Smoke from wildfires continues to cover much of the eastern U.S. There are significant costs to dealing with fires: in 2021, the Department of the Interior and Forest Service spent more than $4 billion on wildfire suppression.

State and local governments have big budgets for this, too, and that’s just the money spent extinguishing fires. Dealing with the effects of smoke has its own price.

Where there’s smoke, there’s also a massive increase in costs for health care and commerce. 

“On the health side we see this very dramatically in the Emergency Department data,” said Marshall Burke, an economist at Stanford.  

According to Burke, the number of people going to emergency rooms with respiratory issues doubles when wildfire smoke is present. 

People who are pregnant and exposed to smoke are more likely to give birth prematurely, and “being born early can have long-term health impacts,” Burke said. 

Wildfire smoke also affects a variety of industries such as tourism. Places being covered in wildfire smoke makes them unsafe to visit. Agriculture is affected, as crops suffer when air quality is poor. 

Smoke exposure makes it harder for all of us to think and work, said Harvard professor Joseph Allen, author of the book “Healthy Buildings”.

“When the air quality is worse, your brain pauses a bit more,” he said.

Allen says the air outside directly affects the air inside, meaning it’s harder to make strategic decisions or respond during a crisis.