As the Hazen Fire burns south of Buckeye, air quality for the rest of the Valley is expected to worsen.
That’s because a low pressure system coming from California is pushing winds from west to east. Wind gusts are expected to be the strongest in the afternoon and evening and could hit 30 miles an hour.
Those winds are blowing black smoke clouds over much of the Valley, as the invasive Salt Cedar bush continues to burn.
Michael Graves with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality says that combined with low cloud cover and small rain chances are creating conditions for fine particulate matter to spread.
"It’s the kind that can lodge deeper into your lungs, so that's gonna be a bit worse for health potentially than the larger particles like in dust," Graves said, “people who are sensitive to that, who have respiratory disease, may wanna, limit their time outdoors, just kind of monitor their health, if you're smelling smoke, you're breathing it," Graves said.
Graves says the wind is helping to prevent the smoke from settling, but it’s also making it easier for the fire to spread. Winds could slow and temperatures could rise come Wednesday when the system moves out.
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"Suppression is always going to be there," Chief Brian Fennessy told the Mountain West News Bureau. "But we're not going to suppress our way out of this situation." -
A new analysis of public federal workforce data shows about 5,800 fewer workers at public lands agencies in 2025 compared to the year before. -
Arizona Public Service has nearly 40 active AI smoke-detection cameras and plans to have 71 by summer's end, and the state’s fire agency has deployed seven of its own. -
Smoke from the fire near Buckeye has blown into the rest of the Valley since it started burning Saturday. -
Kathleen Muldoon is a professor at an Arizona medical school who lives in north Peoria not too far from where the Hazen wildfire is burning. And she has Valley fever.
