UPDATE, 1:52 p.m.: Brian Wilson, pollution control officer with the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District, gets back to tell us that our original hypothesis was most likely correct — that the smoke warning was probably due to wood stoves firing up across the town.

The slash pile burn up near Headwaters Forest that we write about below — and which Wilson confirmed — couldn’t have contributed much to the smoke given weather patterns at the time, he said.

Wilson added that the private weather/smoke apps like PurpleAir or the built-in iPhone weather app generally average their air quality numbers over a very short period of time — 10 minutes, say. So while people with conditions like COPD might indeed feel the smoke, it’s unlikely to have immediate, serious health consequences. The governmental standard is to average those numbers over 24 hours.

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ORIGINAL POST:

Earlier this morning, many people were warned, via their various weather apps, that the air quality in Eureka today was extremely poor — up into the “unhealthy for sensitive groups” category.

Why would that be?

Our first thought was that perhaps this was just an effect of people firing up their wood stoves for the crisp weather last night. Perhaps some of those wood stoves were close to air quality sensors. It didn’t seem particularly smoky, to our noses.

But then looking around at some of our usual fire resources, we see that a couple of the usual satellites did detect a pretty wide set of hotspots on the ground up in the hills between Headwaters Forest and Kneeland, near logging roads. That’s Humboldt Redwood Company land.

These hotspots were detected in the middle of the night, which seems like a strange time for a prescribed burn, or the burning of this year’s logging slash.

But that’s what we must suppose it to be. That’s what Calfire Division Chief Paul Savona supposed it to be, when we reached him a few moments ago. Calfire has not responded to any wildfire incidents in a while. 

Reached at their Scotia headquarters, the person who answered the phone for Humboldt Redwood Company said that anyone who would be able to answer the question was already out of the office for the holidays. 

We’ve left messages with the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District — the agency that would be in charge of large-scale burn permits at this time of year — but haven’t heard back yet. 

Did these Elk River fires contribute to our poor quality this morning? Seems likely, though I suppose we still can’t say for sure. In any case, the smoke seems to have died down. Apps like PurpleAir currently show us in the “acceptable” range for particulate matter. Mostly.

We’ll update if we hear back from Air Quality.