Wildfire smoke
2008-06-26 wildfire smoke episode affecting Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC
Daily PM2.5 peaked at 84.9 µg/m³ near Virginia Beach across 1 covered metro home to 1.8 million people. 1 metro placed a top-ten day in their record.
Counting the extra PM2.5 above each metro's typical day, this event handed the average affected resident ≈ 5.6 cigarettes. Across everyone living in the affected metros, that is the collective equivalent of ≈ 10 million cigarettes. An awareness illustration of outdoor exposure at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette (Berkeley Earth), counting only the event's ranked days; not a medical dose.
Episode peak
-- cigarettes
The smoke map's scale, replayed over this event: the surface interpolates between covered metros' daily records, framed to the affected region. Hover for a reading, click a metro to pin it to the card. Days a monitor did not report draw nothing.
What happened, in the record
Qualified frozen evidence supports wildfire smoke as the broad root cause.
Affected metros
| Metro | Peak PM2.5 | Cigarettes, whole event | Peak day | All-time standing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC | 84.9 µg/m³ | 6.4 | Jun 26, 2008 | #3 of its top days |
"Cigarettes, whole event" totals a metro's ranked event days at 22 µg/m³ per cigarette: what a person outdoors there breathed across the event, as the illustration. "All-time standing" is where this episode's days sit in each metro's ranked record (worst-area measure, since 1999). Full local context is on each metro's Air Records page.
The evidence
EPA AQS monitor qualifier 2
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier RT — Wildfire-U. S. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted request-exclusion qualifier (RT, Wildfire-U. S.) on 3 PM2.5 samples in the candidate CBSA on 2008-06-26, identifying wildfire smoke as affecting the samples. A request-exclusion qualifier is an official submitting-agency causal claim, but this endpoint does not establish EPA concurrence.
- AQS PM2.5 qualifier RT — Wildfire-U. S. EPA AQS carries an agency-submitted request-exclusion qualifier (RT, Wildfire-U. S.) on 1 PM2.5 sample in the candidate CBSA on 2008-06-27, identifying wildfire smoke as affecting the sample. A request-exclusion qualifier is an official submitting-agency causal claim, but this endpoint does not establish EPA concurrence.
Agency and publisher pages 2
- Forests and Rangelands Success Story: Great Dismal Swamp Firefighting Government fire documentation states that smoke from the South One Fire lingered over surrounding communities for many weeks, without event-specific PM2.5 attribution.
- Smoke Text Product NOAA documented a narrow, dense smoke plume from the South 1 wildfire over North Carolina and Virginia two days after the event; it supports a closely timed regional smoke hypothesis but not direct attribution for June 26–27 Virginia Beach PM2.5.
What remains uncertain
- AQS qualifiers are submitting-agency causal flags and do not by themselves establish EPA concurrence.
Status and provenance
Research preview: this record carries research-only status and its boundaries, cause, and name may change as evidence review completes. Grouping policy common_sense_root_cause_grouping.v2. The cause label reflects the assembled evidence above, not an IAQng detection formula.