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With help from Zi-Ann Lum and Wes Venteicher.

A WARM WELCOME — For those unaccustomed to and unnerved by the wildfire haze that’s given your eastern city an alien hue this week: Welcome to the apocalyptic side of California.

Red skies? Sooty discharge when you blow your nose? That’s old hat to Californians, who have vivid memories of 2020, when 4.3 million acres – an area the size of Connecticut and Delaware combined – burned across the state. Canada’s fires, at more than 8 million acres so far (approximately the size of Maryland), are putting ours to shame, though.

Below, some tips for keeping yourself safe and sane:

— There’s no secret shortcut. Stay inside, especially if you’re very young, old, in ill health or pregnant, and definitely don’t exercise outside.

Wear a mask — an N95, not a thin surgical one. Pour one out for the 1,200 excess deaths in California that Stanford researchers estimated were triggered by smoke inhalation in 2020, or the 750 excess Covid-specific deaths that Harvard researchers modeled across the West Coast (or, if you’re more bottom-line minded, the $148.5 billion in economic impacts estimated from California’s 2018 fire season).

— Get an air filter. A MERV-13 filter duct-taped to the intake side of a box fan works fine and costs $10. Four filters taped together is even better. They’re especially good for schools that may not have fancy purifiers, according to Alistair Hayden, a professor of public and ecosystem health at Cornell University.

“They’re safe, they’re effective, and the best thing is they’re cheap,” said Hayden, who was living in Los Angeles during the 2020 fires and evacuated his leaky apartment. “Air quality really impacts learning. Then students learn how to do this and can show their families. It’s the most affordable way to get good clean air at home.”

California is also piloting some “clean air centers” in low-income neighborhoods for people who are less likely to have well-insulated homes or the means to buy air filters (although funding for them got cut in this year’s state budget). And for those who have to work outside, California has labor standards for smoke exposure. But there’s no foolproof way of dealing with it.

“We are nowhere close to managing the air pollution problem,” said Michael Wara, director of Stanford’s Climate and Energy Policy Program. “The only solution is spending a lot of money installing heat pumps that have air conditioning and high-quality air filtration.”

— Get used to weird things. The smoke is only the beginning. Be thankful you don’t have public safety power shutoffs, which have quickly become the norm in fireprone areas of California as a way for utilities to avoid liability.

You also aren’t yet affected by prescribed burns, which are blazes set intentionally during the wet season to reduce the risk of wildfires later in the year.

California’s wildfires have strengthened support for controlled burns because people realize that fire is inevitable, so they might as well try to control when it happens. That means more smoke year-round, with the goal of having less in the summer.

“Beneficial fire still creates smoke,” Hayden said. “We’re going to need to have smoke expertise as part of our planning for those.”

— Suck it up. There is a sense among those in the trenches that it’s good in some ways for the East Coast to be experiencing this.

“It’s not schadenfreude, but it’s more like, ‘We’ve been dealing with this, now you guys can see,’” said University of California Irvine earth systems professor Steven Davis, a coauthor of the cost study and head of climate science at emissions reporting platform Watershed.

“Like so many things, when it happens to New York, it becomes real for people,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for California’s Office of Emergency Services. (He’s a native New Yorker, so it’s OK.) “Our friends and colleagues on the East Coast are learning today what Californians have known for some time, which is that the effects of climate change and the extreme weather whiplash we face don’t just impact the people where the wildfires happen.”

The hope is that the fires bring home some of the consequences of climate change, and show precisely why California has been trying to lower its emissions for the past 15 years.

“The silver lining of this happening is now more people are aware of these hazards,” Hayden said. “More people becoming aware that we need to do something is a good thing, and will benefit everyone in the long run.”

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