Tag: wildfire smoke

Oregon a hellish RV epicenter

A perfect storm of bad ideas with potentially catastrophic consequences is shaping up in central Oregon, where the already struggling Family Motor Coach Association plans to have a four-day international convention and RV expo. The association, which has been hemorrhaging members for years but still advertises itself as “the world’s largest nonprofit association for recreational vehicle owners,” said it expects more than 700 RVs to converge on the Deschutes County fairgrounds in Redmond on Aug. 14.

Well, maybe.

Such events are planned months and even years ahead of time, so FMCA’s leadership might be excused for not knowing it would be hosting a party in a pizza oven. Then again, this is hardly unexpected. California is getting the most wildfire press at the moment, principally because its Park Fire has grown to more than 400,000 acres and is now the fourth largest in that state’s history. But Oregon is even more of a wildfire hotspot, with twice as many large active fires as its southern neighbor (25 versus 13), and this year already has had more than 973,000 acres scorched. Only two of those wildfires have been contained. The convention’s theme, “Adventure Peaks,” may have more of a dark meaning than originally intended.

You might argue that a million acres is only a small fraction of Oregon’s total land mass of roughly 61 million acres, so what are the odds that your campground will be next to go up in flames? But of course it’s not just a question of whether RVers will have a direct encounter with a fire, but whether they’ll also have to breathe its exhaust. Wildfire smoke has become an annual scourge across all of the western U.S. and Canada, and as it becomes more common, its effects on human health are getting closer scrutiny—with dismaying early findings. One recent study, for example, attributed more than 50,000 premature deaths to wildfire smoke exposure; the risk of cardiac arrests for people who have cardiovascular issues increases 70% during days with heavy smoke.

And here’s a truly sobering warning for the RVing demographic most prone to attend FMCA get-togethers: according to a decade-long study involving more than one million southern California residents, released just a few days ago, exposure to wildfire smoke poses a 21% increase in the risk of being diagnosed with dementia compared with other types of air pollution. The dangers, in other words, aren’t just respiratory or cardiac. Wildfires that tear through manmade structures, vehicles and other non-wild fuel emit smoke that contains a toxic brew of chemical compounds; its aerosolized particles, meanwhile, enable those poisons to infiltrate every part of a human body.

Nor is this sort of hazard something unusual—just the opposite. A much-publicized report this past week from The Dyrt, an online camping reservation platform, disclosed that 18% of campers reported that wildfires or other natural disasters disrupted their camping plans last year, or triple the rate of 2019. Such disruptions are even more common on the West Coast, where fully one-third of campers had their plans interrupted in 2023—as did an even larger 42% in Oregon and Washington. Ironically, The Dyrt is headquartered in Oregon, “so we’ve seen firsthand the toll wildfires have taken on the Pacific Northwest,” The Dyrt’s chief executive, Kevin Long, wrote in releasing the study. “It’s scary and tragic for so many reasons.”

For all that, however, Oregon in general and Deschutes County in particular have been grappling with proposals for several new RV parks as well as rules to allow RVs to be used as permanent rental housing. Those efforts have been given additional impetus by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June upholding an Oregon town’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors, which among its unintended consequences has increased the pressure on elected officials to find housing alternatives—and what’s cheaper (and more flammable) than an RV? The unresolved problem, of course, is finding a home for those RVs that’s not a city street or highway underpass.

None of this is going down well with Deschutes County residents, many of whom turned out this past week for a county commissioners’ meeting to excoriate a proposed 300-site RV campground that the county wants to build just north of Bend, at least in part as a low-cost housing solution. In addition to the standard worries about water, sewage and roads, objections also centered on growing concerns about an influx of the homeless and of an increasingly volatile natural landscape. “We need to start controlling sources of combustion out there, whether it be the homeless, people in campgrounds or fireworks,” one attendee told the board, summing up the powder-keg nature of the RVing phenomenon.

Meanwhile, a luxury RV resort being built on the other side of town, southwest of Bend, was originally scheduled to open this past spring but has been delayed repeatedly. A soft-opening of the 176-site property, the Bend RV Resort, is now projected for later this month, just in time for Labor Day—and well into the fire season. At $120 a night, this clearly is not an RV park that’s targeting the homeless as its customer base. Given current events, however, it’s also an RV park with an uncertain future—as, indeed, is true of summer camping overall.

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A dreadful orange sky for RV lobby

Washington D.C. today; the Capitol building is faintly discernible to the right of the Washington Monument.

It is beyond irony that more than 120 RV industry leaders—representing manufacturers, suppliers and campgrounds—have converged on Capitol Hill just as the Washington, D.C. skies have turned orange. But that’s not why the RV reps are in town. They’re here to lobby for their preferred legislation, including America’s Outdoors Recreation Act, the Farm Bill, reauthorization of the Generalized System of Preferences and reform of Competitive Need Limitations, and the Travel Trailer and Camper Tax Parity Act.

Have your eyes glazed over? Have you noticed that nowhere on this list of legislative priorities, compiled by the RV Industry Association, is there any attention to environmental issues. Are you unsurprised?

It’s been only a couple of weeks since I wrote about western Canada’s wildfires darkening the skies over Montana, even as that state’s legislators were busy ensuring that greenhouse gas emissions and climate effects would not be part of the mix when assessing the environmental impact of large projects. I suggested that perhaps it would behoove KOA, which is headquartered in Billings, Montana, to take a more active role in preserving the natural environment that it’s been busy marketing to the American consumer. I’m not holding my breath.

Or maybe I should, now that the pyrocene—an apt phrase coined by fire historian Stephen Pyne—has expanded to the Eastern Seaboard. Five hundred miles south of the fires consuming swaths of Quebec and Ontario, my hometown of Staunton, Virginia is on the pollution cusp, defined not just by distance and prevailing winds, but also by our modestly mountainous topography: earlier today, the Air Quality Index (AQI) just to the north, in Harrisonburg, was a healthy 5, but it popped up to 80 in Charlottesville, on the other side of the Blue Ridge—and up to a decidedly unhealthy 180 in Shenandoah National Park, which runs along the top of the mountains.

But that’s also not quite right. One noteworthy observation about these numbers is that the AQI is actually a composite, combining ozone levels and two different sizes of particulates into one reading. So, for example, the AQI in Shenandoah National Park obscures the fact that the reading for PM2.5—particulates measuring no more than 2.5 microns across—is 193 micrograms per cubic meter, or significantly above the 150 level at which even healthy people should avoid going outdoors. Particulates at that microscopic level (human hair, for comparison, is between 50 and 70 microns wide) are particularly worrisome because they’re small enough to be absorbed into the bloodstream, which means they can cause heart disease in addition to the lung disease caused by larger particles.

The other notable observation about the AQI numbers listed above is that none of them are for Staunton itself. There are no air quality monitors in my small city, and indeed, the farther you go from large urban centers, the fewer monitors there are. Moreover, fewer of those monitors measure particulates in addition to measuring ozone. So, for example, the Harrisonburg AQI reading cited above is really misleading because it’s for ozone only—there’s no accurate way of getting a particulate reading.

And where are most campgrounds located? Precisely in those areas that have the lowest concentration of particulate monitors. What you don’t know can hurt you.

All those kinds of concerns are flying right over the heads of those who claim to be industry devotees of the great outdoors—they’re more concerned with getting tax dollars for infrastructure development, loosening regulatory restrictions and selling their products and services to the great American public. Indeed, the current industry orgasm is over National Go RVing Day, which is just two days away and has the RVIA calling “on the RV industry and consumers alike to celebrate the joys of RVing by heading out to their favorite outdoor destination for a weekend of RVing.” As if! Maybe in Florida or the Rockies (at the moment). Not so much in Pennsylvania or New York.

But this is only the beginning of fire season. And unlike hurricanes or wildfires themselves, which affect a more or less well-defined area, wildfire smoke affects hundreds of square miles far from its point of origin. According to one study (paywall protected) cited by the New York Times, between 2016 and 2020, smoke from distant fires was contributing as much as half of local air pollution in great swaths of the West. “Across the country, the number of people exposed to what are sometimes called extreme smoke days has grown 27-fold in just a decade,” the Times observed.

Here’s a suggestion: all those RV suits up in Washington D.C. should step outside of the Capitol for an hour or two. Take a brisk walk around the Mall. Sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to wonder why they can’t catch their breath. Admire the orange sky. And think about what they should be advocating to ensure that this doesn’t become the norm, because sooner or later the great American public will conclude that RVing is no healthier than cigarette smoking.

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