DETROIT (WXYZ) — Air quality in Detroit ranked among the worst worldwide this week after air pollution from the Canadian wildfires spread, according to government air quality data.
7 Action News spotted several people in downtown Detroit wearing masks Thursday. Some said they've continued to do so post-pandemic. Others said they have respiratory issues, and so they resumed wearing masks this week because they're concerned about the air pollution coming from beyond the border.
“I knew it was a problem because I started coughing more. So, I knew something was going on. So, I decided to start masking up again," Detroiter David Cleveland said.
He added, “Without it, I just have extreme coughing episodes. I have COPD as well. So, all that’s a contributing factor.”
Shelly Jones said besides work, she hardly leaves the house these days.
“I have asthma, and I noticed it affected my breathing," she told 7 Action News. “I’m staying inside mostly because of it.”
Dr. Kathryn Savoie, an ecologist and the director of equity and environmental justice for the Ecology Center, said she monitors air quality on a regular basis. She does that with the help of air quality monitoring stations. There's one located in Southwest Detroit, which is an industrial part of town, and several others throughout the city.
Savoie said what’s happening hundreds and hundreds of miles away in Canada is being detected by those high-tech devices. She said that traveling pollution mixed with sunlight and local air pollution compounds the problem.
The data can be viewed by anyone online at airnow.gov. It’s all color-coded and shows Detroit is in an unhealthy range as of Thursday evening.
When asked if she's seen anything like the impact of the Canadian wildfire, Savoie replied, "We’ve seen it with fires that were happening in the western part of the United States and Canada in the past few years as well as in Australia."
"Those are global fire events that impacted communities around the world, but we’re experiencing it firsthand here in Detroit and the East Coast in a major way. So, this is a new experience for us, and this is something that I hope we’ll pay attention to as a sign of the climate change," Savoie explained.
"You know when we have situations like this and the area is so bad that we can’t send our kids out to play, that’s a warning that we’ve let climate change go to far," she said.
