When I first moved to C Mai in 1992 the air in the city itself was pretty good most of the time. The only time I even saw burning was around Chiang Dao when visiting friends there. After marrying in 2001 we settled in Mae Hia near the airport & I noticed the smog was getting worse. Where it had only ever been noticeable outside the town from about March to June, now it was seriously affecting the city area. By 2007 it was affecting the city from January to July & getting worse each year.
In 2008 we built a 2 storey house in Saraphi & moved out there, but when our daughter was born in 2010 it was obvious to me that the air would never improve & that it was no place to raise a family.
By 2012 it had become so severe that I applied for my wife to migrate to Australia. We had spent several million baht building a home that we loved, but the filthy air had given me a serious cough (I am a non-smoker). Just as we sold our house in 2013, another Australian finished building a bungalow across the road from us at a cost of 4 million baht. It was immaculate. When he asked why I was leaving after all these years, I told him the truth - I didn't want to die early from lung disease.
After we moved to Australia in 2013, I was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, almost certainly caused by years of exposure to the filthy C Mai air. Six years after treatment, I returned to C Mai briefly in March 2019 and was horrified to see just how bad the air pollution had become. As we descended approaching C Mai and the aircraft dropped from clear blue sky into brownish soup, the obviously Aussie pilot laughingly commented "we will be landing at C Mai airport in about fifteen minutes - if we can see it" ! The second day there I was walking in town when a C130 aircraft flew over & dumped a load of water, in a futile attempt at helping the air quality.
Last week I finally got the "all clear" from my ENT specialist, ten years after months of radiation therapy. I showed him the current pictures of the foul air in C Mai and he was stunned. He then said "nobody can live in that - there must be thousands there whose life expectancy will be massively impacted" & he was spot on. Every C Mai Governor for the last 25 years has been either unable or unwilling to do anything about the burning. Friends tell me the 'burning season' in Nth & NE Thailand now starts in December and goes pretty much till about August or the rains come, whichever is sooner. No thanks.