AQI 151: Safety Sue explains herself

They call me Safety Sue. It was not entirely a compliment.

I'm the one who asks if you remembered to put on sunscreen. Who teaches how to get and out of a kayak with fewer injury risks. Who reads the wind three ways before saying yes to heading out. Who has, more than once, watched a group's faces fall while I explained that no, we're not going out today because we truly care about your well being.

I've made my peace with my role as the party pooper who makes tough decisions because my conscience demands it.

Here's the thing about the nickname: every hazard I manage, I can see. Fifteen knots looks like fifteen knots. A squall line announces itself an hour out. Cold water has a number and I know it and feel it. You can stand on the shore and check my work.

This week is different, and it has changed my summer. Yours too.

The hazard you can't see

Wildfire smoke at an AQI of 151+ looks like haze. Haze looks like a normal humid Michigan afternoon with maybe some dust from a farmer cutting hay. Your brain files it under summer weather and moves on, because nothing in your body's warning system evolved to flag a slightly milky sky.

PM2.5 is the part that hurts you — particles under 2.5 microns, roughly one-thirtieth the width of a human hair. Small enough to get past your nose and throat, into the deep lung, and through into the bloodstream. There is no threshold below which it's harmless. There's only more and less.

So this is the one hazard on my list that I cannot manage by looking. It needs an technical instrument and a number.

My number is 151

That's it. That's the whole answer, and I'll put it in writing because I think anyone who runs outdoor operations should too. After running a tour on the first smokey day, I had thoughts. I spent the following day working through all of them, and I'm glad I did.

At an AQI of 151 or above, we not launching. Not a shortened trip, not a mellow paddle.

Here's why that number and not another. AirNow has the scale — six color-coded bands from Good to Hazardous. I didn't pluck 151 out of thin air. It's where orange turns red: the exact point EPA stops saying "unhealthy for sensitive groups" and starts saying "unhealthy," meaning everyone. Below it, the guidance is that most people are fine. At it, they aren't. That's the top of the band I'm still willing to work in, and it's where I call the turnaround.

I'm not telling you 152 is a medical emergency. I'm telling you it's the ceiling of what I'll ask a guest and a guide to breathe for two to four hours on the water. Paddling is steady exertion, and exertion is a multiplier — you pull far more air, and far more particulate, into your lungs than you would sitting on a porch looking at the same sky. Same number, bigger dose for the person doing physical work.

But the number is only half of it, and this is the half most people don't think about.

Smoke isn't just something you breathe. It's weather. It settles into the channels, tangles with the day's wind, humidity, and water temps and takes the visibility down with it. By the time the air is solidly in the unhealthy band, the far islands go soft and the horizon flattens out.

And here's the part that has nothing to do with your lungs. Motorized boats and PWCs (personal watercraft — AKA jet skis) are a hazard out here on the clearest days — most stay in the marked channels, but not always, and plenty of the crossings between islands and bays have no designated channel at all. In flat light and haze, colors wash out and small objects get hard to pick apart. A low kayak against grey water is exactly what a boater loses sight of first. You seeing less is one problem. A powerboat not seeing you, mid-crossing, is the one that actually hurts.

That's the same hazard as fog, and I treat it the same way. When it's bad enough, the National Weather Service says so directly — a Dense Smoke Advisory, issued when smoke drops visibility below a nautical mile. Their words for what that means: hazardous especially to small craft, and low visibility will make navigation difficult. That's not me being cautious. That's the federal forecast telling you that you can't see.

So there are two things that stop a trip, not one: 1. what the air is doing to your body, and 2. what the smoke is doing to the water. Either one is enough.

That's also why any guide of mine can turn a trip around at any time — no approval, no justifying it afterward, and I've never once second-guessed that call. That can be for wind, for a guest who's petering out, or for a horizon that closed in faster than the forecast said. The number gets us to the launch. The guide's eyes get us home.

This week the readings sat in the unhealthy to hazardous bands for days — 160s to 500+ across most of the region — and EGLE's air quality advisories kept getting extended past their initial expiration. Smoke is complicated and uncooperative. As a result, I refunded tours.

I want to be honest that this is hard. Not philosophically hard — hard like a real hole in a short season. Every cancelled trip means guides who don't work, and a family disappointed after driving up and turning right to see us.

There's a name for the thing I'm fighting when I make that call. Pilots call it get-there-itis — the FAA's own term — and the formal version is plan continuation bias: you keep pushing a plan that new information says you should scrap, and the pull gets stronger the closer you are to the finish. The pressure the accident reports name isn't the money already spent. It's not wanting to let people down. That's the exact feeling standing between me and a cancellation, every time. Naming it is how I beat it.

I hate making the call. I do it anyway, because the alternative is heightened collision risks combined with putting your lungs — and my staff's, and mine — on the wrong side of a decision over delivering your tour and a bottom line.

And I'll be honest about what 151 is: it's my best call with the information I have today, not a number carved in stone. As we get more smoke days — and once there's a monitor in the Les Cheneaux community logging them — I'll start to see what a given number actually looks like out on these channels. How 175 reads on the water. Where the visibility really goes. That's knowledge that doesn't exist yet, because nobody's been measuring here. Until it does, 151 is the line, and I'd rather set it too cautious than learn the hard way that I set it too high. We will let you know when our PurpleAir monitor is up and running (ordered 7/17/26).

The same rule covers rentals

If you rent a boat from us, it's the same 151, and the same two reasons. Not because we think you can't decide about your own lungs — but because the two problems move together. As the air climbs into that band, smoke is also settling into the channels and taking the visibility with it. And a renter alone on the water, who a powerboat can't pick out of the haze, is exactly the situation we can't manage from shore. So at 151 we stop renting, the same as we stop guiding. If the National Weather Service posts a near shore Dense Smoke Advisory, tours and rentals are done regardless of the number — they've already made the call. Below the line, we'll tell you what the air's doing and the rest is your day.

What I look at, and what each thing is for

The most useful distinction I can give you: forecast tools tell me whether to call the guide in. Measurement tools tell me whether we launch (several below are both smartphone apps and websites). Forecasts and tools are not interchangeable, and mixing them up is how people talk themselves into bad calls.

PurpleAir — the measurement. Real sensors, real air, right now. Open it in a browser and add it to your home screen. Four settings matter: data layer US EPA PM2.5 (AQI), conversion set to US EPA, averaging at 1-hour, indoor sensors off. Ignore anything flagged low-confidence. One honest caveat — the smoothing lags a building plume and over-reports a clearing one, so on a fast-moving day it's telling you where you were a little while ago.

If you want to measure your own air where you actually are, portable units exist — Atmotube and AirBeam both make one you can clip to a bag. Not necessary for most people. But the reason they exist is worth knowing: EPA built a mobile monitor of their own because smoke plumes have steep gradients over short distances, and the fixed network wasn't catching what people were actually breathing. Which is the same reason I'm putting a station at our location.

AirNow — the official regulatory number. Fewer sensors, better instruments.

Windy — wind, which is what moves smoke around and what I'm reading every day of the season anyway. Convenient thing: you don't need two apps for this. Windy's layer sits right on the PurpleAir map, so you can see what the sensors are reading and what's pushing it, in one view.

SmokeWX — forecast. Surface layer only. The upper-atmosphere layer is an orange sunset, not a health signal, and if you're reading that one you're going to scare yourself over nothing. You can set alerts for different locations.

FireSmoke.ca — Canada's model, about two days out. Good for staffing decisions.

Astrospheric — they have a smoke layer. I use it. I'm including it here specifically to tell you not to use it for this. It's a tool for looking at stars and the northern lights — I use it to decide whether it's worth chasing a KP5. Its smoke layer predicts whether you can see through the column, not what you're breathing at the surface. It is not an air quality tool and I have watched people treat it like one.

The maps have data gaps

Open PurpleAir and look at where you are. Here in the Les Cheneaux Islands, there's nothing. None at the Straits, DeTour, or Drummond. The nearest sensors south are more than an hour's drive. The closest EUP coverage is one in Kincheloe and a handful in and around the Soo — 45 to 60 minutes up the road, on the other side of the escarpment. You may discover you also live, work, or play in a hole.

That's a problem for making good decisions. When the state posts an advisory that covers Cheboygan and Cedarville identically, I have nothing to check it against. I'm making a decision for your group off a map with a hole where we live.

Right now I can only tell you when we're not going. I'd like to be able to tell you when we are going out to play.

That's why I'm installing a PurpleAir monitor. Outdoor unit, running year-round, and the data will be public on the PurpleAir map for free, forever — whether you ever book with me or not. If others decide to put one up, we'd be glad to pass along what we learned getting ours going. We will let you know when our PurpleAir monitor is up and running.

Inside is not automatically better

This is the part most advice skips, and it's the part I most want you to hear.

"Close and seal windows and doors" is not protection. It's a delay. PM2.5 comes through the envelope of any normal house, and once it's in, it stays — often still climbing after the outdoor number has dropped. A closed-up house with no filtration is just outside, later. And if you're frying something, burning a candle, or running the vacuum, inside can be worse than outside.

Closing windows only works if you're also cleaning the air.

Build a DIY air cleaning box. Twenty-inch box fan, four MERV 13 furnace filters, a piece of cardboard, duct tape. Roughly $80. It's called a Corsi-Rosenthal box, and it isn't a hack — EPA's own chamber research found DIY box-fan cleaners cut indoor PM2.5 during simulated wildfire smoke about as well as professional HEPA units costing five to ten times as much. The cube moves 300 to 600 CFM. UC Davis has the build guide, and the man who co-invented it is their engineering dean.

Specifics that matter:

• MERV 13 is a floor. EPA measured 43% less clean air delivery just going from 13 to 11 — same fan, same noise. MERV 11 is only required to catch 20% of particles under a micron, and wildfire smoke averages around 0.3. Rutgers found a 13 box beat the same box in MERV 8 by 71%, for about 41% more in filter cost.

  
  

• Two-inch filters beat one-inch. Meaningfully.

  
  

• Shroud the fan corners with cardboard. Rosenthal measured air running backward near the corners without one.
  

• Watch the filter arrows. They point the direction air should flow (inward). And position the filter so the channels are vertical.
  

• Swap filters every three months in smoke season, not six.
  

Check your own furnace, too. Go look at what's in it right now. If it says MERV 8, that's a dust filter — protecting the equipment, not you. MERV 13 is what catches smoke, and it's the easiest upgrade in this whole post: you already own the fan. The catch — not every residential system can pull through a 13, so check the depth your unit takes (a 4-inch breathes far easier than a 1-inch) and ask whoever services it if you're not sure. And run the fan: most thermostats have a Fan setting separate from Heat and Cool, and "On" instead of "Auto" keeps air moving through the filter even when the system isn't cooling.

Buy your filters in February. I went looking for MERV 13 this week and there were none. I'm building with 11s because that's what I could find. Safety Sue could not get the good filters either. This is the most actionable sentence in this whole post: the person who bought in the off-season is the person breathing clean air right now. Instead I'm building two DIY air-cleaning boxes.

In the car, hit recirculate — the button with the arrow curving around inside the car. Otherwise on fresh air you're pulling the outside in and delivering smoke to your face. Windows up too. And turn your headlights from Auto to On — the sensor reads smoke as daylight and leaves you dark, and in flat haze you want to be seen as much as you want to see.

On foot, if you're walking the dog along a road, the same haze that hides a kayak hides a pedestrian. A reflective vest, a blinking light, or just bright colors instead of grey. Drivers are seeing less than they think they are.

Masks, and the awkwardness of them. A well-fitted N95 does real work against PM2.5 — a cloth or surgical mask doesn't, so if you're going to bother, bother with the right one. On land, running errands, walking from the car: genuinely useful. On the water it's the wrong tool, and if the air's bad enough to need one out there, that's a day we're not paddling anyway.

Here's the honest part: it's hard to be the only person walking the dog wearing one. It always is. But it breaks the moment one person goes first — and you might be giving the person behind you permission to do the sensible thing they were already thinking about. Be the one who goes first.

Know the signs to go in: chest tightness, a cough that won't quit, burning throat or eyes. Chest pain or real shortness of breath is a 911 call, not a tough-it-out.

This isn't a bad week. It's the pattern.

We've seen this show before. As of mid-July 2026 there were 180 active fires in northern Ontario straight upwind of us — 63 of them out of control in the northwest alone — plus 15 more in northeastern Minnesota that had burned about 55,000 acres. The Boundary Waters closed. Canada-wide, more than 880 active fires, 580 out of control.

The jet stream could shift and shut it off. We can't plan on it. And there's next summer, and the one after.

Everything above works for ozone and smog days too. Those are also invisible. Same instruments, same box, same habit of looking at a number instead of the sky.

The other side of this

Full disclosure on the Safety Sue thing: early in my career, before any of this, I worked as a non-motorized transportation planner, and part of that job was the regional ozone program in Kent and Ottawa counties — what's now the West Michigan Clean Air Coalition. So I've spent time on the other end of it, too.

Wildfire smoke isn't our doing — it blows in from both near and far, same as a lot of air pollution, and this week's is coming from both a few hundred and a thousand miles away. But some of the same small actions that keep you from adding to a hot-weather ozone day work here too, if only by not literally adding more particulates to the air you're already breathing.

Combine errands. Refuel and mow after 6:00 PM, once the sun's losing some strength. Skip the campfire and play a board game. Walk the short stuff. Not heroic, and I won't pretend it fixes Ontario. It just keeps you from being one more small source on a day the air's already against us.

The people upwind

I've spent this whole post talking about smoke. It's worth saying plainly what's making it.

On Monday, Namaygoosisagagun First Nation — Collins First Nation — burned to the ground. The entire community. People got into a handful of boats, packed in with their pets, and drove across the lake while their homes caught fire behind them. Everyone got out. Chief Helen Paavola was in Ottawa when it happened, on the phone, losing service, not knowing for a stretch whether anyone had survived.

They built those houses themselves. They live off that land and that water. The Chief says they're going back.

Armstrong, Whitesand First Nation, Gull Bay First Nation, Lac La Croix, Lac des Mille Lacs — all evacuated. Evacuees are in hotels and university residences in Thunder Bay.

I'm cancelling some kayak trips and rentals. The smoke I'm complaining about is somebody's house. Let's keep that in proportion.

If you want to do something: several of the affected First Nations are accepting donations directly, Anishinabek Nation is coordinating support on behalf of Namaygoosisagagun, and the Canadian Red Cross runs a wildfire fund for immediate relief and long-term recovery. A search will get you there in a minute.

One caution, and I hate that it's necessary: verify before you send. Disasters draw impersonators. Confirm you're on the organization's own website before money moves.

If you want to help the businesses in the vast swath of this plume

This one's not just me. It's every lodge, restaurant, tour charter, campground, and shop from here to wherever this plume ends — anyone who sells time outdoors or vacation experiences. When the air goes, we all go together.

Don't send them sympathy. Do any of this instead:

• Reschedule instead of cancelling. It's the single most useful thing.
  

• Buy a gift certificate. It's good whenever, and it lands now.
  

• Visit your favorite businesses. Retail doesn't care about the AQI. Neither does a restaurant, a bookstore, or a gallery. The lights are on and somebody's standing there.
  

• Ask for a partial refund if you're able. I'm mentioning it because most people don't know it's an option when canceling a week-long cottage rental, fishing charter, or tour.
  

One habit

This whole thing comes down to a habit: check a number and look at the water before you go, instead of after. If you own your own paddling gear, you already make these calls — I'm just suggesting smoke and visibility earn a permanent spot on the list, right next to wind and water temp. Same planning you already do. One more input. Be aware of the get-there-itis.

You hired me to keep you out of the water you can't handle. This is the same job. The hazard just doesn't have the decency to look like one.

— Sue PS: Check on your neighbors — the older ones, and the ones with small kids and no AC.