You won’t believe what hit New York City from Canada – it’s the ‘film of the future’!

It was late Tuesday afternoon when a group of senior executives from Related Companies, one of New York’s largest real estate developers, ascended the Edge observation deck atop 30 Hudson Yards to showcase what is typically one of the grandest views of the city. They were amazed at what they found.

“You can’t see anything right now,” said Jeff Blau, chief executive officer of Related. “I’ve never seen it so bad.”

The next day, the misty air that had moved from the Canadian forest fires hundreds of miles away they would become dangerous, prompting health scares for millions across eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, disrupting everything from air travel and schools to Broadway shows.

New York City health officials reported an increase in visits to asthma hospital emergency rooms as anxious residents found themselves scrambling for Covid-19 masks they thought they no longer needed. They also consulted weather maps and fiddled with smartphone apps that showed the city’s air pollution it overtook Delhi like the worst in the world. Even without airborne particulate data, the otherworldly orange and pale yellow skies with an apocalyptic tinge made it clear that all was not well.

“I went outdoors and basically said, what the hell is this?” Eric Adams, mayor of New York City, said Wednesday.

Helen Mannion, a Long Island commuter, was also amazed. “Yesterday changed so fast. It was scary,” she said as she waited for a bus outside New York’s Penn Station on Thursday. The wearing of the masks, the official warnings, and the sudden realization that she was in the grip of a greater threat was all too familiar. “Everyone they have Covid PTSD,” Mannion said, then asked, “Why is it always in New York that all these catastrophes happen?”

People in the media capital of the world routinely have a hard time looking beyond their own shores, as Northern Californians long accustomed to pollution from wildfires widely complained this week. If they did, they might find that the situation of others was even worse. In Quebec, in particular, emergency services were overwhelmed by more than 150 fires on Thursday, most of them believed to be out of control. Many were in remote areas or typically served by volunteer firefighters. Whole cities were being evacuated.

“Some fires are under control, some are not,” François Bonnardel, Quebec’s public safety minister, told reporters on Thursday, a day after US President Joe Biden promised to send more firefighters to help. “We’re watching these fires every hour, we hope to tell the Quebecers they can go home, but that won’t be possible in the short term.”

From Canada’s boreal forests to the farthest reaches of polluted air in the southeastern United States, a common question has emerged this week: Was this a freak event for the East Coast, or the onset of a chronic summer affliction?

Adams was pessimistic. “Although this may be the first time we’ve experienced something like this on this scale, let’s be clear, it’s not the last,” warned the mayor, blaming climate change. Many scientists have shared this point of view. However, as with most matters involving the interaction of weather, climate and human activity, accurate predictions were more difficult to obtain.

The smoke was generated by a particularly intense Canadian bushfire season. Earlier this spring, wildfires in Alberta, the western province that is Canada’s main oil-producing region, displaced tens of thousands of people from their homes. More recently, fires have taken hold in the forests of the eastern provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia. The 4.3 million hectares burned was well above the annual average for the past decade, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.

“This is an unusually bad and unusually early fire season, and this is true across all provinces in Canada,” said Carly Phillips, a researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group. “It was a very hot and very dry spring. If vegetation has more opportunities to lose moisture, it becomes flammable much more quickly.”

This may not necessarily affect New Yorkers and Philadelphians. But the smoky air was carried into the northeastern US by a combination of northerly and northwesterly winds and an unusually stubborn patch of low air pressure over New England, according to the US National Weather Service.

He expects the weather pattern to continue for the next few days, bringing more bouts of concentrated, dense smoke over the mid-Atlantic region into the weekend before a new weather system arrives early next week.

While the Northeast may experience a brief respite, Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the NWS, warned the smoke could return this summer.

“The direct source of this is obviously the wildfires in Canada. Until those fires are contained, or more controlled, smoke will continue to drift into the atmosphere. Depending on wind directions and weather conditions, some of them will likely fall in the US at times.

Timely rains would help, noted Phillips, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. But he also took a longer view. “The bigger question is about these patterns happening not just over a few weeks, but over decades into the future. Fire activity is likely to increase in the future – it may vary from year to year, but the trend will increase.

Meanwhile, those in the field — away from fires and statistical modeling — have been left to make it within their means. Some in New York City have listened to the mayor’s pleas to stay home, or have had the luxury of working from modern skyscrapers, like Hudson Yards, with advanced air filtration.

Then there were those who worked on a construction site downtown on Hudson Street, where a new office building for the Disney company is being built. Construction workers said they were given masks and briefed on safety precautions. By noon on Thursday, many had deserted them and work seemed to continue as usual.

Gustavo Ajche, a founding member of Los Deliveristas Unidos, an association of delivery workers in New York City, said he experienced headaches and eye irritation after his shift on Tuesday. However, on Wednesday he jumped on his cycle, this time wearing an N95 mask. He’s been handling more takeout orders than usual, presumably from so many indoor shelters.

“It felt like we were under attack, like it was another pandemic,” Ajche said of the smoke. The city, he added, “looked like a movie about what the future might look like.”