By Camila DeChalus, CNN
(CNN) — Residents of Washington, DC, on Sunday briefly experienced the worst air quality of any major city in the world, according to a company that ranks pollution globally, as the capital reckoned with the aftermath of a massive, 40-minute Fourth of July fireworks show.
City officials issued a Code Red Air Quality Alert, asking residents to limit time outside, with a warning that the air is “unhealthy for seniors, kids, people with medical conditions” and that the general public may experience health issues.
DC slipped down to No. 26 on the air quality monitoring platform, IQAir, by 5:30 p.m. ET Sunday.
The fireworks show, organized by Freedom 250, a Trump-backed nonprofit tasked with putting on a series of semiquincentennial events, came as DC — and the Northeast more widely — suffered under an extreme heat wave. The district saw a triple-digit high temperature on Saturday, which primed the atmosphere for thunderstorms that saw the National Mall evacuated before the fireworks show.
Dr. Kisha Davis, chief health officer of nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, told CNN before the fireworks show Saturday that, “The air quality today is like running a marathon while smoking a cigarette,” adding that the 850,000-firework display around the National Mall would make matters worse.
But as forecasts showed a chance for thunderstorms Sunday evening, Davis said the rain could help cleanse the air. “It does push all of those, you know, chemicals and pollutants into the water system, but they are at least out of the air,” Davis told CNN Sunday.
The show was expected to set a Guinness World Record, as hundreds of thousands of fireworks shells were launched from 10 sites spanning the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Potomac River barges and West Potomac Park. The benchmark was 810,904 fireworks at a 2016 New Year’s Eve countdown celebration in the Philippines. The capital’s spectacle was about 10 times bigger than Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Show in New York, which is typically the nation’s largest Independence Day bash.
There was no public confirmation as of Sunday that the display had been certified as a new world record. CNN has reached out to Guinness World Records.
Internal National Park Service documents obtained by The Washington Post showed the fireworks show was expected to cause “very unhealthy” conditions in central DC. The documents suggested that people should limit exposure to the pollution and recommended that those watching the fireworks outdoors wear N95 masks.
The park service did not provide a comment about the internal documents when reached by CNN.
The DC Fire and EMS Department reported 96 patient contacts and 40 patient transports from the National Mall between midnight Friday and 9 a.m. Sunday, according to the National Special Security Event Joint Information Center, a multiagency hub that oversees security for events celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary in Washington, DC. It’s unclear how many of those incidents were related to heat or air quality.
George Washington University also reported 289 patient contacts from the National Mall as of 10 p.m. Saturday. The center also reported that the Department of Health and Human Services reported 314 patient contacts.
President Donald Trump, whose 40-minute late-night address preceded the fireworks show, wrote on social media the display was “the Most Spectacular Fireworks Show I have ever seen, and I’ve seen them all. Congratulations on a job well done!”
CNN’s Kaanita Iyer and Aleena Fayaz contributed to this report.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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