The Coast Guard has sent pollution investigators to take samples.
Flooding in urban areas can send pollution downstream, and artificial protection built around cities only shifts the flooding farther down.
The intensity of the smoke sent pollution levels in the Los Angeles Basin soaring and prompted a public health warning from the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which was urging people to avoid unnecessary activity outdoors.
The impact on the electric system is difficult to quantify, in part because the administration is moving forward on two other major rules affecting power plants, one for plants east of the Rockies that send pollution across state borders, and another governing discharges of warm water.
Last year's fireworks sent pollution levels as high as 1,500.
Drought reduces food supply, flooding damages river banks and sends pollution into waterways, and hurricanes and other large coastal storms can devastate coastlines, habitats and wildlife.
During Spitzer's first two years in office, he had sued power-plant operators in Ohio and elsewhere, for sending air pollution to New York; General Electric, for failing to clean up the Hudson River; and several leading gun manufacturers, for selling unsafe products.
Farmers who burn straw are being blamed by officials for causing heavy smog over the Indian capital, Delhi, and sending air pollution way above recommended levels.
A thick smog engulfed the Chinese city of Shenyang on Sunday and Monday, sending air pollution levels 50 times above what's deemed safe by the World Health Organization (WHO) and marking the highest pollution on record since the country began monitoring air quality in 2013, according to the Associated Press.
Fires burning in Sumatra and Kalimantan over the past three months have closed schools, left tens of thousands ill with respiratory disease, and sent air pollution soaring to dangerous levels in neighboring Singapore and Malaysia.
