Thousands of visitors were told to evacuate a remote Minnesota wilderness area accessible only by boat as wildfires pushed dangerously heavy smoke across the U.S. Midwest and Northeast this week. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was closed Tuesday, and rangers said about 17 fires caused by lightning more than a week ago were spreading through the 1.1-million-acre area. People inside were left to navigate a vast emergency with canoes, boats, and whatever luck they had left.
Who Gets Left Holding the Smoke
Rangers estimated anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 people were inside the wilderness when the closure came, Superior National Forest spokesperson Joy VanDrie said. The place is almost the size of Delaware. No injuries or deaths have been reported, but the evacuation itself was a brutal reminder of how quickly a remote recreation zone can turn into a trap when fire and smoke move faster than the institutions meant to manage them.
“It’s an arduous job,” VanDrie said of rangers and campers having to canoe for hours or even carry their boats over land to evacuate. Rangers were going through every lake and waterway, and officials estimated they had about 90% of the people out Wednesday. That’s the machinery of emergency response in real time: exhausted workers, long routes, and people forced to move through smoke and flame because the system had no gentler answer.
Jan Bailey, who was camping with her husband, daughter, son-in-law, two grandchildren and three dogs, said they first noticed wispy smoke on the horizon. Two hours later, they could see a raging firestorm. A paddleboarder with a satellite phone fled to their campsite and they called forestry rangers who sent a boat to rescue them and others. Bailey told Minnesota Public Radio, “We had fire on both sides of us at that time. So we’re just weaving between the lakes. It’s a little smoky. Campsites are going up.”
What They Call Safety
Even authorities in Canada pitched in, rescuing two groups of youth campers Wednesday who had crossed the border. One group was stuck on an isolated sandbar, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said. The cross-border rescue underlines the basic fact of the moment: when the smoke and flames spread, ordinary people depend on whoever can reach them first, not on the tidy borders and official lines that usually organize power.
VanDrie said she didn’t know when the area might reopen. Minnesota officials said some fires in the Boundary Waters will be allowed to burn indefinitely but will be monitored to ensure they don’t threaten people or property. That’s the language of managed danger, where the state decides which fires can keep burning and which lives get priority.
Tyler Hasenstein, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Chanhassen, Minnesota, said the best advice was to stay indoors to avoid both the smoke and the extreme heat. “Those two things coinciding with each other is not good from a health perspective,” he said. Warnings about unhealthy air conditions Wednesday extended from Minnesota through Toronto and into New York, while unusually hot summer temperatures were expected too.
The Air People Have to Breathe
High levels of fine particulate matter in wildfire smoke may be unhealthy for sensitive groups, such as children and people with heart or lung conditions. The particulates can cause shortness of breath, coughing, dizziness or fatigue and aggravate heart and lung diseases and other chronic health issues. Experts suggested wearing an N95 mask if you have to be outside and keeping indoor air cleaner by closing windows and running an air purifier or air conditioner. For people without those options, the advice reads like a cruel joke.
Matt Taraldsen, supervisory meteorologist with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, said the smoke was so thick that the sky turned orange like Mars in northern Minnesota. He also said part of the danger of the heat and smoke there is that only about half the buildings have air conditioning. Residents usually would open windows to keep cool, “but when there’s dense smoke, you can’t do that,” he said. In other words, the people at the bottom are told to adapt to conditions they didn’t create and can’t control.
Taraldsen’s mother described what that looks like in a Duluth, Minnesota, home. She woke up Wednesday morning and everything smelled like a campfire. When she opened her door, her eyes watered and she had to use her inhaler to ease her asthma. Typically, Theresa Taraldsen said, she can see the St. Louis River from her yard, but it was all a white wall of smoke Wednesday. “You literally couldn’t see nothing,” she said.
Dan Westervelt, associate professor at Columbia University’s Climate School, said severe drought conditions combined with heat in Canada and the U.S. have created “a perfect storm for really dry conditions to provide a lot of fuel for these wildfires to burn.” He said research shows warming temperatures from burning coal, oil and gas are making fires more frequent and intense.
About four dozen large fires are currently burning across 15 states, from Minnesota and North Carolina to Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon and California, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Prolonged drought and record low snowpack levels combined to make conditions ripe for rapid fire growth. In Minnesota, officials warned large fires could burn for months.
Patty Thielen, director of the state Department of Natural Resources, said, “It could well be we’re having significant fires throughout the summer until we have snow. Snow would be a good thing.” In Minneapolis, the high Wednesday was expected to be 96 degrees F (36 C), and temperatures above 90 F (32 C) were expected the rest of the week. Officials in Michigan and Wisconsin warned residents about air quality issues that could last for days, while people in New York reported smelling smoke Wednesday afternoon and residents in Maine reported a yellowish and brownish color in the sky. The most intense smoke could spread as far south as Washington, D.C., by midday Thursday. The smoke keeps moving. So do the consequences.