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Is it safe to turn it on an AC? If you have an air purifier, where should you put it? An air quality expert answers our pressing questions.
You’re in your apartment, windows closed, hiding out from the wildfire smoke blanketing your city. But it’s starting to smell a little bit like barbecue, and your eyes are getting watery. What should you do?
Wildfire smoke contains tiny particles, invisible to the human eye, that can enter your lungs and bloodstream. Those particles can exacerbate the risk of having an asthma attack, heart attack, and stroke. They also have lasting effects on your heart and respiratory system, and can lead to premature death. You really want to take the likelihood that smoke is getting into your home seriously.
But that can lead to a lot of questions.
Maybe you have an air purifier. Where should you put it?
Maybe you don’t have an air purifier, but you have a window air conditioner. Is it safe to turn it on?
I called up John Volckens, a professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University, and grilled him on every home configuration I could think of to understand how you can protect yourself against the dangers of smoke. Volckens studies air quality, exposure science, and air pollution-related disease. He has even pioneered the development of new pollution sensor technologies. Hehad a lot of helpful tips to offer.
It’s important to understand there’s really no way to fully prevent smoke from getting inside your home. Even if you don’t smell it or feel its effects, you should do what you can to protect yourself.
That’s because most homes and buildings “breathe.” As the sun heats the upper reaches of the building, it warms the air, which expands and wants to escape. As the air flows out, the lower part of the house, where it’s cooler, draws new air in to replace it.
“The analogy would be like if a 6-foot flood of water came to your house. It doesn’t matter how many sandbags you have, the water’s coming in, right?” Volckens said. “If the air quality index is like 400 outside for a few hours, it’s going to get to like 200 inside your home no matter what.”
The number one thing you can do is get an air purifier. You might not be able to find one in stores right now or have one delivered in time, but there are other options, too, as I’ll discuss below.
Place it wherever you are.
We spend a third of our lives in bed, so Volckens said he likes to have one in the bedroom. “If you have seasonal allergies, creating that kind of safe space for your immune system can be really helpful,” he told me.
But if you only have one device, when you’re done sleeping, just pick it up and move it into the kitchen, office, or living room with you. It should only take about an hour to work its magic and get whatever room you’re in to the best air quality that it’s capable of.
Window AC units work by recirculating the air in your apartment, so they won’t exacerbate the issue and are generally safe to use. The filters in your window units won’t do much to improve your air, though — they are designed to catch larger particles like dust and animal fur, and smoke particles will slip right through.
If you have a central air conditioning system that delivers cool air through ducts and vents, that’s another story. Those are typically designed to draw in air from the outside. In that case, the best thing to do is install what’s called a MERV filter, which you can purchase at most hardware stores or big box stores. Volckens recommends picking up a filter rated MERV-13, which can capture the smallest particles at a relatively high rate.
“It will probably be like 75% efficient. So if 100 wildfire smoke particles pass through that filter, only 25 will get through,” he said. “You're going to knock down the concentration significantly, especially as that filter keeps cycling air through your home.”
The one thing to keep in mind is that these filters are so good, they will get clogged quickly. A clogged filter will cause your HVAC system to work too hard, which could lead to mechanical issues, so make sure you remember to replace it every couple of months.
What's the alternative to an air purifier?
DIY air filters are surprisingly easy to make and incredibly effective. No, really. All you have to do is buy a box fan, duct tape, and a MERV filter. Tape the filter to the back of the box fan. That’s it.
“They work just as well as commercial air cleaners,” said Volckens. They’re a little bit louder, but otherwise, it’s the exact same idea. “A commercial air purifier might have a fancier fan and a fancier filter, but it’s still just a fan and a filter.”
And if you want to get a little fancier, you can build what’s called a Corsi-Rosenthal box. It’s the same idea, but envelops the fan intake in four filters instead of one. The Washington Post has a very easy-to-follow video showing how to build one. “They work as best as the highest-end air cleaners you could buy for one-fifth or one-tenth of the cost,” said Volckens.
N-95 masks, like the kind recommended to protect against COVID-19, also effectively filter out pollution, and are your best bet. Even a blue surgical mask will be somewhat helpful, said Volckens.
If you’re tired of being cooped up at home, you can also find what Volckens likes to call “clean air zones.” He recommended the public library, a Starbucks, or any other public building. Go support your local movie theater.
“Most public buildings actually have more efficient air cleaning than homes because the buildings were built more recently and they’re built to code standards that require cleaner air.”
Wildfire smoke is truly disgusting. The particles can contain thousands of chemicals, and they will stick to any surface they touch — the ceiling, the carpet, your clothing. You can certainly wash your clothes and linens, but it might not be possible to scrub every surface of your home.
“The best thing you can do when the air does clean up is to just open all your windows and get some good air exchange going,” said Volckens. “I guarantee, yes, you’ll have that wildfire smell for a couple of days, but it will eventually go away.”
Before we hung up, I asked Volckens if there were any other tips we didn’t cover.
“The only thing I’ll say is that this problem isn’t going away,” he said. “And it’s our doing, right? This is the result of a warming planet.”
This article was last updated on June 28, 2023.
Read more about wildfire smoke :
The 5 Big Questions About the 2023 Wildfire Smoke Crisis
Wednesday Was the Worst Day for Wildfire Pollution in U.S. History
When There’s Smoke, Getting Indoors Isn’t Enough
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High winds down power lines. But high waters flood substations — and those are much harder to fix.
There’s a familiar script when it comes to hurricanes: The high winds snap tree branches and even tree trunks and whip around anything else that’s light enough or not bolted down — including power lines and distribution poles. While this type of damage can lead to large-scale outages, it’s also relatively straightforward to fix. In many cases the power comes back on relatively quickly, more like days rather than weeks or months.
But when it comes to flooding, especially in areas that do not regularly deal with big storms, the damage can be more severe, long-lasting, and difficult to repair. This is largely because what’s at risk in these scenarios is not power lines but substations. These messes of transmission and distribution lines that channel high voltage power to homes and businesses are vulnerable to rising water, and repairs can’t begin until the floodwaters recede. Often they have to be replaced entirely, which is expensive and can lead to further delays as there’s a nationwide shortage of transformers. Just one substation can support thousands of homes — a single point of failure that, when it floods, takes all its customers down with it.
Duke Energy, whose grid in the Carolinas was pummeled by Hurricane Helene, has said the damage to its system encompasses “submerged substations, thousands of downed utility poles, and downed transmission towers,” and noted that much of the affected area is “inaccessible due to mudslides, flooding and blocked roads, limiting the ability to assess and begin repairing damages.” In an update published Saturday, it stated that while more than 2 million customers had seen their power restored, about 250,000 customers across North and South Carolina remained without electricity more than a week after the storm.
Workers are “encountering more severe damage on a larger scale than we’ve ever experienced,” Duke Energy storm director Jason Hollifield said in a statement. (Duke didn’t respond to my request for comment.) One Duke employee told the local television station in Asheville, North Carolina, which saw more than three months’ worth of rain fall over three days, that a local substation would have to be completely rebuilt, a process that could take months. In Western North Carolina, the area’s Representative Chuck Edwards has estimated that 117,000 customers still lack electricity, and that while some of them will likely get it back by Sunday, others “whose properties are inaccessible or not able to receive power may be without electricity for an extended period of time as Duke Energy works to rebuild critical infrastructure.”
To prepare for the onrushing Hurricane Milton, Duke is staging thousands of “line technicians, vegetation workers, damage assessors and support personnel” in Florida, the company said. The same problem remains, however: Line technicians will not prevent substations from flooding.
While the exact effect of climate change on hurricanes and other storm categories is an area of intense debate among climate scientists and meteorologists, there’s a rough consensus that warming will cause the storms to be wetter. That means utilities will have to update their old disaster response playbooks, or else prolonged outages when an especially wet storm arrives over a flood plain.
In most hurricanes, utilities are able to pre-position workers to restore power quickly, working on knocked down poles and wires, explained Jordan Kern, an assistant professor engineering at North Carolina State University. “When trees fall on distribution lines, those are, in normal situations, easy to repair,” he told me. But, Kern said, “If the substations are flooded, you can’t do anything until the flood waters go down. They can be without power for a long time.”
Wetter hurricanes will likely mean more severe and less predictable flooding happening far away from the coasts, bringing with it risks that utilities and local governments may be less prepared to face, with costs that will ultimately be born by anyone who pays for electricity, as expensive repairs and hardening of electrical infrastructure will likely be born by ratepayers.
“Rates will necessarily rise” to deal with the higher costs of adaptation and repairing infrastructure more complex than a wooden pole, Tyler Norris, a PhD student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, told me while driving towards Asheville to help out family impacted by the storm.
While Helene has been an especially damaging storm, the risks of wetter storms and inland flooding away from the coastal areas that are prepared for frequent hurricanes have become more apparent in recent years. While Hurricane Irene in 2011 made landfall on Long Island, its most devastating effects were felt inland due to heavy rains, especially in Vermont.
North Carolina in particular has seen a rash of nasty hurricanes in the past 10 years or so, giving Duke ample recent experience with big storms — and some indication of what a warming world could bring.
During 2018’s Hurricane Florence, which knocked out power for around a million Duke customers, “at least 10 substations required de-energization due to flooding or flood risk where heavy rainfall and resulting inland flooding,” according to a 2022 Duke climate resiliency report. The report was meant to look at the effects of climate change to the Duke system by 2050 under two emissions scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one assuming emissions start falling by 2040, the other assuming continued (some might say unrealistically) high emissions.
Under the extreme scenario, the “overall vulnerability priority of Duke Energy substations to climate-driven changes in precipitation and inland flooding is high,” the report said, while under the “middle of the road” projection, “transmission infrastructure faces a medium priority vulnerability.” In both cases, however, “without adaptation planning … substations are at the highest potential risk, with extreme heat and flooding being the greatest concerns for existing assets.”
Duke said at the time that it had “implemented permanent flood protection measures at new substations located in flood plains and substations with a prior history of flooding.” For its existing fleet, priority was being given to those substations considered particularly “at-risk,” however the flood protection plan had “not yet been universally implemented at all existing substations in the flood plain.”
“What they characterized there falls significantly short of what we just saw,” Norris said. While he noted that Duke had listed risk to substations from inland flooding as high (albeit only under the extreme scenario), it had listed the risk to the distribution of power, i.e. poles and wires, as “low” under both scenarios. “There’s been a dramatic misestimate of risk here,” Norris said.
For Duke customers, especially in the more isolated parts of Western North Carolina, they may simply have to wait for workers and parts to arrive. Repairs that could normally happen quickly will likely happen slowly as workers struggle to reach areas whose roads have been washed away. Duke said that it’s now focusing on restoring the “backbone” of the transmission and distribution system, and then is moving on to restoring fallen poles in less densely populated areas.
And it will likely happen again. Kern noted that inland flooding especially is notoriously hard to predict compared to coastal flooding from hurricanes. “Flooding is so idiosyncratic,” he said. “It’s hard for anyone to predict how flooding will affect a region. Let alone electric utilities.”
And made Helene so much worse, according to new reports from Climate Central and World Weather Attribution.
Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.
A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.
“Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene — we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy,” Friederike Otto, the lead of WWA and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “But vitally, we need the political will.” Alarmingly, the attribution study found that storms could drop an additional 10% or more rain on average as soon as the 2050s if warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius.
WWA’s study is not the first to be released on Hurricane Helene, but it was still produced incredibly quickly and has not been peer reviewed. Just a few weeks ago, the group issued a correction on a report estimating the contribution of climate change to recent flooding in Europe.
Separately, Climate Central looked at Hurricane Milton, which already has the distinction of being the fifth strongest Atlantic storm on record. The nonprofit’s findings show that Milton’s rapid intensification — one of the fastest and most powerful instances of the phenomenon in history — is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures in the weeks before Milton developed, which was made at least 400 times more likely by climate change and up to 800 times more likely. (WWA relied on Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index for oceans for its research, but found “climate change made the unusually hot sea surface temperature about 200-500 times more likely.”)
Attribution science is incredibly tricky, especially for a storm system like a hurricane that has variables ranging from wind shear to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation to ocean temperatures and jet stream variations. When I spoke to a member of the WWA team earlier this year, I was told the organization specifically avoids attributing the intensification of any individual hurricane — in theory, one of the more straightforward relationships — to climate change because of the relatively limited historical modeling available. Even something like rainfall “is not necessarily correlated to the magnitude of the floods that you see because there are other factors,” WWA’s Clair Barnes previously told me — for example, the steep-sided mountains and hollows of western North Carolina, which served as funnels for rainfall to an especially devastating effect.
But regarding the relationship between hurricanes and climate change more generally, “We’re relatively confident that storms will get more intense” in a warming world, Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton geoscientist, explained on a recent episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. “And we’re really confident that storms will get wetter.”
Helene and Milton hammer that point home: once-in-a-generation storms can now arrive on back-to-back weekends. You can almost understand the impulse to devise a zany explanation as to why. Only, the truth is far simpler than cloud seeding or space lasers: a warmer atmosphere makes for warmer oceans, which make for wetter, more intense storms. And while hurricane seasons eventually end, global temperatures haven’t stopped going up. That, perhaps, is the more terrifying subtext of the attribution studies: There will be more Miltons and Helenes.
On rapid storm intensification, unlocking lithium, and John Kerry’s next move
Current conditions: What remains of former Hurricane Kirk could bring heavy rain and dangerous winds to Europe • Wildfires in Bolivia have scorched nearly 19 million football fields worth of land this year • It is 55 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy today at the Alpe du Grand Serre, an 85-year-old Alpine ski resort in France that announced it will close for good due to a lack of snow.
Hurricane Milton has horrified meteorologists with its swift transformation into a monster system, exploding from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm in about 18 hours. As of this morning it has maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center, and is expected to make landfall near Tampa, Florida, overnight on Wednesday. Milton will likely weaken slightly as it approaches the Sunshine State but will nonetheless bring life-threatening wind, rain, and storm surge to an area still in tatters from last month’s Hurricane Helene. “If Milton stays on its course this will be the most powerful hurricane to hit Tampa Bay in over 100 years,” the Tampa Bay National Weather Service said. “No one in the area has ever experienced a hurricane this strong before.”
NHC/NOAA
Veteran Florida meteorologist John Morales broke down in tears reporting on Milton’s remarkable drop in air pressure – generally the lower a storm’s pressure, the greater its strength. “This is just horrific,” Morales said. “The seas are just so incredibly, incredibly hot. You know what’s driving that. I don’t need to tell you: Global warming.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is under strain from back-to-back extreme weather events, including Hurricane Helene and looming Hurricane Milton. Last week Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that FEMA “does not have the funds” to get through the rest of hurricane season. The agency’s former administrator, Craig Fugate, toldBloomberg the damage from Milton could be more costly than Helene’s. Staff shortages are compounding funding shortfalls, with just 9% of FEMA workers available to respond to disasters as of Monday, as personnel struggle to address a number of recent disasters in other parts of the country. “The agency is simultaneously supporting over 100 major disaster declarations,” Brock Long, who led FEMA during the Trump administration, said. “The scale of staffing required for these operations is immense.”
John Kerry has joined billionaire Tom Steyer’s sustainable investing firm, Galvanize Climate Solutions, as co-executive chair alongside Steyer and Katie Hall. The former secretary of state and top U.S. climate diplomat “will focus on expanding the resources and reach of Galvanize’s investment strategies, originating differentiated opportunities, and leveraging firsthand knowledge as to how technology, policy, and geopolitics are shaping the energy transition,” the firm said in a statement. Steyer and Hall launched Galvanize in 2021. It manages around $1 billion and focuses on “generating long-term value from the energy transition.” Kerry said Galvanize would play a key role in the energy transition by “bringing competitive, commercially viable solutions to market.”
Lithios, a Massachusetts-based startup with a novel method of lithium extraction, just raised a $12 million seed round. Energy market analysts predict that the world is hurtling towards a global lithium shortage by the 2030s, but Lithios is aiming to help unlock previously untapped lithium sources around the world, specifically salty groundwater deposits, a.k.a. brines. The company’s CEO, Mo Alkhadra, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that while about two-thirds of the world’s lithium is contained in brine rather than hard rock, only about 15% to 20% of these brines are currently worth mining. Lithios, he said, will get that number up to around 80% to 85%, in theory. The funding is led by Clean Energy Ventures with support from Lowercarbon Capital, among others. The round included $10 million in venture funding and $2 million in venture debt loans from Silicon Valley Bank.
The Biden administration wants to restart more nuclear power plants that have been decommissioned in an effort to provide zero-emission electricity to meet soaring demand, according to White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi. Two revivals are already in progress: The Department of Energy finalized over $2.8 billion in loans and grants to help restart the Palisades plant in Michigan, and tech giant Microsoft made a deal with energy company Constellation to revive Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Zaidi said he could think of at least two other plants that could be brought back online, but didn’t get specific.
“Governments come and go and they may change things, but the energy transition has passed the inflection point.” –Martin Pochtaruk, CEO of solar-module maker Heliene, which this week announced a strategic equity investment of up to $54 million that will support its new manufacturing operation in Minnesota.