Smoke prompts health alerts
While visitors to Glacier National Park might be cursing the Reynolds Creek Fire for hours-long delays along the west side of Going-to-the-Sun Road, that wildfire isn’t to blame for the dense smoke obscuring the Flathead Valley over the past two days.
Smoke plumes settling in from the West Coast led the Montana Division of Environmental Quality to declare an “unhealthy for sensitive groups” alert Monday for the Flathead Valley and Seeley Lake, along with a more severe “unhealthy” alert for the Libby area.
Flathead Valley and Seeley Lake residents with respiratory or heart disease, as well as children and the elderly, are advised to limit prolonged outdoor exertion. In the Libby area, that recommendation applies to everyone.
State air quality meteorologist Kristen Martin added that the conditions may persist today, and possibly worsen, depending on weather conditions.
“It might get a little worse overnight when air settles into the valley,” Martin said Monday. “We are getting a system moving through overnight that might help improve it, but it depends on when those winds kick in. It could cause it to get worse and then possibly improve overnight, so it should be an interesting night.”
She said the Wolverine Creek Fire in Washington’s Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest was mostly to blame for the haze that on Sunday stayed mostly aloft before beginning to affect ground-level air quality on Monday. By Monday morning, the fire had consumed an estimated 16,000 acres and had zero containment reported.
A Type I Incident Management team is scheduled to take over operations on that fire this morning, but Martin said it might require a change in the weather before a long-term improvement in air quality is seen in Northwest Montana.
“Right now, a ridge of high pressure is over us, and we’re at the top of that ridge, which is causing a more westerly airflow,” she said. “That’s allowing not only the smoke from Washington to head directly over from the West, but also a lot of the smoke from Oregon and California to go around that ridge of high pressure into north Montana.”
On Monday afternoon, the National Weather Service was forecasting scattered showers and thunderstorms in Kalispell overnight and into today. That could be enough to push some of the smoke out of the valley, but the haze could return to some extent by the weekend, said Trent Smith, a meteorologist with the federal agency.
“We might see the ridge build back in by the weekend, but right now it looks to remain fairly active, so hopefully we won’t get as dense of smoke settling up into the valley,” Smith said.
Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.