![]() “Out here in the West, there’s almost no place you can go that won’t have some amount of this at some point, given the trends of climate change … Maybe I’ll move a little closer to Denver or something like that.” “If we continue to have fires nearby and if this is what August looks like in Reno, I’m probably not going to stay,” he said. Salkoff said he pays close attention to AQI, in part, to start planning for his future. “It’s just a curiosity: What are the standards? When you see two indices and they are markedly different, like one is above 150 and one is below, then you start digging a little bit and thinking, ‘Why is that?’” Salkoff decided Purple Air was his favorite over Air Now, the government AQI tracker, because the individual sensors around the city of Reno create a real-time map of AQI readings from block to block, instead of pulling its data from a single centralized air-quality tracker. “I was in the Navy and did nuclear engineering for a while, and this is the sort of thing that totally lights me up,” he said. An avid swimmer, Salkoff does laps in a 50-meter outdoor pool every morning during the summer, and became interested in tracking air quality last year, after the pool began closing whenever the AQI was over 150. ![]() Jonathan Salkoff, a New York City native who lives in Reno, where he does voiceover work and sales for a software company, is one of many Purple Air aficionados. (Also: Purple Air is the preferred AQI platform of just about everybody I interviewed for this article.) Dybwad said that had about 250,000 visitors per day in 2017 now that number is as high as 600,000. The company has since exploded in popularity. Purple Air now sells sensors ranging between $199-$279, and its website has a free AQI map anyone can access that draws its data from every sensor sold. Eventually, the demand for his sensors became strong enough for him to start charging money for them. I wondered how much dust there was, I was curious, so I made a sensor.” Dybwad originally gave away his sensors for free, using Facebook to find volunteers who would put up his sensors throughout the Salt Lake Valley, which is how he started to create a network of hyper-localized AQI readings. Every day I would watch dust coming out over the city below it. “We lived on a hill in Draper near a gravel pit. Dybwad, originally from South Africa, created Purple Air after he moved to Utah with his wife, where he worked as a network engineer. “Last year Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed, and they said to him, ‘What’s your favorite website outside of Facebook?’ and he said, ‘Well I’m into Purple Air a lot these days,’” Adrian Dybwad, the company’s founder and CEO, told me. It was the first time people have given me funny looks on BART.”įuerst is far from the only West Coaster who has become increasingly obsessed with AQI. People can’t tell who I am because I have the mask on anyway. I felt like, fuck it, I’ll just wear the respirator. My lymph nodes were hard as rocks,” he said, recalling one of his commutes to work in November 2018. “You could just feel it in your lungs and throat. In late 2018, Fuerst bought a respirator in anticipation of worsening smoke. His fascination with AQI also had him wearing a mask in public long before COVID was a thing. ![]() He said he suffers from mild AQI anxiety, but his obsession with monitoring it is largely practical: It helps him figure out whether it’s safe to keep his windows open and also, his son’s day care gets canceled if the AQI is over 151. The scale goes from 0-500 and is divided into six color-coded categories: good (green, 0-50), moderate (yellow, 51-100), unhealthy for sensitive groups (orange, 101-150), unhealthy (red, 151-200), very unhealthy (purple, 201-300), and hazardous (maroon, 301+).ĭuring the wildfire season, Fuerst checks his AQI first thing every morning on, one of several popular AQI-monitoring websites. ![]() AQI is a scale that measures how polluted the air is. “Some years we’d get terrible smoke.” But it wasn’t until 2018, when the Bay Area started to experience especially thick smoke during wildfire season, that Fuerst became obsessed with monitoring his area’s AQI, or air-quality index. My father was on our small-town volunteer fire department, and I was on it for a couple years as a teenager,” he said. Carlin Fuerst, a Berkeley-based software engineer, has always been aware of the impact of wildfires in the American West. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesĮvery year, it feels like the fires, and the smoke they generate, just get worse and worse. Smoke from Northern California wildfires is visible over San Francisco on August 19. ![]()
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