Wildfire Smoke: A Self Defense Guide

piece of that. If you're anywhere kind of in the Eastern Seaboard, if you're in New York City, if you're in Philly, if you're in DC, if you're in one of the other places at Baltimore, you're dealing with air quality the likes of which you've probably never seen unless you fled there from the West coast. Basically everyone who lives in the northeast of the United States right now, as well as a huge number of Canadians, are absolutely cloaked in wildfire smoke, drowning in the ghosts of a

thousand forests. And that's a bummer. It's a bummer, and it's a real problem. And so I wanted to kind of sit down with Margaret Killjoy, our resident Prepper extraordinaiy Hi, Margaret, Hello, how are you yeah? Doing great? Because we're not drowning in wildfire smoke. But three years ago in Portland in twenty twenty, the air quality was even worse than it

is in New York City right now. So I've got some experience dealing with this, and Margaret, you spend a lot of time thinking about practical prepping, and that's something that I think a lot of folks probably are wishing that they had spent more time doing right now. This is the kind of thing that happens. You know, it's not on you know, anybody is like a moral thing.

But it happens anytime there's a disaster that affects everybody at once, all the stuff that is useful for countering that disaster sells out or is looted very very quickly, and then people suddenly don't have the kind of options for tools that they need. You know, this is not great. So I wanted to kind of sit down first off and kind of talk about one of the better airsats tools that you can put together if you are trying to deal with the problem of making your air cleaner.

And basically we have to kind of split this problem into two. Right there is the problem of what do I do if I'm going outside, and we'll talk about that later. But there's stuff that you purchase, you know, that is the only things that's going or stuff that you already had on hand is all that's going to

help in that instance. But there are some things you can do to keep your inside space clean of particulate and relatively safe that don't require at least as many things to purchase, and that are you know, can be made with stuff that you probably are likelier to have on hand. So I want to talk first about what

you can do to like filter your indoor air. You know, in Portland, when we had our horrible fucking wildfire apocalypse, yellow smog blanketing the world and making everything look like fucking blade runner, everyone at least had gas masks and full face respirators, which you know, folks in the Northeast right now haven't gone through that experience and so don't have that kind of stuff on hand. But what we didn't have in Portland was the stuff that can keep

your indoors cleaner. For one thing, people don't have like HEPA filters or central air you know in Oregon as often as they have it in some other parts of this country. And so a lot of people wound up creating building for themselves what are called Corsey Rosenthal boxes now a Coarsey Rosenthal box is a kind of like air filtration system for rooms that's made up of a box fan and five air filters, like the kind of filters that you're going to use for your HVAC system

in your house. Right, pretty much most houses are going to have some kind of like air filter already, and they're also widely available, Like if you go to any home depot or lows, they're going to have a shitload of air filters. You can use multiple different types. The bigger the air filter, the more air it'll handle. Coursey Rosenthal boxes were invented kind of right at the start

of the pandemic. One of the guys who made it, Richard Corsi, was an environmental engineer who kind of realized as soon as the pandos started that a lot of poor people were going to be absolutely fucked when it came to filtering air in their homes because good you can get like a nice Hepa filter, like standalone Hepa filter, but they're usually several hundred dollars. So he wanted to try and provide people with something that could make that

was a lot cheaper. He had worked previously with the CEO of a filter company that I think is based in Texas, so he called that guy up and they collaborated on a design that basically used you build like a box out of air filters and you stick a back box fan on top of it. If you google Coursey Co R SI, Dash Rosenthal R O, S E N T H A L box, you'll find the Wikipedia page which has a guide to making these. It's very simple. If you're not crafty at all or have no real tools,

you can still make it work. I've won a couple of years ago, you know, when shit happened in Portland, as did several people I knew. And they're not hard to do, and the most common size of box that you can build will allow it'll basically change the air out in a room five full times per hour and a five hundred square foot room, which is reasonably good. It'll make a meaningful difference in your indoor air quality if you're like blanketed in Hell's mog right now.

and what things are are running. But Hepa filters are also standalone ones likelier to sell out fast as opposed to kind of the raw components to making a Coarsey Rosenthal filter, So you may find it easier to get access to I like the Corsey Rosenthal filter for a couple of other reasons. Obviously, it's accessible and it's comparatively affordable, but it also is something that you can make yourself that will have a meaningful impact on how you weather

this event. That's important psychologically in a disaster, feeling as if you have some sort of agency by actually doing the useful thing, and it can also be important from a community point of view. You can thear hdically raise money and put together people to make Corsey Rosenthal boxes and hand them out to people who maybe can't afford them or you know, have mobility issues or less able

to get the equipment. That's the kind of thing that builds community connection and also offers an immediate alleviation of suffering and health consequences for people, which is the kind of thing that I like to see people doing in a disaster like this. I also kind of like this filter because it represents a rare example of people you might call elites taking immediate action to ensure cash poor

individuals had a life saving tool available to themselves. It's one of those kind of rare examples from the start of the pandemic of like that radical solidarity we saw bits and pieces of. And I think Jim Rosenthal and Richard Corsi are pretty cool in my book for figuring out this thing. So you know, there's a lot that's nice about these filters.

that's a more accessible thing compared to the equipment. We're about to start talking about stuff like respirators and stuff like standalone HEPA filters, which are likely to sell out pretty quickly as people go to all of the stores to buy up all the things.

frightening to folks. You know, people who are in New York or Philly, or Richmond or DC or a lot of other places in the Northeast have not dealt with this kind of air quality before. This is because most people who are young in those areas, because most young Americans have had the privilege of experiencing air pollution primarily

as either an annoyance or as an abstract concept. A big part of why is that the Clean Air Act, instituted in nineteen sixty three, did a huge amount to stop the kind of poisoning of the sky that led to fairly regular smog events in the fifties and early to mid nineteen sixties, even nineteen seventies in a lot of parts of this country. You know, it took a while.

There was more involved than just the Clean Air Act, but shit like this used to be a lot more common, and Americans suffered from a variety of illnesses, including adult onset emphysema or young adult on set mphysima at a much higher rate because of stuff like this. If you are young, and by young, I mean like my age, Margaret's age, you know, not all that young. Because air quality in the United States has been significantly better than it was for like my parents when they were kids.

For quite a while, you have benefited from a pretty remarkably successful campaign to render Americans at least less vulnerable to them to this kind of pollution. Now, this came alongside years of others' reforms and things like emission standards, which were successful enough that in like West La right now, a lot of days of the year you can see the mountains. That was not a thing for people who

lived in Los Angeles and say the nineteen seventies. I had an annual check up right after I moved there with my doctor in you know, southern California, and I asked him, like what life had been like there during the small years. And the thing that he mentioned to me that stuck with me is that he had a shitload of like patients in their twenties who had like the early symptoms of emphysema, which is just not a

thing that really occurred occurs in southern California anymore. Although, you know, because of climate change, there are similar things that are starting to hit. You know, there's a number of like fungal based infections that people are getting, particularly in the valley that's really nasty and wildfire smoke could

bring back a lot of this stuff. And so yeah, we're kind of looking at a lot of the gains in public health caused by reducing you know, the amount of smog in the air going away as a result

of you know, externalities that can't be controlled locally. Now, the downside of the really lovely state of affairs that was kind of ushered into the Clean Air Act is that most Americans have spent their lives in kind of a bubble of artificially pure air, while the negative externalities that made are tech heavy lives possible were exported to the global South, and those people experienced with increasing regularity the kind of catastrophic pollution that in an earlier age

here caused the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland to light on fire every spring or so. Globally, in twenty eighteen, some eight point seven million deaths were caused by air pollution, specifically pollution created via the burning of fossil fuels. David Wallace Wells, who writes about climate catastrophe better than most people, put the cost this way in a testimony before the US Senate Committee on the Budget in twenty twenty one.

Those punishments are harrowingly widespread. The Lancet puts the global annual death toll of air pollution at nine million. This is dying at the scale of the Holocaust every single year. In India, where three hundred and forty nine thousand stillbirths and miscarriages have been attributed annually to the effects of air pollution, the average resident of Delhih had his or her life expectancy shortened by more than nine years from

the repetitive inhalation of smog. Globally, the average figure is two years.

consistently for years. Like one of the things that's you know, you've kind of seen on like Twitter and shit, is like people in the West Coast and the East Coast fighting about who's had it worse in terms of wildfire smog lately and like, well, the answer if you want to talk about who's been dealing with this the worst and the longest, is like people in fucking Deli, people in Shinzen, you know, the in China. Like this is

a problem that is primarily born. I mean, this is not in the US too, by the poor, but it's been borne by the poor outside of the United States because we successfully externalized a lot of the consequences of

our lifestyles. And ideally, the hopeful thing is that perhaps experiencing this in New York City, which is, if you're not aware, we're the only writers that people apparently listen to live will cause some kind of enhanced solidarity for the folks in what you might call or what often is described as the Global South, who are have been dealing with this for years and will continue to deal with this in a much more severe form with much

fewer resources available to them. If you are currently living in one of the great cities besieged by wildfire smoke, your life span has already been shortened. Now I'm not trying to be like panic inducing. We're talking about like by the same it would be like if you had smoked half a pack of cigarettes since this all started. It's kind of similar to that, But there is no safe amount of time to inhale, particular in the quantities

when you're talking about AQI over four hundred. There's no safe amount of time to just kind of be raw dogging the air out in the street. Any amount is going to damage your lungs, it's going to stiffen your arteries, it's going to increase your chances of a number of cancer's. Heart attack risk increases by a meaningful amount. When you are out dealing with stuff like this, your immune system is significantly weaker, and.

of wildfire. There's a lot Also, it's kind of worth noting that, like when we're talking about the day here, it's not It may smell like a little like campfire smoke, but you're also inhaling an incinerated asbestos and particle board, and you know, presumably hordes of ammunition that had been buried by Canadian preppers. So like, there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to breathe this shit in. So when you go outside, you are going to want

to wear a mask. In ninety fives work reasonably well for adults if you have any on hand, or if you're fortunate enough to live in a city with the kind of emergency preparedness budget that allows them to provide stuff like that New York City is providing in ninety fives in some quantity right now. If you're out on your own, an N ninety five maybe an easy thing to acquire quickly for relatively cheap. That said, they're not perfect for one thing. They don't tend to work very

well on kids. For this just because like the fit is off and wrong. You may find that something like a KF ninety four allows you to get a better fit on a child, and those do work reasonably well, certainly better than like nothing at all in this kind of a situation. My personal recommendation, if they are in stock and if you can afford them, is either a

half or a full face respirator. We'll talk about the differences between those in a second, but these are the kind of masks that like, if you're a contractor and you're like putting together a building, you're dealing with a shitload of insulation, you're like cutting certain kinds of metal, or you know, you're doing a whole bunch of different things that can kick up nasty particulate. You probably have a number of these, right Like people I know in

graffiti and graffiti. Yeah, if you're doing a lot of graffiti, you know, hang out near a building, you know that kids that kids spray paint a lot, and then you know, stick them up with a handgun for their their respirators. That's a responsible way to deal with Yeah, that's trying to teach everyone smoke through the respirator. That makes it extra cool and healthy. So yeah, what we're talking about here, Like, if you're looking for a thing to type into Google

or whatever, three M half mask respirator. I found a three and a half mask respirator kit with a couple of what are called Bayonet filters for forty six forty one on Granger dot com right now. You can get them for similar prices on Amazon dot com. If you walk into a Lows or a home depot and they have not there hasn't been a run on them, you can probably find these. You will want to make sure you get filters with them. Sometimes you get just the

respirator and you have to buy the filters separately. Usually if you get one, it'll it'll come with them, But make sure the filters are going to be these. Most of them look kind of like triangles with like rounded edges that are sort of this like pinkish purple color. For the most part, there's some that are gray and like circular. It doesn't really matter you know which kind of filters yours get. I would say just get whatever they have the most of Well, yeah.

There's Honeywell, and then there's Yeah, I can't remember off the top of my head, but anyway, P one hundred is like you just look for particular filter. But honestly, yeah, pretty much anything is going to do it.

which normal people do not need in this situation. That's like, you know, it has like a tank of stuff walking around.

are also reusable elastomeric respirators. I tend to prefer half a full face masks for one thing, there's no reason to like, you're not working in some sort of like capacity where you want to be tossing it every time. You know, you might as well just get one. You can plug new filters into. A half face mask is

going to be a lot more convenient. It's a lot less sort of weight and stuff, but it doesn't protect your eyes or anything, which if you're dealing with really heavy particulate, you may find your eyes getting irritated out there. The benefit of a full face mask is that it does protect your eyes, and if you happen to ever be in a situation where there's hella, mace or tear gas being used, it provides excellent protection from that kind

of thing. The downside is that these are three to four times as expensive as the half faced respirator, so they're not my general recommendation to people. But again, either of them is going to be perfectly adequate for wildfire smoke.

protect you from particulate. You may if you are someone who has the benefit of money, decide I'm going to just go ahead and get a good gas mask if so, you know, there's a number of places you can look to for that. The one I have is called a Mirram ir. They're three four hundred dollars something like that. I can confirm that they work great when you're drenched in tear gas so heavy that you can't see through it.

People bitch at them online in like weirdo prepper communities sometimes because they have some like silly attachments and stuff that are kind of too expensive. But like I have used every kind of face mask filtering product in heavy gas and mace. Mirror are comfortable, they do work well. That said, much more expensive and much heavier than you need for something like filtering particulate. This would not be my first go to for anybody. Any kind of gas

mask you get is going to be very bulky. Even the ones that are made specifically for stuff like special Forces use where they're like really streamlines so that you can like shoulder a rifle with them, those are still much bulkier than you know a normal half faced respirator is going to be. They also, you know, one of

the benefits. One thing I will say I did a few times when Portland was bad, as I would put on two filters in my gas mask, which allows you to kind of breathe it close to the normal rate that you can, and I would go jogging because like otherwise you really can't safely. I'm not saying you should do this. Please don't like avoid outdoor exercise as a general rule anyway, Military surplus gas masks if that's what you have again, and you have filters for them that

can help. If you do attempt to do this, you will immediately get in an understanding of why chemical warfare sucks so much, because most especially MILLSERP gas masks suck ass to wear super uncomfortable, super shitty visibility, not ever my primary recommendation, but again, if that's what you've got and all you can get, it will indeed filter out particulate and an.

get a respirator. That's going to be a lot more effective for basically one hundred percent of people. Now, you will probably notice, if you've been paying attention to what we've been talking about today, that all of the effective measures for mitigating the danger of smoke cost money nearly all of them at least, and also rely on having stuff like access to transit that can get you to a store, on you know, having an address that packages can be delivered to, because once again, as we talked

about with you know, places like India that have been dealing with smog like this for many, many years, the costs of climate collapse are always heaviest on those who can least bear them. Assuming you are housed. There are some other decent tips that can allow you to protect your house. One of them is that you probably want to create a clean room for your animals. Yours and your dogs number one, are less capable of understanding what's

happened happening, and they will notice something is wrong. You know, they will not go outside and feel like it's a normal day just because they're stupid dog or whatever. Like, they will recognize that something is gravely wrong. You want to keep them inside as much as possible because it's even they're smaller than you, right, it's even worse for them.

The same thing with thin like you want to keep your kids inside because the kind of shit that like maybe a two hundred pound adult can sort of shrug off in terms of particulate will hit a sixty five pound child or a forty five pound dog a lot worse.

So a good thing to do is to create a clean room, potentially with the kind of filters, the Corsey Rosenthal filters that we talked about, if you have the ability doing something like you would do kind of for a mudroom, a little kind of airlock situation when you take your pets in and out from doing their business, so you can minimize the amount of shit that gets in.

There's a few ways to do this. You know, when there's not currently smog everywhere, Making sure that the seals and stuff on your windows and doors are of quality and up to date and recently replaced is key. Obviously, if you're under smog right now, that's less of a realistic thing that you can do. But one thing you can do people, did you know in Portland during this if you get like towels and soak them and put

them around the edges. If you know you've got oh I know this windows, Yeah, I know stuff's getting in. If you kind of can tape that up around and keep it wet around the window, that will take some of the basically particulate, it'll get kind of soaked into the towel and it should minimize kind of what you're dealing with in the house. I haven't seen, actually, this is one of the things I haven't seen like studies

on how well this works. But it's what most of the people I knew who had kind of older houses did and do during wildfires, and it seems to have an impact. So I would recommend kind of trying that.

know it'll be fine for a little while. But if like most people, you kind of let that go a little long, probably one of the first things you should do is slot in a fresh air filter if you've got one. If you are shopping for an air filter and you want something that is going to work better in your HVAC system on particulate, you want something with a high minimum efficiency reporting value or MERV, which Margaret mentioned a little earlier value. Those are going to catch

more particles than normal filters. You're going to want to switch your HVAC into fan only mode immediately. This will insist ensure that it runs your indoor air through the filter rather than pulling air in from the outside. Yeah,

that is a key thing to do. If you've got kind of a central system, you're also going to want to turn off anything that pulls in air from the outside, like, for example, the portable air conditioner units with like hoses that go at your window, which is the things that like everyone in the East Coast tends to have as opposed to a central system.

like that is generally not perfect. You're going to want to be extra careful because even a small gap, you know, that that allows shit in, is going to allow quite a lot of particulate and like a surprising amount. Again, a lot of some of these methods are just like stuff that you should be doing to prep your house, but a lot of them do require resources, which is, you know, frustrating for a lot of reasons. I'm sure hope.

I'm hoping Margaret that like what you found online is accurate people's experience and that stores have not sold out of the things that are useful in this situation. That is one of those things kind of when we talk more broadly about preparation for stuff like this, that people should be thinking about, like don't just think about what stuff has gone wrong in the past. That's a great way to have plenty of toilet paper when there's a

shortage of water or whatever. Right Likewise, it's one of those things where where you know, if you were in when I made a couple of posts about what was happening in New York earlier, and somebody responded, and I was making the joke that like, hey, if you get a full face respirator, it'll be useful, you know, if you've got to fight the cops too, And their comment was like, well, we don't really get tear gassed here.

And first off, I mean that may be true, but like you guys do get maced, and they're great against mace. I can say that from a intense personal experience. But the other thing is that, like, well, that's part of when we talk about kind of proactive practical prepping. A big part of it is thinking about stuff that like maybe unlikely, but it's not impossible, and that if you don't have shit on hand, you're not going to be able to deal with, right, Yeah, And one of those

things is having a fucking respirator. Basically, everybody who is capable of affording them should have a half or a full faced respirator. You should get that. You should get a couple of spare filters, and you should just have it, even if you're in a place where wildfire smoke has never been a problem for you, because it will be at some point. That's just basically guaranteed.

fives and tape and stuff. And then if your dog, if you're really on top of it, you're going to do the work to acclimate your dog to this, right, Yeah, reward reward your dog greatly and slowly build up their tolerance. And if you don't have time for that, you can put a cone on your dog to keep your dog

to keep the mask on. And obviously you don't want to, like I mean, mostly just want to keep your dog inside, right, But yeah, if your dogs, yeah, exactly, there's actually an argument for pad training my dog that I I've never.

needed one and someone else had one. I will just have one, right And you know, so if this is you're suddenly I need an air purer of fire, it maybe is too late. It may not be too late.

just the way people be. And so like, I'm sure basically everyone in New York had extra toilet paper on hand just shit hit, but they weren't ready for you know, which is you know that's not New Yorkers, you so stupid. No, that's everybody. That's how that's how we all are. The only reason Portland was more prepared for this when it hit us is that we'd been getting like a significant portion of the city had been going out and getting tear gassed every night.

it fun. Yeah, Like, there's no reason not to treat it like a you know, a session of D and D. Walk through different kinds of problems that you guys think are more likely and try to lay out kind of consequence trees as to like what might happen and what might be necessary, and then you know, think about what kind of equipment would be useful in those situations and put it in a kind of teer it in a list of like what is more affordable, what is more likely,

and you know kind of trioge with that, and what's small too, Yeah, what's small? Like what's easy to have on hand?

That's like a chunk of the country dealing with some sort of terrible disaster that affects everybody at once that people in that area at least haven't dealt with before, like it, because that's the world that we're living in now. And so you're never going to be perfect at thinking

through stuff. But like, the more time you spend kind of trying to make your brain elastic when it comes to disaster, the more likely you are to have at least some of the things that you need to deal with problems when they occur, especially since a lot of tools are like multi use tools. You know, respirators are great with wildfire smoke. They're also you know, potentially useful if like, for example, a pandemic where to hit.

forest fire? And I thought it through and most of the answer was keep my car, you know, gassed and ready to go and have my go bag and I was like, that's it. That's the only preparation I'm going to do for this fire that may or may not happen. And so then I stopped worrying about it because I've done everything that I'm going to do. There's like a next level thing, like actually these particular fires, I was

looking it up. I think one hundred thousand people have been displaced from their homes in Canada as a result of this.

morning and it's orange. Yeah, like is a nice way to allay the doom feeling. Like give yourself a task. It increases agency. And when you once you build that thing, you know, either you'll use it all up right away because those filters don't last forever, or you'll have something on hand the next time this occurs. Yeah, so yeah, I don't know. That's what I got, Margaret, You got anything else to get into?

you choose to do. Obviously, if you're like, no, the whole points I live in a cabin with trees over it or whatever, right, Yeah, And there's more that you can do to look at making sure that like a lot of the fires are about sparks getting sucked in through vents, and there's ways to close it up. And I also want to say, this is a really good time to take care of each other in particular, look out for asthmatic friends, or if you're the asthmatic friend,

get other people to help take care of you. Go get groceries for your asthmatic friends during a smoke emergency, because you're going to be able to handle it a lot better than some other people might.

you know, as we always say. But like, look, guys, this isn't going to be the last time in New York is the color of Mexico in a breaking bad right, Yeah, Like it's this is going to happen again, because the fires aren't going to stop until there's no more forest left than they all have, more gloriously clean air.

Have stopped having people mask, and people don't want to be the weirdo with a mask. And I will say, as someone who has been the weirdo for the past thirty years of my life, it's not that bad to be the weirdo. And we can build new social norms. And so if you're worried about wearing a half mask respirator and a smoke emergency because you'll look weird, it is better than getting sick.