The sidewalk cafes of Silicon Valley’s Mountain View, usually packed at lunchtime with workers from Google and other high-tech companies, were mostly abandoned on Monday afternoon.
A few people, some wearing surgical masks, rushed past and ducked inside stores, avoiding the acrid, smoky air outside.
Although the deadly wildfires around Paradise, California, are about 240km to the northeast, the San Francisco Bay Area has been blanketed with a thick layer of haze for days.
San Francisco on Monday reported that air quality was unhealthy for the 12th straight day.
Purple Air, a private company that monitors air quality worldwide, last week ranked northern California as having the foulest air in the world.
Weather forecasters promised improvement when rain arrives today.
“If I don’t have the mask on, I actually feel like I can taste the sediment in the air,” Eric Ryzl told reporters as he delivered packages for United Parcel Service at a Mountain View apartment complex.
Many Bay Area universities and secondary schools remained closed on Monday and did not plan to reopen until after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
The schools that did open restricted students, canceling sports and other outdoor activities.
Joanne Doria, a junior at Los Altos High School, was wearing a mask and said that she was trying to avoid going outside when possible.
“The tiny particles from the smoke can damage your lungs and I have slight asthma, as well as a history of getting pneumonia,” she said.
She added that she donned a mask, “because my dad is worried.”
Parks and zoos were closed, and streets usually packed at lunchtime were ghostly quiet.
Across the bay from San Francisco, a group called Mask Oakland planned to hand out 50,000 masks to homeless people and others most at risk in that city.
San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge was shrouded in haze as the air quality index was listed at 172.
Anything above 151 is considered unhealthy and leads to calls for even healthy people to avoid prolonged outdoor exertion.
Tourists found attractions such as Alcatraz Island closed, and some Bay Area residents headed to Nevada and Oregon in search of fresher air.
At the University of California, Berkeley, classes were canceled on Monday and yesterday, and chancellor Carol Christ sent a message to those students remaining on campus suggesting which libraries and classrooms have the best air filtration systems.
The Camp Fire, which wiped out the town of Paradise on Nov. 8 and is still burning in the drought-parched Sierra Nevada foothills, is the worst in California history.
At least 77 people have died, about 1,000 are missing and more than 11,000 homes have been destroyed.
Alan Wang, a local real-estate agent, and his three young children were all wearing masks as they hurried into a Mountain View cafe.
He has tried to limit how much his kids are outside for the past couple of weeks.
However, Wang said that the air is still not as bad as what he experienced as a student in the late 1990s in China.
“I used to live in Beijing and it was much more disgusting than this,” he said.
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