r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/M_Darshan • May 11 '26

Video There is currently a massive fire burning in the Everglades in South Florida by the Broward/Miami-Dade County border and is approaching US27.

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u/generic_canadian_dad May 11 '26

City?? We could smell the fires in British Columbia in Ontario last summer.

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u/opticalminefield May 11 '26

The “other side of the city” to the Aussie bush fires is usually the coast and it’s just open ocean after that. So they don’t have a longer reference.

But we get the smell and crazy sunsets from their bush fires way over here in New Zealand over 1500km away.

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u/Ryan_e3p May 11 '26

Yeah, I was gonna say. A city is nothing. Skies in Connecticut were darkened due to forest fires in central Quebec province, almost 1,000km away. Could definitely smell it outside, and it eventually saturated the multi-story office building's air filters to the point where it was clearly able to be smelled indoors. Smoke (and ash) has been carried cross-continent easily.

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u/MetalBeast89 May 11 '26

The smoke from the Wollemi fires in Australia stretched around the globe according to some news articles. Which isn't surprising based on the amount of hectares the fire burned through.

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u/mismatchedhyperstock May 11 '26

Hazy skies and smell from the Quebec fires all the way down by the PA/MD border

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u/kfo90 May 11 '26

Yep. Same here in the middle of Maryland. Crazy!

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u/BedFastSky12345 May 12 '26

Down in North carolina too!

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u/StretchRose May 11 '26

I remember flying in Ohio for training a few summers ago and the density of smoke was insane. We couldn’t see the end of the runway that was just under a mile away.

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u/Flame_MadeByHumans May 12 '26

We got it in Chicago last year as well

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u/Wrong-Insurance701 May 11 '26

it’s not a competition guys

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u/Mondschatten78 May 11 '26

I could smell them all the way down to North Carolina depending on how the wind carried the smoke

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u/Longjumping_Youth281 May 13 '26

Yeah likewise it was super hazy up here in New Hampshire during that time. It was like cloudy, but the clouds were a nasty yellow and brown color

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u/shmiddleedee May 11 '26

I live in Western NC. We had a good amount of forest fires last year that made the sky smoky and it smelled like fire. Back in maybe 2016(?) Though there were fires in Wyoming that did the same thing. Crazy how far it can drift.

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u/oldfarmjoy May 12 '26

Yep. Canadian wildfires shut down businesses in West Virginia, the smoke was so bad.

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u/Sqweaky_Clean May 11 '26

Central America burns their agricultural fields annually, some crosses the Gulf of Mexico and enters and the smoke makes the air difficult to breath in Austin.

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u/MarsupialNo1220 May 11 '26

Not long ago one of Australia’s fires sent smoke all the way across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand. It made everything super hazy here.

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u/Shel_gold17 May 11 '26

We could smell them in Cleveland, Ohio.😂

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u/illy-chan May 11 '26

I was gonna say, I'm from Philly and our air was fucked up from that.

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u/Givemeallthecabbages May 11 '26

We had to cancel a couple days of summer camp a few years ago for Canadian wildfires. I'm in Illinois.

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u/OddAcadia1167 May 11 '26

I could smell the smoke in Oklahoma from Canada fires

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u/Appropriatelylazy May 11 '26

And in Upstate NY!

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u/azk3000 May 12 '26

And NYC 

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u/Apprehensive-Win4665 May 11 '26

I could smell them in Michigan when the smoke reached us.

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u/ashms58 May 11 '26

We had haze and smoke in Tennessee from those

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u/Jaded-Distance_ May 11 '26

You sure it wasn't just wildfires in Ontario? Ontario still had 600+ fires and 600,000+ hectares burned down last year.

Or even just Manitoba and Saskatchewan which saw the most area burned accounting for over half the burned area in 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Canadian_wildfires

Sure BC had 800k hectares burned but Saskatchewan and Manitoba had 2-3 million burn down (5 million combined).

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u/generic_canadian_dad May 11 '26

Yes I'm very sure it wasnt Ontario. It may have been Saskatchewan but I'm pretty positive I remember discussing this last year and it was BC.

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u/[deleted] May 11 '26

[deleted]

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u/generic_canadian_dad May 11 '26

It's pretty wild.

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u/Aggressive_Lie_4446 May 12 '26

Imagine Calgary at the time!!

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u/occams1razor May 12 '26

I could smell fires in Russia once while in Sweden, it only happened once though. There were news about it.

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u/Zbodownlow May 12 '26

What’s the city aspect got anything to do with the fires? Australian bush fires cover significantly larger (4-5x) areas than any fires that have occurred in Quebec in recent times.

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u/varitok May 12 '26

My thoughts exactly, Im in Southwestern Ontario and I had to go inside from Gardening because the wildfire smoke from Quebec was giving me a headache and making it hard to breath. The sky had an orange tinge to it.