The United States is grappling with three major weather emergencies at once — choking wildfire smoke blanketing the East Coast, devastating floodwaters surging through Texas for a third straight day, and new fires erupting overnight across the Pacific Northwest.
As of Friday, July 17, firefighters were battling 68 large wildfires burning across 15 states — a jump of nearly two dozen from the previous day. Seventeen new blazes ignited in the Pacific Northwest after a series of lightning strikes, making it the most active fire region in the nation, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
The scale of the response is enormous: more than 17,400 personnel, 140 helicopters, and four military C-130 air tanker crews have been deployed across the country. The NIFC reports that record-low snowpack in the Mountain West and widespread drought have pushed fire conditions to levels typically not seen until mid-August.
So far this year, nearly 3.72 million acres — approximately 1.51 million hectares — have burned nationwide, surpassing last year’s mid-July total by more than one million acres.
Jesse Berman, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health who studies how extreme weather impacts human health, said disasters happening at the same time amplify the danger. “These are compound events, and that can sometimes make the impacts of them far worse than what we would experience with any one of these events individually,” Berman said.
University of Pennsylvania climatologist Michael Mann linked the simultaneous crises to a wave pattern in the jet stream called “resonance” — a phenomenon where large jet stream waves become amplified and locked in place, causing extreme weather to linger over a region for extended periods. Mann said his research shows that human-driven climate change has caused these stalled jet stream events to triple in frequency since the 1950s.
Hazy Skies Across the East
Smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires has turned skies from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. an orange-brown haze, pushing dangerous air quality conditions onto tens of millions of people across the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic regions.
On Friday, Chicago ranked as having the second-worst air quality of any city in the world, according to Swiss air quality technology company IQAir. Local officials responded by closing parks and beaches along Lake Michigan indefinitely and moving parks department activities indoors.
Those closures left few options for residents without air conditioning — about 4% of city households, according to the Civic Data Atlas. Temperatures in Chicago were expected to climb above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), with heat index values reaching up to 97 degrees, the National Weather Service said, prompting the city to activate its community cooling centers.
Earlier in the week, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Toronto were among the most polluted cities on the planet. A heat dome sitting over the Carolinas has been pushing northwesterly winds that funnel smoke from Minnesota and Canada into the nation’s most densely populated corridor. Rain expected over the weekend may offer some relief.
Texas Flooding Continues
In Texas, there was no relief in sight as the Hill Country suffered through a third consecutive day of severe flash flooding. More than 27 inches of rain have fallen in some parts of the region since Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.
Governor Greg Abbott confirmed two deaths tied to this week’s flooding: a 65-year-old man who was swept away in his RV near the town of Comfort, and a 74-year-old man who drove into floodwaters in Uvalde County. Rescue crews have pulled hundreds of people from rising waters throughout the week.
The National Weather Service forecast that rainfall in Texas would begin tapering off Friday, with hot and dry conditions expected in the days ahead.
This week’s flooding comes just two weeks after the one-year anniversary of last July’s deadly Guadalupe River flood, which killed at least 135 people in many of the same communities now experiencing flooding again.
