a harrowing sight. you are supposed to drop into paradise. unfortunately this is hell on earth for so many people. luckily the fire activity has died down. behind us we have a group of firefighters keeping tabs on one hot spot making sure it doesn t get out of control. so many people hurting on the island of maui at this hour. it is still unclear how the fires started on tuesday. but when they did, this island was a tinderbox. things were so incredibly dry and winds were whipping in part due to hurricane doria doria, winter gusting the flames and it made it so difficult for firefighters to put out the flames. we had firefighting helicopters grounded because they couldn t fly with such high winds. we have communities in the western part of maui devastated. especially in the community of
under heat warnings where temperatures could top 110 degrees fahrenheit through the weekend. people in europe are cleaning up from severe storms. there were hail reports mostly in spain with some measuring about 6 centimeterses. heavy rainfall was in italy with some areas getting as much as 143 mill meertsimeters of rain. but the storms are wrapping up and no threats for severe weather in the coming hours across europe. but it is not so good news in canada where the wildfires won t let up anytime soon. this forecast outlines a high likelihood of heightened fire activity through the next two months. drought conditions when coupled with above normal temperatures across most of the country means that the risk of fire activity is going to remain very high throughout the majority of the
had this before, and you re right. it is back. here s a live look at st. paul, minnesota from our earth cam. you can barely make out the buildings across the skyline, and we re looking at poor air quality anywhere across wisconsin, portions of minnesota, and down into iowa. we have air quality alerts up, and you can see these yellow and red dots. those indicate some poor air quality. we have unhealthy air quality across portions of iowa on into near chicago even, seeing poor air quality as you saw from that picture and that smoke is just pouring in from canada. these wildfires and we talked about how this could be the summer of smoke. we are seeing it. so it really all depends on the fire activity in canada, and the wind direction. here s going to be the near surface smoke forecast going forward, and you can see that poor air quality is going to be pretty far south, but what really caught my attention is this plume right here. you can see around the canada/u.s. border by saturday morni