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The first sign of trouble blew into New Jersey last year as a benign spectacle.

Smoke from raging wildfires in Canada lingered high in the atmosphere over the Garden State for a few days in late May, allowing for few stunning sunrises and sunsets in a grainy sky. Then, a few weeks later, wildfires erupted closer to the East Coast in Quebec, and a perfect set of weather conditions sent a record amount of smoke billowing into New Jersey for three days, creating a serious public health threat.

A year after the skies turned dark orange on June 6 and the noxious odor of burning wood wafted across the region for days, the threat of wildfire smoke remains due to the gradual warming of the planet, experts say.

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It threatens to turn back a lot of the progress made to clean the region’s air. It has emerged at a time when asthma rates are already on the rise and the number of senior citizens, who are more susceptible to developing chronic lung disease, is expected to explode in New Jersey over the next few years.

Despite the existential threat, there’s some good news — New Jersey will not likely see a smoky rerun of last summer, experts say.

How much of a danger it presents year to year is unknown since conditions have to be just right — not only for wildfires to ignite and linger as long as they did in Canada last year — but for the particular wind alignment to carry all that smoke into the region.

“The threat is going to be different every year because of changes in weather patterns,” said Greg Pope, a professor of earth and environmental studies at Montclair State University.

“There was a perfect circulation system that allowed all that smoke to come down here and that’s not going to happen all the time,” Pope said. “The issue is that the risk is increasing due to climate change and there’s no reason to believe there won’t be a continued threat.”

El Nino transitioning to La Nina

Wildfire season has not been as bad as last year — the worst in Canada’s history, with a record amount of acreage burned. But pockets of wildfires are still still erupting up north, prompting air quality alerts in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota last month. Several fires have ignited in Quebec and southern Ontario in recent weeks.

Helping matters is that the weather phenomenon El Nino is transitioning to La Nina — a cooling of the Pacific Ocean surface that generally brings more rain to North America in the summer.

Despite the forecasts, New York City health officials have already sent out a health advisory to hospitals and other medical providers with a quick overview of the threat wildfire smoke poses along with safety measures that should be taken by those with underlying lung diseases.

Have smoke will travel

Wildfire smoke is not new to New Jersey. The state has hundreds of wildfires each year, from the Highlands to the Pinelands. But unlike Canada or northern California, the amount of fuel that New Jersey forests provide is limited in the nation’s most densely-populated state. Combine that with robust local fire departments and the state forest fire service, and most wildfires are often brought under control quickly in New Jersey.

Still, the region has seen its sky grow hazy in recent summers, including 2020, due to smoke that traveled across the continent from large fires mostly in California. But the smoke from those fires was high in the atmosphere and did not pose a health risk — unlike the Canadian fires last year.

Although June 6 to 8, 2023 saw historically bad air quality in New Jersey with a never-before-seen concentration of small particles of burning wood, wildfire smoke continued to sweep into the region well into July. It was at lower levels, but still concentrated enough to cause health alerts for young children and the elderly.

Asthma-associated emergency department visits were 17% higher than normal among all age groups in the U.S. from April 30 to Aug. 4 last year at the height of the wildfire season, according to a study. Although data is limited for New Jersey, another study in New York showed emergency department visits for asthma doubled for all ages in some of the hardest-hit regions near Lake Ontario, and tripled among older children and young adults.

Cleaner fuels have improved air quality, reduced NJ deaths

The threat of wildfire smoke disrupts the steady progress that has been made cleaning up the region’s air.

Although smog remains a constant problem, especially in summer, microscopic particles that once inundated the air due to burning materials such as coal, diesel fuel and wood have dropped considerably. Cleaner energy generation and more efficient emission controls mandated by environmental laws have been credited along with such market forces as a glut of cheaper energy alternatives, including natural gas.

That, in turn, has caused deaths related to air pollution exposure to drop from 135,000 in 1990 to 71,000 in 2010, according to a 2018 study by the University of North Carolina.

“Our air is much better than it was, say, in the 90s,” said Kevin Stewart, director of Environmental Health for the American Lung Association. “The problem is you can see that being turned back by climate change. It’s undoing a lot of progress that’s been made.”

Meanwhile, Rutgers scientists have been studying the toxicity of the smoke from last year’s Canada wildfires and its long-term health implications.

Air monitors near the New Brunswick campus registered a high of 330 micrograms per cubic meter of particles — about 10 times above New Jersey’s air quality standard — over four hours on June 7 last year. It was the equivalent of breathing in secondhand cigarette smoke in a confined room.

Papers are scheduled to be published in journals over the next few months, and Rutgers will host a conference on the findings in the fall, said Philip Demokritou, director of the school’s Nanoscience and Advanced Materials Center.

“We wanted to find out the chemistry of the particles from those wildfires,” Demokritou said. “We also wanted to see what happens to those particles when they come into contact with pollution that’s already in the air.”

Four weeks into Sen. Bob Menendez’s federal corruption trial in Manhattan, jurors have heard barely a peep about the co-defendant who pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against him.

That changed Wednesday, when prosecutors spent the day explaining failed insurance broker Jose Uribe’s role in what they call a many-tentacled bribery scheme, laying the foundation for former New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to testify Thursday.

Prosecutors say Menendez, New Jersey’s senior senator, called and met with Grewal several times in 2019 in a bid to stop a state insurance fraud investigation and prosecution into Uribe’s friends.

In exchange, Uribe hosted a July 2018 fundraiser for the senator in Cliffside Park and spent tens of thousands of dollars on a new Mercedes-Benz convertible for the senator’s wife, Nadine, who needed a car to replace one she totaled in December 2018, according to testimony Wednesday.

“The deal is to kill and stop all investigation,” Uribe texted his friend Wael Hana, who prosecutors said connected him with the couple.

The senator’s alleged attempt to strong-arm Grewal didn’t work — trucking company owner Elvis Parra, who was scheduled to stand trial in April 2019 for bilking nearly $389,000 from an insurance carrier, pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and got sentenced to probation.

Yet Uribe, who covered the $15,000 down payment on the $67,000-plus Mercedes, continued paying monthly bills on the car — to the tune of about $30,000 — until FBI agents searched the Menendezes’ home in June 2022 as part of their corruption probe.

“The car is home,” Nadine texted the senator after signing paperwork for it at the dealership on April 5, 2019.

“Woopy!!!” the senator texted back.

To Uribe, she texted: “You are a miracle worker who makes dreams come true. I will always remember that.”

Prosecutor Paul Monteleoni methodically presented hundreds of texts, emails, calls, and other documents Wednesday, through questioning FBI Special Agent Rachel Graves, that showed Uribe began texting Nadine Menendez so frequently for access to the senator that within months, she called him “family.”

“I will not let you down. You are family,” Nadine Menendez assured Uribe by text when it appeared the state investigation was proceeding.

The senator called Grewal in early September 2019 and two days later met him and Andrew Bruck in a meeting that was conspicuously missing from his official Senate calendar, testimony showed. Bruck was Grewal’s executive assistant attorney general and briefly succeeded him when Grewal left in July 2021 to become director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of enforcement.

After that meeting, the senator texted his wife: “Done.” Uribe later texted a friend and told him that he met with Menendez — whom he called “the Amigo” — at his apartment after the Grewal meeting, and the senator reported feeling “very positive” about it, testimony showed.

In a day of a dizzying amount of exhibits, prosecutors continued trying to dismantle defense attorneys’ claim that Menendez didn’t know much of what his wife did, showing text exchanges both banal and suggestive that he was well-aware of her doings. They also have repeatedly referred to his frequent use of a Find My Friends tracking app to check on Nadine’s whereabouts.

Wednesday’s testimony revealed other tantalizing tidbits that promise to make Nadine Menendez’s trial interesting. She’s not set to be tried until at least July, after Judge Sidney H. Stein granted her request for a delay so she could get needed medical treatment.

Texts showed that Nadine had a flip phone she used for sensitive communications that she called her “007 cell number.” On her loan application for the Mercedes, she said she was “self-employed,” listed her occupation as “vice president,” and reported an income of $197,000.

The December 12, 2018, night she totaled her Mercedes, she was on her way to see Rosemarie Sorce, the wife of a real estate developer and a Menendez donor, according to testimony.

She texted Sorce at 7:28 p.m. that she had hit detours and was just a few miles away — and six minutes later, texted again: “911 call me.”

“I’m sitting in an ambulance,” she texted Sorce 20 minutes later.

Police have said the collision happened at 7:35 p.m.

Nadine had hit and killed a jaywalking pedestrian in Bogota. Police did not ticket her or test her for intoxication, and she was not charged. Jurors will not hear those details, which Stein deemed prejudicial.

The trial is scheduled to resume at 9:30 a.m. Thursday. Besides Grewal, prosecutors told Stein they also expect to call an FBI agent who’s a fingerprint analyst.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday that she has directed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to put an indefinite hold on implementing its controversial congestion pricing plan, saying she cannot “add another burden to working and middle-class New Yorkers or create another obstacle to our continued recovery.”

The congestion price plan was slated to begin June 30. Drivers entering Manhattan south of 60th Street would have been forced to pay a $15 toll, in addition to tolls for using bridges and tunnels to enter the city.

The news was met with cheers from a group of New Jersey Democrats who have voiced opposition to congestion pricing, including Gov. Phil Murphy. The Murphy administration filed a lawsuit last July arguing the feds failed to conduct a comprehensive environmental review before giving the plan their OK.

“I want to thank Governor Hochul for pausing the implementation of congestion pricing in Manhattan’s Central Business District. Although we have had a difference of opinion with our colleagues in New York in congestion pricing implementation, we have always had a shared vision for growing our regional economy, protecting our environment, and creating good-paying jobs on both sides of the Hudson River,” Murphy said in a statement Wednesday.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-05) also celebrated Hochul’s decision to drop the state’s “outrageous congestion tax.” Gottheimer, who represents parts of Bergen County home to many commuters, has been one of the loudest voices opposing the plan, saying it would increase traffic and pollution on this side of the Hudson.

“We threw the kitchen sink at New York — and then some — and got it done. Even when some said the fight was over, we kept going. Well today, Jersey families, their wallets, and the environment won big,” he said. “As I always say, don’t mess with Jersey.”

New York would have been the first city in the nation to implement congestion pricing. Similar pricing schemes exist in London, Milan, and Singapore. Supporters of congestion pricing say it decreases the number of vehicles on the road, leads to more people using public transit, and reduces pollution.

The plan was first signed into law in 2019 by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Revenue from the tolls was intended to fund public transit in New York (none would go to NJ Transit). Hochul on Wednesday said “circumstances have changed” since the plan was introduced, most notably the pandemic.

“While our recovery has been stronger and swifter than anyone imagined, it is by no means complete. And we cannot afford to undercut this momentum, and I won’t allow this delicate recovery to be jeopardized,” she said.

She noted many workers are commuting into the city for just two or three days instead of five, with subways packed Tuesdays to Thursdays but much less so on Mondays and Fridays. And while the idea behind congestion pricing was to generate more revenue and shift commuters to public transit, she laid out another possibility — people avoiding the city altogether, for work and leisure.

Commuters might tell their bosses they need to work fully remote, or families visiting on the weekend might skip the trip to the city, she said. An additional cost to enter Manhattan would hurt its recovery even more, she added.

The Regional Plan Association, a tri-state environmental organization, called Hochul’s move a “betrayal to New Yorkers and our climate.” Delaying the plan will also delay critical transit projects like improving subway lines and electrifying buses, said Kate Slevin, executive vice president of the association.

Talya Schwartz, president of SafeStreetsJC, said the group had been looking forward to congestion pricing, hoping it would reduce the number of cars headed to Manhattan that clog Jersey City streets daily.

“The cost of delaying congestion pricing means more crashes and unsafe streets, more buses stuck in traffic, and all of us breathing dirty air,” she noted.