The story is that there is a massive number of
wildfires burning right now in the Western U.S.
and it's burning so many that they are literally
running out of people to fight these fires.
They've got 27,000 people on the
ground and that's all that there is.
It's not the biggest year on
record but it's the how many fires
that are burning at this exact moment.
The smoke from that is becoming
a really serious problem too.
You can see it.
This is getting caught in the jet-stream
and its going all the way across the country
and that's having pretty
big impacts on air quality.
Normally when you see a fire burning you
think it of as, it only matters to you
if your home is going to be evacuated.
There is a school district in Colorado that is
cancelling recess, in Idaho they are handing
out gas masks on campus because of
smoke from fires burning over here.
Not like dust masks but actual
medical grade masks.
We keep a National Air Quality Index and if
you look, all of this is smoke from fires.
So anything that you see here
that is above orange is considered
to be unhealthy for people that are sensitive.
So with all of the different other disasters
going on right now, I mean we have Harvey
and then Irma coming up, the hurricanes are
definitely kind of dominating the coverage.
But this idea that this is this
nationwide problem that's taxing resources
to such a huge extent, you would
usually be seeing it on national news
and it's there, but it's pretty deeply buried.
