4 min readNew DelhiSep 10, 2020 03:13 PM IST
First published on: Sep 10, 2020 at 12:25 PM IST
Residents of San Francisco and several other cities across the US’ West Coast awoke to eerie orange skies after clouds of smoke from multiple nearby wildfires blocked all sunlight and triggered a downpour of ash and soot.
San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley were blanketed in orange to rust-tinted skies as strong winds continued to carry smoke and ash from the wildfires to the northern parts of California, CNN reported. While the sky was tinted a light yellow on Tuesday, it darkened to a deep orange by the next morning, bystanders said.
“When the smoke and ash get even thicker close to the wildfires, it can cut the sunlight out completely, making it look like the dead of night,” CNN meteorologist Judson Jones explained.
The recent wildfires caused a 25-day stretch of unhealthy air quality in the San Francisco Bay Area, setting a new record in the region. The record was previously set in 2018, when plumes of smoke from the devastating Camp Fire caused a sharp decline in air quality for 14 straight days.
Surprisingly, despite the darkened sky and showers of ash, the air quality index in San Francisco did not reach unhealthy levels on Wednesday, AP reported. Fog from the Pacific Ocean — wedged between the smoke and the ground — acted as a filter, as per reports.
Social media was flooded with images and videos shared from the streets of cities across California, which were shrouded in darkness all day. Aamir Vaid, a San Francisco resident, had to cancel plans to have lunch in the city because of the overcast sky.
“It feels like I should be in bed sleeping,” Vaid told the Associated Press. He added that it felt “strange and ominous outside”. “Good morning, hell,” another social media user tweeted, sharing a picture of the bright orange sky from his living room window.
“I was wondering what time it was. I looked outside and it looked like doomsday,” Carl Juan Anderson, an Oakland resident, told the New York Times. “It feels like the end of the world!” Berkeley resident Beth Ghelghorn said.
A series of wildfires broke out across California in August, amidst an intense heat wave. Nearly 14,000 firefighters have been deployed to douse the flames, which are believed to have razed at least 2.5 million acres of land till date. Of the multiple wildfires, the SCU Lightning Complex has become one of the most dangerous to break out in the state’s history.
The sprawling August Complex fire, which has spread across northern California, was elevated from a ‘megafire’ to a ‘gigafire’ after it scorched more than one million acres of land (Source: New York Times) 
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