Clean Air Clubs distribute free masks as wildfire smoke chokes US
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Clean Air Clubs and Mask Blocs have grown to more than 40 groups worldwide, running lending libraries of free masks and air purifiers and partnering with local businesses to distribute PPE to residents facing dangerous wildfire smoke.
- Mask Bloc Los Angeles handed out more than 300,000 masks in just two weeks during the catastrophic January 2025 LA fires, illustrating the scale volunteer mutual aid can mobilize without bureaucracy.
- Mendo Clean Air Club organizer Miquette Thompson is distributing masks in Mendocino county, where the nearby Feliz and Woodside fires have burned more than 1,000 acres in northern California and smoke drifts in from Oregon and Washington.
- Hospitalizations for asthma rise 10% on smoke days according to a recent University of California study, a statistic that makes the groups' insistence on N95s — which filter tiny particles far better than cloth or surgical masks — a clinical, not just symbolic, choice.
- Mask Bloc Delaware co-founder Shannon Durkin, who has cystic fibrosis, and her husband Jimmy walked through Wilmington in July distributing PPE as Canadian wildfire smoke reached the east coast; Durkin launched the group in 2024 after saying Biden's 2023 end of the Covid emergency made her feel "functionally over" as a public participant.
- Emily Dupree, the Chicago resident who launched the first Clean Air Club by lending purifiers to touring musicians during Covid, has published a public Google doc walking others through starting their own clubs and said the work addresses what she called "two major pillars of collective denial": Covid and climate change.
Why it matters: In rural Mendocino county and cities from Wilmington to LA, under-resourced health departments and rolling back federal public health posture have left a vacuum that volunteer groups are filling with 300,000-mask两周 responses. For the people most at risk — the 10% of asthma sufferers hospitalized on smoke days and immunocompromised organizers like Shannon Durkin — these lending libraries are now the only real-time air safety net.
Ask SkimNews
