The air has been feeling pretty heavy around here lately — metaphorically as well as literally. July is always a muggy month, but over the past two weeks, a sensation of atmospheric oppression has descended and it is seemingly refusing to budge: frequent dew-point spikes, sweltering nights, and so much (urgently needed) rain that water collects in the saucers beneath all the plants on the patio. According to the National Weather Service, through July 14, the weather monitoring station at Islip had received 2.8 times the normal amount of rainfall. And yet we are still in a drought.
It has been a summer of weather warnings.
We are continually being zapped by the buzz of our iPhones as they blare out new alerts: dangerous-heat advisories, severe thunderstorms, flash flooding, and now air-quality warnings. According to the meteorologist for Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News,” the wind gusts reached 87 m.p.h. on Long Island during that wild July 4 thunderstorm; that’s hurricane speed.
Now comes the smoke.
Dozens of wildfires are burning in the Canadian province of Ontario — the government there put the count at 100 provincewide as of yesterday — and the haze from these blazes began to reach the northeastern United States Tuesday into this afternoon. Despite the alarmist language of, for example, the Fox network (which managed to frame the Ontario wildfires in political terms with the headline “Canadian Wildfire Smoke to Invade U.S. Again, Spreading Thick Haze, Extremely Poor Air Quality to Millions”), the forecasters do not, at least as yet, expect the situation to become as surreal as it did in the memorable summer of 2023, when the sky over Manhattan turned orange and we on the East End of Long Island smelled the spruce and birch trees burning in southwest Nova Scotia. Still, those with respiratory issues who may be sensitive to particulate matter in the air are advised to take care and stay inside. Once again, the weather reminds us of how interconnected the nations and systems of the Earth really are.
What next, you may well be asking? Well, we have entered hurricane season, of course.
The Star is the perennial Cassandra in calling out the alarm over hurricane preparedness. That is because, as one of the prime repositories of the South Fork’s communal memory, well . . . we remember.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted a less-active hurricane season in the Atlantic basin in general this year, due to the developing El Nino, but that forecast doesn’t mean we won’t get one.
With hurricanes making near-misses — or making landfall once demoted in strength — every few years, we can be forgiven for thinking hurricanes happen here all the time and are not really a big deal. But that’s a dangerous mirage. We think we don’t really have to worry about hurricanes only because there has been such a long, long time since an official “major hurricane” (that is, of Category 3 or higher on the 1-to-5 scale) made a direct strike.
Our most-recent Big One to make landfall was Gloria, way back in 1985. She was a Category 2. It has been 88 years since the famous monster of 1938, a Category 3, made a direct hit here. In 1938, dozens of houses were swept out to sea and dozens died. Our population today is at least five times what it was then, and the number of houses must have increased tenfold, at least, especially along the shoreline.
High humidity and forest-fire haze do not mean the sky is falling, but let us pray that the next iPhone zinger from the county’s SuffolkAlert system isn’t the Real Big One — belatedly — inbound.