excited to return tonight for another game, but I was stopped dead in my tracks by an AirNow Air Quality Index (AQI) rating of 179, the highest rating in the world at that moment.
A month ago, I had no idea what AirNow was or what its ratings indicated. Today, it is an App on my IPhone that tells me the air quality rating for a given city at a given time. AirNow's scale ranges from 0-500. The higher the AQI value, the greater the level of air pollution and the greater the health concern. For example, an AQI value under 50 represents good air quality, a rating between 50-100 is moderately acceptable, a rating between 100 and 150 is unhealthy for sensitive groups (e.g., elderly or very young people, folks with lung or heart conditions, etc.), a rating of 150-200 is unhealthy for most people (and is typically called the Red Zone), 200-300 is very unhealthy and over 300 is hazardous for everyone. Let me repeat: the rating in Buffalo was 179, clearly in the danger zone of unhealthy for most people.
Needless to say, I decided that sitting outside, even with an N-95 mask on, for 2-3 hours amidst dangerous and unhealthy air, was not exactly a good thing to do, so I missed my beloved Red Sox for the evening. Being The Warnings Doctor, however, I didn't stop there. I called the Bisons office to warn them about what I assumed they already knew: your fans (and players) could be at risk due to the high AQI. Their response was disappointing, but not totally unexpected: they offered to exchange my ticket for another date but the game would definitely go on, a decision made by the Bisons' top management. As readers of my new book, Murder, Inc., already know, this is a classic example of putting profits over safety.
Rather than dwell on the plight of a missed Red Sox game and an organization that may have placed its fans and players at risk, we should be more concerned about what caused this dangerously high AQI in the first place. If you think the 179 was dangerously high, a few weeks earlier in NYC, where I live, we reached an unbelievably high AQI of 479, so dangerous a level that the Mayor told everyone to stay inside with windows shut until the air improved.
Is this dystopian image a glimpse into our future? Are we destined to have our summer days and nights interrupted by smoke alerts that force us to cancel everything and hide inside our shelters as our cavemen ancestors did during (for them) scary thunderstorms?
Sadly, the answer is probably yes. As long as those Canadian fires continue burning, there's a risk the smoke may simply be directed towards other areas of the U.S., according to the National Weather Service. The episode is a wake-up call for the East Coast and the Midwest, which have far less experience with wildfire smoke than the highly flammable West. Shrouded in haze, places like New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis and yes, Buffalo experienced their worst air pollution on record in the last few weeks and got a possible glimpse of their future in a changing climate.