The Air Hurts My Face - Summer Edition

Called it.

Although we had a couple of days of rain at the beginning of last week, it wasn't enough to extinguish the wildfires that are burning through much of the northwest part of the province. 

This week, the winds changed, and the smoke from those fires has moved throughout the rest of the province. 

The air quality over the week has been hit or miss, with most mornings being poor but getting better through the day as the wind continued to blow. This weekend, though, it got significantly worse, and settled in.

Friday started off a bit hazy and got worse as the day progressed. By mid-afternoon the haze blocked out the sun, so although the temperature was 27 celsius it felt much cooler. 

The view at the barn on Friday evening.

I woke up in the wee hours of Saturday morning and checked my air quality app. The area was solidly in the purple hazardous zone. And it stayed like that all day. 

Saturday night. 300 is considered hazardous. The horses live a bit north of that 449 in the top right corner.

This is not good for anyone that needs to be outside, human or other creature. 

I'm definitely not regretting that purchase of the Flexineb last year!

Those trees in the background are usually easy to see. 

Here's a Facebook live session where they talk about horses and smoke inhalation. It's probably the best information that I've found so far with some specifics regarding time and treatment.

So far, my horses aren't showing any negative symptoms from the smoke exposure. They live out 24/7. and are pretty chill so don't run around too much to increase their respiration. I'm trying to wet their hay as much as I can, and have added Vitamin E to their diet (if Phantom continues to eat it. We'll see.).

They'll get nebulized with saline every day for a while. At the moment, the only hand walking I'm doing is while nebulizing so that they inhale deeper. Once things start to clear up we will very slowly start our way back to proper exercise again. 

I wore an N95 mask for the couple of hours that I was at the barn on Saturday. It made it bearable to be outside and did a good job of keeping out the ashtray smell. 

We're expecting more rain again early this week, and with that an improvement in the air quality. I fear that it might be up and down for quite a while though and it will be tough to get the horses back into a regular program.

It looks like we're going to have solid lateral work at the walk by the end of summer!