Manaus suspends school classes and university activities as wildfire smoke worsens

Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, suspended municipal school classes on Friday, 9 October, as smoke from fires worsened air quality. The suspension affected 242,000 children, according to Folha de S.Paulo. The Federal University of Amazonas and the State University of Amazonas also suspended in-person activities that day. The closures brought the smoke emergency directly into classrooms and campuses in a city of about 2.3 million people.

The Manaus city government said the school closures were intended to protect the health, safety and well-being of students and education workers, AFP reported. No date had been set for municipal schools to reopen when AFP published its report on Saturday. Folha said this was the first municipal school suspension of its kind in Manaus this year.

Which Manaus classes were suspended?

Folha reported that the city suspended classes for the 242,000 children attending its municipal schools. Its report also named the Federal University of Amazonas and the State University of Amazonas as institutions that halted in-person activities on Friday. The State University said its decision reflected the need to protect the health and well-being of its university community under the prevailing conditions. The reports do not establish a reopening schedule for the suspended activities.

The closure decisions followed days of worsening smoke. Folha said the Selva environmental monitoring system at the State University of Amazonas recorded the poorest air-quality levels since September this week. On Thursday night, 8 October, its monitors registered particulate matter peaks of 337 micrograms per cubic meter, according to the newspaper. That figure describes a reported peak, not an average exposure for every resident or a measure of individual illness.

How widespread were fires in Amazonas?

Folha, citing Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, reported 4,370 fire hotspots across Amazonas state from 1 September through 6 October, compared with 1,198 over the same period in 2025. The hotspots were recorded in 95% of the state's municipalities. AFP separately reported more than 3,700 hotspots in September alone, nearly four times the previous year's September count, and more than 749 fires burning on Wednesday, 7 October. Those figures cover different periods and should not be treated as competing totals for the same interval.

The smoke did not come with a measured breakdown of its sources in the available reports. Folha described a fire at a private landfill in eastern Manaus that was still burning when it reported on Friday. Filipe Arruda, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, warned the newspaper that burning waste can add pollutants and that both short and prolonged exposure matter. His warning does not establish how much of the city's smoke came from that fire.

What is known about health risks and the response?

Jesem Orellana, an epidemiologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, told Folha that residual effects of smoke exposure could last beyond the immediate event. His comment is a caution about possible effects, not a finding that lasting harm has already been measured among Manaus residents. A separate researcher quoted by Folha said Manaus had registered 400 micrograms per cubic meter of particulate matter. The report does not provide enough detail to compare that observation directly with Selva's Thursday-night peak of 337.

The Amazonas state government told Folha it had increased permanent fire-service bases in inland cities from 11 to 25 and had about 1,000 personnel and brigadiers working in an operation across 33 municipalities. Those are the government's figures, rather than an independent assessment of whether its response matched the scale of the fires. Folha reported that the Manaus municipal government did not answer its questions about health-service readiness, coordination with the state or its next steps.

For families and university communities, the immediate unanswered question is when in-person teaching can resume. The published accounts establish the Friday suspensions and the city's lack of an announced school reopening date; they do not document a later resumption. They also do not quantify residents' health outcomes or establish the contribution of individual fires to the smoke over Manaus.