MINNEAPOLIS — For much of the summer, a breath of fresh air was hard to find. Vicki Winter, of Milwaukee, said one step outside stopped her and her husband from going on their usual walks.
"Some days I could hardly breathe," Winter said. "I would come outside and felt like somebody had a fire going somewhere. The smog, not much sun."
Ricky Santos, a native Panamanian who now lives in downtown Minneapolis, said he had to cancel lots of plans, as well.
"We’re from a tropical country, so we love the outdoors," Santos said. "But we couldn’t take the dog for a walk, and it was just unbearable to actually take a long walk."
And Minneapolis is under yet another air quality alert starting in the wee hours of Thursday and set to run through Friday at 11 p.m.
The alert is expected to reach the red Air Quality Index category for northeast and east central Minnesota. The rest of the state will be in the orange category. Red is marked unhealthy for everyone and orange is unhealthy for sensitive groups.
For Duane Ring, who lives in Northeast Minneapolis, this summer's air quality alerts have marked a change.
"You know life has changed when you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is go to your app and say, what is the air quality? That’s not something you normally do," Ring said.
However, checking the air quality was something you had to do this summer, as the Canadian wildfires raged on. KARE 11 Sunrise Meteorologist John Zeigler said unprecedented warmth in Canada meant 60% of the country was abnormally dry.
"The jet stream goes way up into Canada, which makes it hot. And then it turns, and we are in the trough," Zeigler said. "And it drives down the northwest wind from Canada. So it makes them super hot, literally picks up the smoke, and we get the northwest wind. So this has been a perfect scenario."
The perfect smoky scenario was imperfect for summer plans. Greta Koehler, who has an 18-month-old son, wanted him to spend most of his time outdoors this summer. However, plans had to change.
"It was disappointing," Koehler said. "We kind of gear him up for it, not that he understands, but super disappointing that he couldn’t be outside with his friends experiencing summer like a kid in Minnesota should."
So how long could this last? Zeigler says the wildfire season typically wraps up in late September or early October, but we've learned that this year has been anything but typical.
"It definitely will linger longer this year, it's definitely something to watch," Zeigler said. "We’ve had it multiple times a week. It’s made people change their plans. It’s likely to continue that way, so it’s good to have a backup plan going into the early fall. Late fall, it should get better."
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