Heavy wildfire smoke from record-breaking blazes burning in Oregon, California and Washington caused air quality throughout Jefferson County to take a nosedive last week, prompting some business that don’t have any choice but to work outside to make some difficult decisions. 

With few opportunities to work indoors and out of the smoke, farming is particularly vulnerable to drops in air quality. 

According to Karyn Williams, owner of Chimacum’s Red Dog Farm, she had to make the tough call between keeping things rolling on the farm to get their organic produce to market, and making sure her staff of 20 or so workers stay healthy. 

Ultimately, Williams said, the decision was a no-brainer.   

“I’m realizing more and more as this world gets more complicated that the bottom line is just really not what I want to be basing my decisions off of exclusively,” she said. 

“Making sure employees are happy and healthy is really worth a lot.”

Williams gave the word to her employees to head home and stay out of the smoke. When all was said and done, Red Dog Farms was offline from Saturday, Sept. 12 through Wednesday, Sept. 16; something she called “unprecedented.” 

“We’ve never shut down before,” Williams explained. “We actually missed market, which I’m pretty sure is the first time we’ve missed market in 14 years of the farm operation.” 

An irritated throat, burning eyes, fatigue and a general feeling of just being “off” were all reported by Williams when she tried to get a little work done outdoors, despite the smoke. 

“It really made me reconsider what actually has to happen,” she said. “My health and my employees health is so much more important than the crops struggling a little bit for a week or losing the sales on tomatoes for a week.” 

Williams quickly noted that given the time of year, such a decision was no trifling matter.

“It’s very significant to lose sales in September, this is like peak harvest season, but I feel like the long term health of people is just so much more important.” 

The massive amount of smoke flowing into the region from fires in the West is without historical equal.

County Health Officer Dr. Thomas Locke called the thick smoke an “unprecedented health event in Washington State.” 

“We have never had this bad of air quality for this long in our state history,” Locke told the Jefferson County Board of Health at its meeting late last week.

Air quality in the area, as reported by the monitoring station in Port Townsend, was measured at “unhealthy” levels through the afternoon Sept. 17, before dropping to “moderate” levels Sept. 18.

“People think it’s bad here with our levels in the 150 to 250 range [micrograms per cubic meter],” Locke told the health board. “In Eastern Washington, they’re in the 450 range. And 400 is just clearly hazardous. Not just for people with sensitivities, but for absolutely everyone.”

“It’s an extraordinarily difficult situation. People are doing the best they can,” he added. 

Locke said that “remarkably little” is known about indoor air quality, apart from industrial settings.

“We’re going to learn a lot about extreme wildfire — or as the governor called it climate fire — health effects,” Locke said. “This is a giant and tragic experiment that’s going on, on the whole West Coast.”

The terrible air quality prompted Jefferson County emergency management officials last week to begin developing plans for how to set up “clean air” shelters, where people can escape when air quality plummets.

Williams is also thinking ahead.

“In the long term this made me realize that I want to be a lot more prepared for smoke season,” Williams said. “I need to make sure I have a lot of the N95 masks on hand for my employees; I think we would’ve been able to work a little bit more if we’d have been able to supply employees with those.” 

“It’s so hard to predict because it could happen anywhere between early August and late September,” she said.