Becoming Wildfire Smoke Ready: Tips from Missoula County
If you were in Missoula two summer ago you remember the apocalypse-like conditions we were subject to with all the smoke. I remember starting my freshman year with a horrible sore throat while chunks of ash fell from the sky as I walked to class.
So far, *knock on wood*, wildfire season has not hit us hard in Missoula! The good news, according to Sarah Coefield, an air quality specialist with the Missoula City-County Health Department, is that “we’re not supposed to have an extreme wildfire season in western Montana this year.” But our neighbor to the west Washington is supposed to have a bad fire year. So we just might have some smoke knocking on our door before the summer is over.
Luckily for us, we have an in house expert in Sarah Coefield. Coefield has been featured on NPR and has a blog with a bunch of handy tips for becoming wildfire-smoke ready! There is no better time than the present to get prepared. According to Coefield:
Wildfire smoke is nasty businesses. It’s composed of a veritable stew of chemicals and fine particulate matter. Most of the growing field of wildfire smoke health research has focused on the particulate matter in smoke, and really, there’s no good news there. The fine particulate matter in wildfire smoke is super tiny (typically less than 1 micron in diameter), and it can bypass all your natural defenses to get deep into your lungs and even enter your bloodstream where it sets off an inflammatory response.
So this proves what we already know — that wildfire smoke is no good for us. But what can we do in preparation to protect ourselves?
The most important thing we can do is “get the smoke out of our breathing space.” Easier said than done. But here are 3 actions you can take to be wildfire-smoke ready:
1. Seal up your house
“A well-sealed house will act as a barrier to slow smoke’s entry. If you have leaky house, you can see so much outdoor air coming inside that you effectively have a small window open 24/7. If you have a hard time keeping your house warm in the winter and deal with a lot of cold drafts, that’s a good sign you have a leaky house. Sealing up your house will save energy and slow smoke’s entry during wildfire season. Win, win!”
2. Manage your air conditioning
A lot of us do not have central air conditioning. That leaves us with window air conditioners, portable air conditioners (those rolling things with giant hoses that send exhaust out the window), and the good old-fashioned method of opening windows at night and using fans to push hot air out and draw cool air in. Whichever method you use is personal preference, but the tricky thing here is smoke infiltration. Opening windows at night works pretty well when it’s not smoky. Unfortunately, the nice cool air that is so refreshing at night is the same cool air that traps smoke near the valley floor. It’s not uncommon for us to see thick overnight smoke, and that smoke will move right into your home when you open your windows. If you have no other option, it may be best to open your windows for long enough to cool your home, and then, once you’ve closed the windows, crank up your portable air cleaner(s) (PACs) to remove the smoke.
3. Ready to get serious about air quality? Get a portable air cleaner
Invest is a portable air cleaner (PAC). First off, what they do isn’t particularly complicated. At its core, a HEPA PAC is a fan and a filter. The fan pulls dirty air through the filter, the filter traps airborne particles and cleaner air exits the machine. Easy peasy. There are a lot of different styles of HEPA PACs on the market with various bells and whistles, but the fan and the filter are the primary components. Note that while there are PACs that will clean a small bedroom in the $100 range, you can easily spend a lot more than that on a machine with more features and a larger cleaning area. HEPA PACs can be incredibly effective at removing particles from indoor air, but you need to do some due diligence and use them properly to see indoor air improvements.
Coefield’s blog with more information about air quality and smoke is linked below and is an excellent resource for becoming smoke ready. We can’t decide whether we will have a smoky end to this Missoula summer but we can become prepared for it!
