September 9, 2020

Five years ago, during an already messed up year, we had widespread wildfires in the Pacific Northwest that combined with a high pressure front and gave us hot, stale air currents that produced the worst air quality I've seen in over 20 years of living in Oregon.

I recently did some research on environmental risks of the Pacific Northwest, and "air quality" was the third biggest risk after fires and earthquakes, largely due to that September 2020 event when AQI readings crested 500 for several days straight all over the state.

Here's a screenshot of AQI from the 13th, and it's still quite bad. I seem to recall it took a week or two before it finally rained and kind of "washed away" the bad air after the high point. I remember at the time not going outside much and not being able to exercise at all, while working from home and still largely house-bound thanks to covid.

More shots

Here are my photos of the worst of it, from 9:55AM on the 9th, when I stopped at a McDonald's drive through to grab a McMuffin. This was the morning sky, and it helps to have some familiar signage to compare against.

Here was part of downtown McMinnville, Oregon also on that day.

In the afternoon on the 9th, my daughter and I set out on a road trip to see the California Coastal Redwoods that we'd been planning for weeks and the orange sky followed us.

We headed out to the coast then pointed our way south. In the late afternoon, about halfway down the Oregon Coast we still had pretty bad air quality near Florence, Oregon.

We made it down to California the next day and enjoyed our time as far away from the PNW fires as we could, but as you can see from this famous roadside landmark, air quality was still pretty bad 500 miles away.

It was a quick trip and we returned a couple days later.

Another weird relic of the time

I happened to load up Craiglist while looking for a used car during the week of the fires and the worst air quality and you could instantly tell which sellers took photos that same week.

Here's a single listing where you can almost pinpoint the day they took the photo based on the sky alone.

Monitoring air quality

We moved into a new house in 2019 and I just happened to buy a couple small air quality monitors back then for my bedroom and office. At the time, I got them because I was told the house was really air-tight thanks to its modern construction, so much so that it required an air exchanger that ran each morning to bring in fresh air. I wanted to make sure it all worked, hence the AQI monitors inside the house.

Having them was great because we could tell any time we opened a window for more than a minute to let in cold air at night, or even opened a door to come and go, our AQI numbers would go from 50 to 100+ almost instantly and we'd have to shut everything up again.

2020 was a gnarly year. Covid, lockdowns, elections, police killings and subsequent protests, then on top of it all, much of September spent keeping our house closed up, changing air filters weekly, and running fans with air filters duct-taped onto them all over the house while we tried to get some sleep.

I wonder if 2020 will go down in history like 1968 did, since it seemed like the entire world was falling apart in front of our eyes.