For a second straight year, California wildfires are bringing up air quality concerns that could affect swim practices and competitions.
Wildfires are tearing across the West Coast, killing seven people and destroying buildings across California, Oregon and Washington. The resulting ash in the air has caused health and safety concerns. We saw a similar situation last year, when swimming officials were forced to cancel practices or competitions if air quality crossed a certain threshold.
The Pleasanton Seahawks, one of the Bay Area’s bigger clubs, canceled a practice last night due to falling ash, even though the AQI was still under that threshold. The club continues to evaluate the situation.
Stanford University said it was continuing to monitor the AQI and would adhere to the school’s policies of canceling activities if the AQI rises too high. Stanford’s college swim team is not yet back on campus and training, though we’re told the training schedule of the professionals already training on campus has been affected.
“We are continuing to closely monitor the AQI, as outlined in our sports medicine and NCAA policies, which includes suspending activities depending on the level at that time,” a school spokesperson said. “Overall, Stanford began welcoming student-athletes to campus on June 17 to participate in on-campus voluntary activities. The health, safety and overall well-being of our student-athletes remain our primary concerns.”
California also said it would be monitoring AQI and making changes to practice schedules if needed.
“Unfortunately, the impact of poor air quality on our ability to practice isn’t new territory for our swimming & diving programs,” the school said in a statement. “It’s been a challenging piece of our puzzle over the last few years, but what is clearly more unfortunate right now is the impact of these fires on our local and statewide communities. Looking at the big picture, the air quality’s effect on our practice schedule is the least of our concerns.
Terrible confluence of climate change and forest mismanagement by an incompetent state government… sadly CA’s smoke season is here to stay in a big way. The west has a longer and more intense dry season than ever before, coupled with a more dense forest than would have ever occurred under natural processes that is the result of decades of “put the blue stuff on the burning stuff” reactive forest management mistakes. This year may look particularly bad compared to those around it, but in 15 years I bet it’ll look modest. Outdoor athletics will need to deal with this. It’s sad but true for at least the next decade or two, probably more. (which is not to be defeatist! Both… Read more »
Agree with half of what you are saying, but climate change? The climate has been changing well before man came on the scene and we have yet to figure out how to accurately predict or control it. We fail miserably predicting temperatures, rain fall, hurricanes, ect. I’m all for doing sensible things to prevent pollution and lower CO2, but look at the stats. The US isn’t the problem here when compared to 88 other countries and California has taken such drastic measures they can’t even provide power to their citizens, yet this is ground zero for forest fires here on out?
https://www.numbeo.com/pollution/rankings_by_country.jsp
Is this like Al Gore’s Armageddon countdown clock predicting we are all doomed? I have to hand it to you though, you made the claim stating it had already started where it’s usually a prediction 10,20,30 years into the future.
https://dailycaller.com/2016/01/02/limbaughs-al-gore-armageddon-clock-about-to-hit-zero-after-ten-years/
Gotta keep thinning the forests.
Between COVID and the fires, we should just stop breathing altogether.
I don’t know about we, but no arguments here if you want to go that route.
I guess all these no-breath sets finally paid off.