Washington DC sees 'Code Red' air quality after massive fireworks display on the 4th of July

As the United States celebrated the Fourth of July, residents of Washington, DC, on Sunday briefly experienced the worst air quality of any major city in the world, due to a massive fireworks show. The capital witnessed horrible air quality in the aftermath of a massive 40-minute Fourth of July fireworks show.

In light of this, city officials issued a Code Red Air Quality Alert, asking residents to limit time outside. They warned that the air is “unhealthy for seniors, kids, people with medical conditions” and that the general public may experience health issues. At 5:30 pm (local time), DC slipped down to No. 26 on the air quality monitoring platform, IQAir.

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It is pertinent to note that the fireworks show was organised by Freedom 250, a Trump-backed nonprofit tasked with putting on a series of semiquincentennial events. It came at a time when DC and the Northeast more widely suffered under an extreme heat wave. According to CNN, the district saw a triple-digit high temperature on Saturday.

Dr Kisha Davis, chief health officer of nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, told CNN that the air quality was the same as smoking a cigarette. “The air quality today is like running a marathon while smoking a cigarette,” she said,  adding that the 850,000-firework display around the National Mall would make matters worse.

Rains could help

However, the forecasts showed a chance for thunderstorms on Sunday evening. Davis noted that the rain could help cleanse the air. “It does push all of those, you know, chemicals and pollutants into the water system, but they are at least out of the air,” Davis told CNN Sunday.

It is pertinent to note that the show set a Guinness World Record, as hundreds of thousands of fireworks shells were launched from 10 sites spanning the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Potomac River barges and West Potomac Park. The benchmark was 810,904 fireworks, which was set during the 2016 New Year's Eve countdown celebration in the Philippines.

Not only this year, but the American capital's spectacle was also about 10 times bigger than Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Show in New York, which is typically the nation’s largest Independence Day bash. As of Sunday, there is no public confirmation whether the display had been certified as a new world record.

As of Sunday, there was no public confirmation that they diplay had been certified as a new world record. Meanwhile, Internal National Park Service documents obtained by The Washington Post showed the fireworks show was expected to cause “very unhealthy” conditions in central DC.

The documents suggested that people should limit exposure to the pollution and recommended that those watching the fireworks outdoors wear N95 masks. Apart from this, the DC  Fire and EMS Department reported 96 patient contacts and 40 patient transports from the National Mall between midnight Friday and 9 am (local time) on Sunday. It’s unclear how many of those incidents were related to heat or air quality.