MONTREAL — An acrid haze crept across central Canada and deep into the United States on Monday as smoke from Quebec forest fires made its improbable journey 1,000 kilometres from the flames.
Heavy clouds and a pungent, campfire-like smell permeated Montreal, Quebec City, and Ottawa for several hours Monday.
Winds then carried the Quebec smoke across New England, where it choked the skies of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New York, and even Cape Cod, in southeastern Massachusetts.
“It kind of looks like L.A. in the summertime,” Steve Courchesne said from Boston, where he refused to let the pervasive wildfire smoke blacken his Memorial Day barbecue.
“It looks sort of like every single house has a cook fire going... It’s right at the house level.
“Actually, other than that, it’s very nice outside.”
Nearly 50 forest fires burned across Quebec on Monday, including seven that were out of control.
In the past week, wildfires have closed in on several central Quebec villages, forcing more than 2,000 people from their houses and into shelters.
The 1,300 people of Wemotaci, about 400 kilometres north of Montreal, abandoned their homes nearly a week ago.
By Monday morning, Montrealers were reporting a burning smell so potent that many feared their homes were on fire. Others said their breathing was impacted.
The billowing smoke eventually prompted news coverage and plenty of chatter south of the border, where millions of Americans spent their holiday under the foreign murk.
A spokeswoman for Quebec’s forest-firefighting organization said wildfires have scorched 109,000 hectares of the province’s forests in 2010.
“The great majority of that has been in the last week in these fires,” Melanie Morin said Monday, adding that lightning strikes and the unusually dry spring have created ideal conditions for wildfires.
More than 1,300 firefighters are battling the Quebec blazes, including about 300 from Maine, New Hampshire, New Brunswick and Western Canada.