Just over three years ago, nine-year-old Carter Vigh died after experiencing an asthma attack exacerbated by B.C.’s wildfire smoke.
Since then, his mother, Amber Vigh, has worked with the BC Lung Foundation on Carter’s Project, bringing real-time, accurate air quality information to communities across the province.
Now, she’s calling on the federal government to expand this program Canada-wide. A few weeks ago, Vigh launched a petition, asking the Minister of Health and the Minister of the Environment, Climate Change and Nature to fund Carter’s Project so all provinces and territories have air quality sensors.
Canada currently has its National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) Program, where it collects and reports air pollution data from about 280 monitoring stations across the country.
However, Vigh argues that this isn’t enough, saying that most of these sensors are near big cities, leaving many rural, remote, and northern communities without any access to air quality data.
“If you look at the PurpleAir map, [air quality sensors are] all across the world. But if you zoom into B.C., there’s so many gaps all across B.C., and people don’t realize that a lot of the time when you’re looking on your phone at the air quality, that’s coming from the biggest city closest to you,” said Vigh, in a phone call with Daily Hive.
She said that people have become complacent about how dangerous smoky weather can be, even with experts warning that we can continue to expect active wildfire seasons. Between 2020 and 2024, wildfire smoke was responsible for an average of 1,400 deaths per year.
Carter’s story
On July 11, 2023 — the day that Carter died — Vigh said she had checked the air quality online, and it looked fine. However, the nearest official monitoring station was about 100 kilometres away, and didn’t show what the air quality was like in 100 Mile House, where they live.
She had taken Carter to the summer camp she was running at the municipality’s arena, and thought it would be safe to take him and the other kids on a 10-minute walk to a nearby water park.
Around lunchtime, wildfire smoke started to roll in.
“You could smell it, you could visibly see it,” said Vigh.
She called a coworker and asked her to come pick Carter up. Since he had asthma, she knew it wouldn’t be good for him to walk back.
“When I got back to the arena with the other kids, he came running out, and he’s like, ‘Mom, mom, guess what?’ And I was like, ‘What, buddy?’ And he’s like, ‘I heard on the radio it’s free Slurpee Day. We have to get Slurpees.’ And so we decided we would go as a family after dinner to get Slurpees. But unfortunately we never made it for Slurpees that night.”
That evening, Vigh was making dinner, while Carter’s dad, James, was with Carter and their two other children in the living room. She heard Carter start to cough, and James give him his puffer.
“And he just continued to cough,” Vigh said.
“We did all the things we were supposed to do. We gave him his rescue inhaler. We gave him his steroid inhaler. We tried to calm him down.”
When Carter seemed to be calming down, they gave him some water, and Vigh ran him a cool bath, which he always wanted after having an asthma attack since he would get hot and clammy.
“I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom beside the tub talking to him, and he started coughing again,” Vigh said. “Again, we did all the same things, and I just said to James, ‘We need to take him to the hospital.'”
This wasn’t out of the norm, Vigh said. They’d often have to take Carter to the hospital to get his oxygen topped up if he had a bad asthma attack, due to things like the change of the seasons or the flu season.
“We figured that’s what it was going to be,” she said.
A week prior, they had called an ambulance to their house for their daughter who had a head injury, which had taken 12 minutes. Vigh said she knew Carter couldn’t wait that long, so she drove him to the hospital herself, calling 911 so that they would be ready for them.
“James stayed home with the other two kids because, again, we thought they were just going to top up his oxygen.”
Vigh family
Vigh said she got to the hospital in less than five minutes, and paramedics were waiting outside the door to take him in.
“And I just stood there at the side of his bed and watched all of these nurses and doctors work on him, just telling him like, “I love you, just breathe, buddy. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. And at one point, a nurse was getting ready to give him an IV, and I said, “Oh, he’s not gonna like that. And when she gave him the IV, he didn’t even react. And I knew in that moment that something was wrong.”
She texted James, telling him to come to the hospital immediately.
“The whole time we just stood there and held Carter’s hand and told him that we loved him and just begged him to breathe,” Vigh said.
“At one point, he stopped breathing, and there was an entire lineup of nurses and paramedics and doctors switching out every 30 seconds to give him CPR. And I remember thinking, ‘It’s going to be okay, buddy. Your ribs are going to hurt really bad tomorrow, but we’re here, and we’ll be there to help you.'”
A doctor asked them to leave the room with him, and told them that was nothing more they could do — Carter had passed away.
“And when we walked back into that room full of nurses and doctors and paramedics, everyone was crying, and nobody was touching him, and he, my baby, was just laying in the middle of the room on this bed, lifeless. And we had to leave the hospital that day without our baby.”
The start of Carter’s Project
After this devastating loss, Carter’s story was widely reported in the news.
“I can’t even tell you in those first weeks how many interviews I did,” said Vigh. “For a kid to die from an asthma attack exacerbated by wildfire smoke really made people realize how dangerous the wildfire smoke is.”
The BC Lung Foundation learned about Carter’s story, and Vigh said she heard from the organization’s CEO, Chris Lam.
“[He] reached out to me and he said, ‘I have an idea. We have this project that we want to get going, and we’d love your guys’ blessing, and we’d love for you guys to be involved, and we’d love to do it in Carter’s name and call it Carter’s project,'” Vigh said.
“Basically, they had been lobbying the government for years to try and get them to get all these decommissioned air quality monitors back up and running, or for the government to fund a project similar to this. And Carter’s passing just made them realize that we can’t wait for the government anymore. We need to actually get this started.”
Vigh said they started raising money, and in May 2024 they rolled out Carter’s Project in 100 Mile House, which included giving out indoor air quality sensors that people could use in their homes, training people on how to make DIY air filters, and installing an outdoor air quality monitor.
Since then, they’ve distributed 20 outdoor air quality monitors and 200 indoor air quality monitors, giving real-time data to over 15,000 British Columbians.
“We always said Carter was going to do amazing things in this world, and I’m so proud that we are doing that for him, and he’s making a difference. But I would give it all back in a second just to have him,” Vigh said.