“Very Unhealthy” – no, just fine

We have an excellent way to track our local air quality – our county’s air pollution authority posts data every hour, for multiple measures, and one of the most thorough of the stations in the county is barely a mile from our house. This time of year, one of the things on my do-list for soon after waking is to check the particulate count (PM2.5, as measured by nephilometer). It’s an excellent way to see whether the wildfire smoke is bad, so I can plan whether to go places or just stay inside. There’s also an aggregate figure called the AQI (air quality index, I suppose), which is color-coded for just how bad things are.

Unfortunately, they haven’t posted any data since 8 am Thursday, which was rather inconvenient over the weekend – I wanted to know whether the smoke was problematic on Saturday, since I’m too congested to smell it very well. All weekend I wondered what was going on. Then, when I woke up today, not only was there no new data, but the AQI (which has been updated regularly) announced that our air quality was “very unhealthy” – the next-to-worst category. This seemed highly unlikely! I could see from the kitchen window that there were normal-looking clouds, with normal-blue sky between them.

So I phoned them. It turns out their temporary office move has somehow dramatically messed up the software, and they’re getting lots of calls. I told the woman I was speaking with that maybe it’s good to think of it as seeing how much the community depends on them and values them, since they normally wouldn’t hear about that. I think she liked that.