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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I was born almost fifty years ago in Oregon. Growing up I never remember another event like the fires of 2020. Is this just me misremembering? Is there something fundamentally different about the smoke now compared to then? Was it all heightened three years ago because of social media and wouldn't have been as impactful in the newspaper era? Do any other Pacific Northwest natives recall smoke like there is lately? I'm reading a lot of the comments and believe that this isn't the worst of the last forty years but my memory tells me differently and I'm wondering how I could be so off.

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I've lived in Seattle for 25-30 years, and I think prior to the last ~5 years, the smoke from wildfires making it to the city was a much more rare event. Maybe once every few years, rather than every year. And it didn't last nearly as long, nor was there as much smoke.

Native Portlander here. It was sometime in the mid 2010s that we started to have the orange haze from forest fires here. However that week in the summer of 2020 was definitely the worst I have ever seen it here. There is a building about fifty feet away from mine and I could not see it because the smoke was that thick.

I was born in B.C. over 50 years ago. I don't remember having to live with intense forest fire smoke until 2003. We've had heavy smoke almost every summer since 2018 in the Southern interior. So something has definitely changed.

Native of 30+ years. The last ~5 years are absolutely an anomaly.

They've always been present, yes, especially towards the eastern side of the Cascades, but the past few years have felt like a different beast.

I don't think we've had anything like the 2020 fires in a long time (though the 2017 Gorge fire was pretty bad). Maybe the Tillamook burn was comparable?

Field burning used to be a more common thing though, so it was a regular annual occurrence that you'd have a lot of smoke in the air during field burning season.

I lived in Eugene, OR in 1976-1984 and have lived in Seattle since 1989 and I don't remember wildfire smoke events at all before something like 2017? Maybe a little hazy and nice sunsets, but not to the point where you could literally taste it.

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