The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has declared a statewide Code Red Air Quality Action Day for particulate matter for July 16.<\/p>\n
Wildfire smoke from Canada and Minnesota will be entering Pennsylvania\u2019s northernmost counties and pushing into southern counties into Thursday.<\/p>\n
Residents are strongly encouraged to check\u00a0www.airnow.gov\u00a0for current conditions in their area.<\/p>\n
During Code Red Air Quality Alerts all residents should consider limiting their outdoor activities, and sensitive groups such as children, elderly residents, and those with respiratory illnesses should avoid long or intense outdoor activities and consider moving activities indoors.<\/p>\n
Residents and businesses within the Air Quality Alert areas are strongly encouraged to voluntarily help reduce fine particulate matter air pollution by:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Avoiding the use of gas-powered lawn and garden equipment;<\/p>\n
\u2022 Reducing or eliminating fireplace and wood stove use; and<\/p>\n
\u2022 Avoiding the open burning of leaves, trash, and other materials<\/p>\n
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s (EPA) Air Quality Index (AQI) provides standardized color codes for forecasting and reporting daily air quality. Green signifies good air quality; Yellow means moderate air quality; Orange represents unhealthy pollution levels for sensitive groups of people; and Red warns of unhealthy pollution levels for all. An Air Quality Alert is declared when the AQI is forecasted to be Code Orange or higher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has declared a statewide Code Red Air Quality Action Day for particulate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[201,182,803,139,28,178,180,179,181,1133],"class_list":["post-246833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-luzerne-county","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-top-stories-stt","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}