A brush fire in Spokane Valley, Washington, in 2008. Photo : Young Kwak ( AP )

Massive, ravaging wildfires are now the norm on the West Coast, with the state of California now regularly breaking fire records, Canada’s British Columbia experiencing the third-worst fire season in recorded history, and all the smoke from those fires spreading across much of the continent and even further. But don’t worry, an area man has a plan, according to Global News, and that plan is blowing all the smoke from Canadian wildfires back up across the border with box fans.




Per Global News’ report, Spokane, Washington resident Caleb Moon formed a Facebook event titled “Blow Spokane’s Smoke Away to Canada.” It is impossible to believe that the August 24th event, wh ich asks each of the city’s 550,000 residents to place “at least 5 box fans on their roof” to accomplish this, is anything but a joke. But Moon at least played it earnest in an interview with the network:

The event may sound like a joke, but Moon said he’s serious about this. “We figure a small box fan can move smoke about six feet, so if you put 500,000 of them together, you can do the math on that, we can probably get it pretty far into Canada,” he said.


British Columbia Centre for Disease Control senior environmental health specialist Sarah Henderson told Global News the idea was “very ridiculous,” noting that a fan does not magically clean air but “pulls air through it.” So even if it did work—which, again, it would not—the fans would probably just pull in fresh smoke from California.

In any case, dumb plans for how to deal with the wildfires are kind of in vogue in the U.S. right now. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has spent much of the past few weeks rambling about how the fires are caused by anything from poor forest management to “environmental terrorists” and definitely not climate change, as is agreed to be a major factor by experts. Donald Trump has blamed the fires on “bad environmental laws” preventing firefighters from just spraying them with water, which is complete nonsense but nonetheless served as a pretext for the White House to seize control of protected California waterways and open up more federal lands to logging.

[Global News]