Pacific Northwest businesses should plan IT for wildfire smoke season by making remote work fully operational on demand, defining air-quality triggers for sending staff home, ensuring cloud-accessible business applications, and pre-staging laptops, VPN or zero-trust access, and communication tools before smoke arrives. Western Washington has had multiple summers in the last six years where the air became unsafe for routine office work. The businesses that kept running were already set up to flip to remote at a moment’s notice.
How Bad Has PNW Wildfire Smoke Actually Gotten?
If your memory of “fire season” is the East Coast version — distant headlines, occasional haze — the last few PNW summers have rewritten the picture:
- September 2020 Labor Day fires. The Bolt Creek precursor era. Seattle and Portland recorded some of the worst air quality on the planet for several days. Air Quality Index (AQI) values cleared 300 — the “Hazardous” tier — across Western Washington.
- September 2022 Bolt Creek Fire. Burning along U.S. 2 in Snohomish County, the fire pushed smoke directly into the Highway 2 corridor and the Sky Valley for weeks. AQI in Monroe, Sultan, and Gold Bar climbed into “Unhealthy” and “Very Unhealthy” ranges repeatedly.
- Recurring summer patterns. Even without a local fire, smoke from Eastern Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia regularly reaches the I-5 corridor in late August and September. The trend is not improving.
This is no longer a once-a-decade story. It is a recurring summer planning input.
What Does Washington Law Require?
Washington L&I adopted a permanent wildfire smoke rule under WAC 296-820, effective January 15, 2024. The rule is tiered — different PM2.5 thresholds trigger different employer obligations:
- PM2.5 ≥ 20.5 µg/m³ (~AQI 72) — training trigger. Employers must inform workers, monitor air quality, and have a written plan. N95s available on request.
- PM2.5 ≥ 35.5 µg/m³ — exposure controls become mandatory; N95 respirators must be available for voluntary use.
- PM2.5 ≥ 250.5 µg/m³ (~AQI 301) — employers must distribute N95 respirators to each exposed employee and encourage use; use remains voluntary at this level.
- PM2.5 ≥ 500.4 µg/m³ — mandatory respirator use, full respiratory protection program with fit-testing.
The important nuance: the L&I rule applies specifically to outdoor workers, and there’s a closed-building exception when the employer keeps windows, doors, and bays shut. It does not, by itself, require an office-based business to send staff home when AQI rises. But it sets a useful state-recognized benchmark — and if your office HVAC cannot keep indoor air clean, the same thresholds become a practical decision tool for indoor staff anyway.
Two-rule guidance for most small businesses:
- Treat the L&I trigger as a planning prompt, not a ceiling. If outdoor PM2.5 crosses 20.5 µg/m³, your remote-work posture should be on standby.
- Decide your own thresholds in advance. Pick the AQI at which your office becomes optional and the AQI at which it becomes closed. Document it. Communicate it before smoke arrives.
What Has to Be True for Remote Work to Actually Function?
Smoke days expose every weakness in a half-finished remote-work setup. The post-2020 hybrid scramble left a lot of businesses partway there. To go fully remote on short notice, the following has to be real, not aspirational:
- Every employee has a working laptop. Desktops chain staff to the office. If half your team is on towers, half your team is grounded.
- Business applications run in the cloud or via cloud-accessible remote access. Software locked to an on-prem server requires VPN/ZTNA and a tested access path. If it has not been used remotely, it is not ready.
- Authentication is MFA-enforced and works from anywhere. No “I can only get in from the office IP” surprises.
- Phones forward, not break. VoIP softphones on staff laptops, mobile apps, or auto-forwarding to cell phones should be set up and tested.
- Document access is cloud-first. A shared drive on the office NAS that no one has accessed remotely is not a usable shared drive in a smoke event.
- Helpdesk is reachable without the office. Your MSP should be able to support remote staff during an outage, not just office-bound staff.
What About the Office Itself?
For staff who must be on-site or for businesses that cannot fully remote, the IT considerations extend to the building:
- HVAC and air filtration. Confer with your facilities or HVAC contractor on filter ratings appropriate to your system. This is an HVAC question, not an IT question — but IT teams often get pulled into “why is the office air bad” conversations and should know who owns the answer.
- Server room cooling. Smoke season is also heat season. Server rooms that barely hold temperature in normal summers can fail when smoke restricts ventilation and exhaust airflow. Check thermostats and runtimes.
- Printer and equipment intake filters. Some office equipment intakes get clogged faster during smoke events. Track service intervals.
This is also a reason cloud migration keeps paying off. A business with workloads already in Microsoft 365 or a cloud-hosted server does not panic when the building becomes temporarily uninhabitable. A business with a closet full of on-prem servers and no remote-work plan does.
How Should You Communicate With Clients During a Smoke Event?
The communication side matters as much as the technology side:
- Pre-draft a short client notice. “Our office is closed today due to air quality. Our team is fully operational remotely. Reach us at [phone] or [email].” Send it once, do not over-send.
- Update your website and Google Business Profile. A quick banner or post sets expectations.
- Keep your auto-attendant accurate. If your phone tree announces office hours that no longer match, callers lose trust.
How Should You Prioritize If Budget Is Limited?
Not every business can do everything before September. The priority order:
- Laptops for every employee whose work could be done from home. This is the foundation. Without it, remote work is fiction.
- Cloud-accessible business applications. Either move workloads to the cloud or stand up tested remote access.
- MFA on every cloud account. See our MFA guidance for 2026.
- Documented thresholds and a one-page smoke-day playbook. Free to create, invaluable in August.
- HVAC review for the office. Worth doing — but conversation with your facilities contractor, not your IT provider.
ROI Technology helps Snohomish County, Skagit, and King County businesses build the kind of remote-work readiness that turns a smoke day into a normal workday. Talk to us about wildfire smoke IT planning or call (888) 707-3652.