Today's episode is brought to you by Mentos Pure Freshcom. It's time to get energized.

So we had a forecast of a big wind storm that was coming through, something that was like

didn't ever happen, like wasn't a common occurrence, and scheduled to start on Labor Day.

That's Kate Andrews. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

My friends and I joked that like, oh, it's not going to be a big deal. They're forecasting

this crazy storm, but it's going to be totally fine. And it was not fine. It ripped through town,

it carried flames. And because it was so dry already, because we hadn't had rain,

and I don't know how many days, it was, I think, the major fire starter. It was what kicked everything off.

Last week, wildfires in Oregon went from bad to really bad.

When a fire burns more than 100,000 acres, it gets labeled a mega fire.

Oregon has seen five of those this month. For a little perspective, Oregon had six mega fires

over the entire 20th century. So this is pretty unprecedented. Anyway, the wind Andrews was talking

about not only caused fires to spread rapidly, wiping out towns and forcing thousands of people

to flee their homes, but last week it started pushing tons of smoke right into cities like Portland.

When they, we woke up and it was apocalyptic.

For a few days this week and over the weekend, Portland, Oregon had the worst air quality of any

city in the world. My husband and I both had raging headaches all day long. We've woken up in the

middle of the night and just been coughing and not being able to breathe. And that's here in Portland

where we're not even close to the fires. Welcome to skim this week. We're going to try and clear the

air on what's going on with the wildfires on the west coast. And what can be done to stop each

fire season from being worse than the one before. We'll also talk to a lung expert about the health

risks of breathing in all this smoke, which even if you're on the east coast or even Europe,

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