Chileno Fire Smoke Over the North Bay and EPA Clean-Air Rollbacks — September 21, 2026

A Sunday-evening grass fire in Marin County put smoke over the North Bay, and a smoke advisory runs through today. Elsewhere, a fact-check tallies what the EPA has undone on clean-air rules this year, and California's wildfire insurance problem is showing up in suburbs that never thought of themselves as fire country.

Chileno Fire halted at 341 acres, smoke advisory through Monday

Firefighters stopped the forward spread of the Chileno Fire in Marin County on Sunday evening, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports. Marin County Fire responded at about 4:40 p.m. to what began as several spot fires along Chileno Valley Road, about four miles south of Tomales Road near the Marin-Sonoma line. The fire was mapped at 341.5 acres by about 6:45 p.m., and no evacuation orders or warnings were issued.

The Bay Area Air District issued an air quality advisory for the North Bay through Monday, according to SFGATE. Smoke is affecting parts of Sonoma and Marin counties and may spread into Napa and Solano. The district said 24-hour average smoke levels are not expected to exceed the national health standard, but that ground-level smoke is hard to predict and residents could see air quality from "unhealthy for sensitive groups" to "very unhealthy" at times. No Spare the Air alert had been issued as of Sunday night. If you smell smoke, keeping windows and doors closed is the simple move until it clears.

What the EPA has rolled back on clean air this year

A fact-check in the Augusta Free Press walks through the EPA's deregulatory moves under Administrator Lee Zeldin. In February the agency rescinded the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the legal basis for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles, and repealed greenhouse-gas standards for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. Zeldin called it "the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history."

The same month the EPA repealed Biden-era upgrades to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for coal plants, removing tighter particulate-matter controls and continuous particulate-emissions monitoring. The agency also missed a February deadline to designate which areas fail the strengthened fine-particle standard, and is reconsidering the "Good Neighbor Plan" that limits ozone-forming pollution crossing state lines. The EPA says the changes cut regulatory costs; health groups, including the American Lung Association, say they mean dirtier air.

California's wildfire insurance squeeze reaches the suburbs

California's home insurance crisis is spreading past mountain towns into suburban neighborhoods, the New York Post reports, citing a Los Angeles Times analysis. A buyer closing on a home in Menifee's Cimarron Ridge development, set among scrub and rolling hills rather than dense forest, could not get conventional coverage and ended up with a surplus-lines policy carrying a $25,000 fire deductible.

The Times analysis found that in 396 ZIP codes, nine out of ten policies added to the state's FAIR Plan between March 2025 and June 2026 were classified as low-risk. More than 11,000 such homes were added in that period, on top of 138,000 low-risk properties already on the insurer of last resort.

Sources

• Firefighters halt progress of Chileno Fire in Marin County — Santa Rosa Press Democrat
• Regional: Update: Air District Expands Smoke Advisory For North Bay Through Monday — SFGATE
• Is Trump working to cut back clean air protections in place since the 1970s? — Augusta Free Press
• California insurance crisis hits shocking new low as even more homeowners denied protection — New York Post

Canairy aggregates publicly reported air-quality and wildfire news and summarizes it in plain English, with links to the original sources. This is educational information, not medical or emergency advice. In a wildfire or air-quality emergency, follow guidance from local authorities.